Category: Transportation
What’s the Infrastructure’s Highest Value?
A piece of land and infrastructure may have multiple uses. Land might be needed for urban development or for a highway. A two-track structure might be needed for freight or passenger service. A right-of-way might be needed for multiple kinds of rail, or a road, or a power line easement, or a park. In all cases, the correct policy choice is to allocate the land to the use that has the highest social value, and this use depends on the situation at hand. It should not be allocated to whatever one fancies.
Concretely, let us consider the following cases:
1. The High Line. Occasionally, railfans grumble about the linear park, and say it should’ve had passenger rail service instead; read the comments on Ben Kabak’s post on linear parks, or New York City subway forums. But in reality, the High Line is very useful as a park in a busy neighborhood that doesn’t have other parks. In contrast, it’s nearly worthless as a transit line: it’s parallel to a north-south subway that’s operating well below capacity, it would be nightmarishly difficult to connect to any existing line, and the only east-west service it could possibly be useful for is connecting to 14th Street, not the most important job destination in the city.
2. The Northeast Corridor in Rhode Island, south of Providence. The expansion of MBTA commuter rail southward into sprawling exurbs is a major failure of regional transportation policy. Providence is not all that congested by the standards of the larger Northeastern cities; auto-oriented commuter rail toward it is doomed to fail, and near-downtown parking is cheap and plentiful. (The commute market from Warwick and Wickford Junction to Boston is trivial.) In contrast, the line is perfect for intercity service, since it has relatively gentle curves outside city limits, and is straight south of East Greenwich. The South County project not only costs $200,000 per weekday rider, but also makes poor use of high-speed track. Since the line is more important as high-speed rail than as a commuter line, Amtrak should be more aggressive about demanding that commuter projects create their own capacity.
3. The Northeast Corridor in Maryland, north of Baltimore. For the same reasons as the MBTA extension’s eventual failure, MARC underperforms north of Baltimore. Although the line has extensive three- and four-track segments, the bridges are two-tracked, and high-speed rail should again be given priority, including canceling commuter rail if necessary. Ironically, because of more extensive four-tracking, the need for bypasses around Wilmington and perhaps North East, and the at-grade track layout, Perryville is quite easy to connect to Philadelphia by commuter rail without interfering with intercity rail.
4. Caltrain to San Jose, the MBTA to Providence, MARC to Baltimore. In contrast with the situation in points #2-3, those three lines are all useful commuter lines; they are all similar in that they connect two distinct cities that share suburbs, with a rump extension that exists purely for show (into Gilroy, Perryville, and soon to be Wickford Junction). Any and all high-speed rail use of these corridors should permit a reasonable frequency of commuter trains, with timed overtakes when possible and full four-tracking otherwise. On Caltrain, in particular, interference with commuter rail is one reason why the chosen Pacheco Pass alignment is inferior to the Altamont alignment.
5. The Lower Montauk Line. Despite perennial railfan desires (and an empty Bloomberg campaign promise, since scrubbed from his campaign website) to restore passenger service, there’s not much point in regional rail that stub-ends in Long Island City. To give an idea how much demand there is, the LIRR currently runs 5 trains per day per direction into Long Island City. Thus, the line is more useful for freight trains than for passenger trains. This will change if, and only if, there is a way to connect the line to Manhattan through the existing LIRR tunnels, or perhaps new tunnels, but then the cost is going to be orders of magnitude higher than just restoring service.
6. Urban freeways, e.g. the BQE. American freeways were built at a time when, even more so than today, land was allocated based on political power rather than any sort of social consensus or market pricing concept. While Japanese cities have to make do with 4-lane freeways due to high land costs and strong property rights protections, American cities demolished entire neighborhoods to make room for freeways with wide exclusion zones around them. The land occupied by some would be more useful for additional neighborhood housing growth than it is for a freeway. For example, the BQE hogs prime real estate in Williamsburg, right next to the under-capacity Marcy Avenue subway station, and to a lesser extent in the rest of Brooklyn and Queens, and this land could be used for high-density development instead.
Regional Rail to Lower Manhattan
Staten Islanders’ desire for a subway connection got me thinking again about my previous proposal for a tunnel from Staten Island to Manhattan, possibly with a cross-platform connection to Brooklyn and New Jersey. From all points of view, it is desirable to build a regional rail hub near Fulton Street, and connect it to nearby commuter lines, creating a second pole for an RER- or S-Bahn-like system in New York, in addition to a Midtown pole centered around Penn Station. My intention in this post is to discuss tradeoffs in choosing how to build it.
As the source of the ARC and ESA cost overruns is the station caverns in Manhattan, the Fulton Street station should be minimalistic: as close as possible to the surface (closer to 20 meters underground than to 55), without a full-length mezzanine, and with only four tracks, one to each of Midtown, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Staten Island. It should under no circumstances look like the ESA extravaganza. This economizing means it’s difficult to build this as a terminal: ideally the station box would be built and then tunnels would be built to all four destinations, making two two-track lines.
The length of this station should be 300 meters, to accommodate 12-car trains, but if it’s too hard to build within the available footprint, then a shortening to 10- or even 8-car trains is feasible. Regional trains in both Paris and Tokyo are usually only 200 meters long. In addition, unlike its Parisian inspiration, Chatelet-Les Halles, Fulton Street need not have very wide platforms. When I took the RER A and changed trains at Chatelet, at 8:40 in the morning, the platform was about as crowded as that of a normal subway station, and needed much less than its full width of 17 meters. Indeed, the Chuo Line, with far higher peak load than anywhere in the West, terminates on a single 10-meter-wide island platform. A single-level four-track station with a cross-platform transfer should be about 30-35 meters wide; since it is too wide for most Lower Manhattan Streets, another option is a bilevel station with two tracks per level, with useful cross-platform transfers, and about 15-18 meters wall to wall per level.
The best time to have built this project was right after 9/11. Because of the connection to World Trade Center, it could have been funded out of 9/11 recovery funds, which instead went to the Calatrava PATH terminal. In addition, the rebuilding of WTC and the PATH terminal could have been done in tandem with the new train station, making its placement far easier. Alas, this did not happen, and all available space east of the WTC site is gone.
The difficult part in building this is the train station, not the access tunnels. Access tunnels can be built very deep using tunnel-boring machines and can even go directly underneath existing subway tunnels. For example, Paris Métro Line 14, whose construction cost was low relative to its depth and Paris’s underground complexity, goes parallel to and under Line 7 for a short segment, and a few kilometers of the RER D were constructed alongside the preexisting RER A tunnel. While I’m not aware of similar examples outside Paris, this shows that it is doable. In contrast, I don’t know of new stations built right underneath preexisting stations in parallel except for some high-cost US projects like the BART Market Street Tunnel Sixth Avenue Subway (thanks to Adirondacker for the correction). Stations-under-stations in oblique configurations exist in Paris, but the biggest station, namely Chatelet-Les Halles, avoids this.
The upshot is that many streets in Lower Manhattan are suitable for new tunnels, and it’s even possible to have access tunnel go deep under building foundations. However, since nearly all suitable north-south streets already host subways, a new station is more difficult. The option for a station under an existing subway station exists, but would be expensive. Let us then scout alternative locations.
Although it’s desirable to have cross-platform transfers, this configuration is more difficult than a cross configuration, in which the Brooklyn-New Jersey line goes east-west in Manhattan. This is because under a north-south configuration it may be difficult to have the Brooklyn-New Jersey tracks dive and turn west fast enough to connect to the desired New Jersey end. An east-west configuration also permits narrower single-level station caverns.
Finally, we should consider the fact that peak employment in Lower Manhattan is around Wall Street, judging by where skyscrapers are located, whereas the main station to connect to is at Fulton Street. In both cases, the key location is well east of the WTC site. Thus a Cortlandt Street location is suboptimal, and a West Street location, where there’s enough space for everything, is too far away. We will repeatedly look at the location relative to existing subway stations in Lower Manhattan: close is good, intersection is not so good.
With the above in mind, here are the options:
East-West Lines
Liberty Street
Advantages: wide enough for everything for a long stretch, from Cortlandt to beyond William. A possible 18*300 box exists from Nassau to Cortlandt, requiring demolition of at most a few low-rise buildings west of Church Street; another box with a slight curve exists from Church to William. There’s a 200-meter stretch that’s 25-meter wide from building edge to building edge. Zucotti Park permits a main entrance with enough space for pedestrians that commuters wouldn’t saturate the neighborhood’s narrow streets. Liberty is close to quite close to the center of Lower Manhattan. Brushes off against the existing Cortlandt Station on the R, but stays away from the other subway stations.
Disadvantages: far from Fulton Street (200 meters); closer to the Wall Street subway station than to the Fulton Street station on the 2/3 and J/Z. Also far from one of the easiest if not the most convenient locations for a north-south line. (But see at the end of the post for update.)
Vesey Street
Advantages: one block from Fulton. There’s an easy location for a north-south line (even a four-track one) next to City Hall, right north of Vesey. St. Paul’s Churchyard can act as the equivalent of Zucotti Park for the Liberty option. Intersects just one subway line, the E. There’s a very easy 200-meter box beginning at Broadway and continuing east.
Disadvantages: far from where most Lower Manhattan workers want to go to. A 300-meter box requires going under Vesey north of WTC, where building foundations may be a problem, or through narrow right-of-way under Ann. Continuing west requires threading the narrows between 1 WTC and 7 WTC, and continuing east requiring threading the Ann Street narrows.
John/Dey Streets
Advantages: one block from Fulton. Almost as close to where most people work as Liberty. Close to the Fulton Street stationhouse, which may be developed into a major retail destination because of the subway station.
Disadvantages: even a 200*15 box would require a few low-rise demolitions. To the east it could thread the John Street narrows, but to the west it would dip under WTC foundations and the memorial. A 300-meter box is impossible without going under skyscraper foundations (fortunately, nothing supertall). Crosses right under the J/Z and 4/5, though the active constraint for depth is probably the WTC foundations to the west.
North-South Lines
City Hall Park
Advantages: enormous space for everything, including a 35*300 box that misses all building foundations, all subway stations, and possibly all subway tunnels. Can bend to the south under Broadway and go under a mid-rise building to the north. A lot of space for pedestrian circulation both in the park and on Broadway.
Disadvantages: closer to the City Hall subway stations than to Fulton – in other words, located about half a subway stop farther away from the CBD than Fulton, which is already at the margin of the main cluster of skyscrapers. If it were picked, then there would probably be a need for a South Ferry train station serving the southern end of Lower Manhattan, which is about a kilometer from the southern end of this location – and South Ferry is so close to the water the station would have to be deep-level.
Broadway
Advantages: close to everything. The street offers about 21 meters of width until well south of Zucotti Park, which is more than enough for a box, and the only stretch narrower than about 24 is at Fulton and John, where the buildings are lower-rise.
Disadvantages: right under and parallel to the 4/5. If this is a four-track option, then this means putting the station at levels -2 and -3. It’s no big deal by the standards of Chatelet-Les Halles or especially Auber, but the RER A was expensive for its time. And even the Chatelet train box was built between two Métro stations (Chatelet and Les Halles, hence the name) rather than under a station.
Church Street or Nassau Street, taking over a subway line
Advantages: could leverage some existing structures, no interference from the subway for rather obvious reasons; under both options the J/Z would terminate at Chambers, where there are existing tracks for it, and under the Church Street option the R would be rerouted along a short new tunnel (cheap by the standards of what we’re talking about here) and thence the Nassau Street tracks. Nassau is literally in the center of the Fulton Street complex.
Disadvantages: beyond the immense subway disruption this would cause, the tracks are old and have insufficient loading gauge. In addition, Nassau, the less disruptive option and the one that is closer to the peak employment center, is a narrow street and even its two subway tracks are on separate levels (see track map). Existing track geometry may impose unreasonable curves, causing squeal.
Greenwich Street
Advantages: serves WTC. Already has a grand terminal because of PATH, reducing the likelihood that politicians will spend billions on starchitecture. I believe that when the street is remapped after WTC construction is complete, it will be 18 meters wide from building to building, permitting an ample train box, even a four-track bilevel one. There’s an easy way to continue both north and south, allowing shallow construction, right underneath the 1 and PATH.
Disadvantages: too far west of where most Lower Manhattan employment is. The PATH terminal may impose unreasonable constraints. Taking over the 1 is a possibility, but presents the same difficulties as taking over the R or J/Z, and would also require an additional South Ferry station, at great depth. The proximity to WTC means the national security agencies may shit bricks about such good transit designs as shallow platforms, maximally free pedestrian circulation, and an open station. Of course the TSA and associated paranoid agencies should be (and is) fought whenever it is required, but ideally agencies should avoid situations that invite a fight they may lose.
Pearl/Water Street
Advantages: Pearl is wide enough for everything north of Fulton, and Water is wide enough south to Pine but with a 22-meter narrows between Fulton and John. Free of obstructions, as the only intersecting subway line, the A/C, is already deep. Can continue south fairly easily as well as north, curving west under the Brooklyn Bridge ramps.
Disadvantages: far east of the existing train station – 300 meters just to the 2/3 at Williams. On a similar note, east of most development; the block east of Pearl and north of Beekman is a parking lot. Conflicts with Second Avenue Subway Phase 4, but this is a small problem as the box could be built with provisions for a two-track subway underneath at little additional cost.
Gold Street
Advantages: close to both the subway station and most Lower Manhattan development. Crosses the A/C line but no station. Can continue north very easily because of the Brooklyn Bridge ramps.
Disadvantages: some room to the north of Fulton, away from the development, but very little south of Fulton; even 250*15 would brush up against the southern end of the street, which is flanked by skyscrapers. In a similar vein, continuing south requires bending west under William or maybe east under Pearl, and both require tunneling under buildings with three-figure height.
Dutch Street, or between Broadway and Nassau
Advantages: both options offer the ability to thread through some gaps in the skyscrapers, going under lower-rise buildings or lower-rise sections of the skyscrapers and limiting the amount of demolition required. Literally at the same site as the subway station. Quite close to most commercial buildings.
Disadvantages: even a 200*15 box would probably require deep-level construction to limit demolitions. Has some leeway to the south and north (assuming shallow construction) but much less than options using continuous streets. In other words, very expensive.
Update: another option is to route the Staten Island-Manhattan tunnel through Brooklyn, in which case it comes into Manhattan from the east, allowing a four-track east-west option. Both Vesey and Liberty present the option of the line to Grand Central branching north under West, then diagonally once deep enough that it can freely go under private property. Vesey presents the additional option of going north under Greenwich, which conflicts with nothing. Conversely, Liberty has the advantage of being south of the 9/11 memorial rather than south of skyscrapers, allowing the turn to West to have much wider curve radius (about 200 meters) without going under any building or the footprint of the Twin Towers.
An HSR Country is a Centralized Country
1950s’ Japan was a fairly monocentric country, in which everything was in Tokyo. When it built the Shinkansen, the expectation was that fast travel nationwide would make it easier to do business in the other cities, reducing centralization. Instead, the opposite happened: the Shinkansen made it easier to get to and from Tokyo, increasing centralization. At the same time, the US, which forwent its rail system and built the Interstate system, saw its manufacturing belt disintegrate, with production moving to the South. If we think of high-speed rail as a nationwide version of rapid transit, then we get the same pattern seen in cities, in which transit works hand-in-hand with centralization.
As with transit, there are exceptions – namely, Germany. Germany’s point-to-point HSR network coexists with its polycentric layout. What this suggests is that HSR does not create centralization so much as reinforces it when it already exists. The Shinkansen made the rest of Japan more dependent on Tokyo, and the TGV has made most of France more dependent on Paris, but that’s because the existing traffic patterns were such that only lines connecting to or near the capital would be competitive. Thus, only connections from a provincial city to the capital are fast, and the loss of province-to-province connectivity (more precisely the deemphasizing of such connections, since both Japan and France continued to build nationwide freeway networks) leads to a loss of independence in the provinces. Lille has redeveloped with the help of the TGV, but this has involved marketing itself as a city close to Paris, Brussels, and London. It’s not the same as Paris itself, which gets by without needing to tout how close it is to London or Lyon.
This does not detract from the fact that HSR can lead to development. Lille really did redevelop with the help of the TGV. Many cities right outside Ile-de-France, such as Tours, are seeing a property boom fueled by fast train links to Paris. The Shinkansen helped bind the Tokaido-Sanyo megaregion, redeveloping cities at appropriate commute range, for example Mishima. The issue here is that a city bound by a megaregion is no longer an independent region, for all that entails.
The consequence in the US is of course not that HSR will turn the country into a single-city country. The US is too big and decentralized. But within each region, HSR is going to bind megaregions together in a way that leads to the same loss of independence. In the Northeast, we can expect the region to be far more dependent on its four primary cities, especially New York. Providence would benefit from being about 20 minutes from Boston and 1:15 from New York, but it would be drawn fully into those two cities’ orbits. The economic development it can expect is not the sort that still clusters in New York and Boston, but rather the lower-end development that is worthwhile to outsource to lower-cost regions. It would be competing with Middlesex County, New Jersey for jobs, rather than with Midtown or even with Downtown Brooklyn. Likewise, in California, we can expect to see more dependence on Los Angeles ans San Francisco, with Bakersfield and Fresno relegated to secondary status.
What I’m doing here is describing in grimmer terms what is cheerfully described as development in various pro-HSR brochures. An advanced economic system, including fast transportation, will lead to specialization, and this includes specialization into center and hinterland. This is new economic geography: reduced transportation costs lead to more rather than less specialization, and HSR reduces transportation costs with respect to time for certain kinds of work.
Ironically, what this implies is that the best way to preserve independence is to not build any binding infrastructure, or engage in national planning. Toronto will remain independent of New York so long as there are separate currencies, separate national markets, and different infrastructure clusters; there’s not much demand for New York-Toronto travel (the air market has about 100,000 monthly passengers in both directions; the top intranational market, New York-Miami, has about a million), so there will not be any new infrastructure between New York and Toronto anytime soon, which will further reinforce those cities’ distinct economies. Montreal, which occasionally seeks HSR to New York as economic development, is doing so explicitly to have an economic basin separate from Toronto’s; it is willing to sacrifice economic independence to achieve some independence from Toronto.
This seems to have been Jane Jacobs’ view in The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Although she wrote about the economic links of the original manufacturing belt megaregion, she wrote even more about the economic links within each city region, and had a dim view of megaprojects; in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she also rejected national currencies, and proposed city-states as a replacement for nation-states. I have little doubt that she would oppose HSR, just as later in life she came to oppose rapid transit and support jitneys.
Not believing that everything Jacobs said is gospel, I take a more neutral view. The HSR-bound megaregion is more efficient in a way than having ten independent cities along the Northeast Corridor, just as New York is better off today as a single city than it would have been as separate cities if the 1898 amalgamation had not gone through, despite the loss of independence Brooklyn has endured. However, this efficiency is achieved via a brutal division of labor between the cities: some become core, some become periphery.
Of course, this may be sufficient consolation in the small cities that would love to become suburbs of successful cities. At the time of this writing, Fresno’s unemployment rate is 15%, and Bakersfield’s is 14%. The Central Valley is seeking prisons as a form of job creation. Providence is better off, but despite recent economic growth and slow absorption into Greater Boston, it’s one of the higher-unemployment regions in the Northeast. Loss of independence is not necessarily bad. But conversely, the fact that this development is good does not mean that it will really turn the smaller cities into productive city regions; it will just make them more comfortable peripheries of cities in which there’s so much that the residents don’t have to care about intercity travel.
Different Kinds of Centralization (Hoisted from Comments)
As an addendum to my post about transit cities and centralization, let me explain that the term centralized city really means two different things. One is diffuse centralization throughout the core, typical of pedestrian cities and bus cities and of Paris ex-La Défense; the other is spiky centralization around geographically small transit hubs, for examples Midtown Manhattan, the Chicago Loop, and Central Tokyo. A transit city will tend toward the latter kind of centralization, which is based on walking distance from the subway.
By bus city, I mean a specific kind of urbanism that never existed in the West, but crops up repeatedly elsewhere. It occurs when a city grows too large for walking and cycling while it’s still too poor to build rapid transit, whose construction costs are very high as a share of GDP in developing-world cities. Old buses are not expensive to buy, and their main cost component is labor, which isn’t expensive in a poor city; Beijing for example has only recently gotten rid of conductors on buses.
For a good source on different typologies, I as usual recommend Paul Barter’s thesis – it’s not the main subject of the thesis, but the thesis explains it as background. Bus cities, much like pedestrian cities (which are cities where most people walk to work), tend to be dense all over and monocentric in the sense that there aren’t large suburban centers around them, but they do not have a dominant CBD since buses don’t have the capacity.
Paris is unique among first-world megacities in having preserved this arrangement with its height limits. But it’s still moving in the spiky direction somewhat: the RER has wide stop spacing, which encourages spiky development; and the proposed orbital may be marketed as a circumferential line, but it’s for the most part just a north-south line through La Défense that’s being run together with other lines to potential secondary centers. The difference is that La Défense is more sterile and less pedestrian-friendly than Midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop. I may write about this in another post, but greenfield CBDs seem to be always worse for pedestrians than legacy ones, and if the legacy CBD hasn’t evolved to the spiky transit city form, then urbanists may conflate the spiky transit city form with the pedestrian-unfriendliness of the greenfield CBD.
Transit city centralization works differently – it’s based on walking distance from the main rapid transit nodes. Recall that transfers at the downtown end are the most inconvenient for suburban commuters, so that one subway stop away from the center is too far. This makes the transit city CBD inherently geographically small, so that the job density is much higher than that of any other urban form; the job density can also be higher because of the larger amount of space afforded by skyscrapers.
In contrast, the transit city is unlikely to be monocentric. A dominant CBD accessed by rapid transit is a geography that tends to create extremely long commutes – much longer than car-accessible edgeless cities, though not longer than trying to access the same CBD by car – and this leads governments to promote the growth of secondary centers, which are also spiky. Because those secondary centers look like CBDs and not like endless sprawl as do the secondary centers in the US, they make the city look polycentric, even if measured in terms of the CBD’s share of metro area employment they’re very CBD-dominated. When I say a transit city is inherently a centralized city, I do not mean that secondary centers are impossible or undesirable, just that the CBD needs to have a relatively large share of jobs, and that the secondary centers should be actual centers – if they can’t be like Shinjuku, they should be like Jamaica or Newark or how Tysons Corner wants to look in 20 years and not like how Tysons Corner looks now.
For example of how this kind of centralization emerges from the other kind, we can look at the evolution of cities that built large rapid transit networks. Tokyo around Nihonbashi would be the best example, but New York around City Hall is as good. While Lower Manhattan is clearly a smaller CBD than Midtown, it still looks like a spiky CBD, which it did not a hundred years ago. If you plot the locations of the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, with few exceptions they’re all south of Chambers, usually far south; peak employment is around Fulton and Wall Streets. The old elevated terminal for Brooklyn trains at Park Row would be inappropriately located. North of Chambers there are city neighborhoods with names like Chinatown or TriBeCa, which are mixed-use enough to have many jobs but have nowhere near the job density of Wall Street.
A related kind of centralization occurs in a multipolar city region, composed of many small cities. None of the cities of the Ruhr is large enough to spawn spiky subcenters on its own, but because the region has grown so interdependent it’s as big as a megacity, the legacy centers in the various cities have turned into a spiky centralization, only without one CBD dominating the rest.
I think it’s the last kind of spiky centralization that transit advocates think of when they propose to turn LA into a multipolar region. Or perhaps it’s in a limbo between a true multipolar region and a unipolar one with well-defined, transit-oriented secondary CBDs. On the one hand, the transit lines proposed in and beyond Measure R are not very downtown-centric. Each direction out of downtown generally gets one line, the exception being the west because of the low-hanging Expo Line fruit and the higher-demand Wilshire corridor. The focus is on connectivity between different poles, since unlike a true transit city Los Angeles has no capacity crunch on its transit system. The subway proposal for going beyond Measure R is to continue south of Wilshire on Vermont, missing downtown entirely, rather than, say, continuing east of Union Station along Whittier.
But on the other hand, the secondary cores are defined in relation to downtown – west (Santa Monica, UCLA), north (Burbank), south (Long Beach), and so on. It’s not like the organic buildup of agglomeration that merged the various cities of the Ruhr into one megaregion, or the merger of the metro areas of New York and Newark, or on a larger scale San Francisco and San Jose. Instead, these secondary cores emerged as secondary to Downtown LA, and only became big because Downtown LA’s transportation capacity is limited by the lack of rapid transit. Put another way, a transit revival in Los Angeles that includes rapid transit construction would make Los Angeles more downtown-oriented rather than less.
A Transit City is a Centralized City
In New York, a large fraction of employment clusters in a rectangle bounded roughly by 59th Street, 2nd Avenue, 42nd Street, and 9th Avenue. Although it’s a commonplace that New York employment is centralized around Manhattan, in reality most of Manhattan is residential, and employment is concentrated in a few square kilometers in the heart of Midtown. This is where the subway lines converge from all directions – elsewhere there simply isn’t enough capacity. Of course it wasn’t always like this: Manhattan’s population in the 1890s was the same as it is today, and it was clustered toward the southern third of the island, but employment was relatively evenly distributed in the downtown area. What has happened since then is that New York became a transit city.
There’s a strong correlation between the form of a city and the mix of transportation options people use. This extends well beyond density, but the principle is the same. Transit is at its best at high intensity, because this is what supports high-frequency service. Cars are the opposite: even on a normal urban street, a car alone will beat any rapid transit line, but every additional car will slow down the road dramatically, so that at even the moderate intensity of an edge city gridlock ensues.
Although usually this principle is stated in terms of density, it’s equally true for work centralization. The pedestrian city and the bus city will be dense all over, and feature high job density scattered across neighborhoods: walking is too slow for the transit city pattern to emerge, and buses have too little capacity. But dedicated rapid transit wants to serve an area right next to the stations, and once a network is built, a CBD grows around the central area. This CBD is typically small, just a few square kilometers. Even vaguely CBD-ish locations, such as Penn Station, are too far, as one commonly quoted figure about work locations demonstrates. The CBD isn’t even large enough to encompass all of the 34h-59th Street strip that the tourist guidebooks define as Midtown. The subway lines only form a tight mesh in a subset of that general area.
The job density of such a CBD is measured in hundreds of thousands per square kilometers, requiring many high-rise towers, several of which are supertall. In contrast, most of New York’s residences are mid-rise, and Tokyo’s are low- and mid-rise; their residential densities in the low tens of thousands per square kilometer are high enough that they are considered the epitome of density, but their CBDs are an order of magnitude denser.
Of the major transit cities of the world, Paris is the only one that’s resisted this trend with its height limit, but instead a transit-like CBD started out in La Défense, and the same pattern that comes from the subway in New York or Tokyo or the L in Chicago emerges with the RER. Of course, Paris maintains very high residential density, but its job distribution is more in line with that of a bus city – employment is dense all over, and the Downtown Paris employment density peak is less pronounced than in comparable transit city downtowns.
This does not mean a transit city needs to have empty trains going in the reverse-peak direction, as Cap’n Transit, Jarrett Walker, and others charge. A transit city will have job destinations outside the CBD, growing around rapid transit junctions: for example, Tokyo has Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro, all of which are so replete with high-rises it’s hard easy to forget they’re secondary job centers. While there is still a pronounced peak direction, people rely on transit so much that they take it for regular errands, supporting very high off-peak frequency by the standards of trains with drivers.
New York has something similar in Downtown Brooklyn, Jamaica, and Long Island City, but the modal split of those job destinations is much less favorable to transit – 50% in Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City and 30% in Jamaica, according to a study of New York’s secondary job centers that I can no longer find. This is a general feature of many old American cities: the core looks like a transit city, but beyond it is a car-centric city, filled with edge cities and edgeless cities. Because the layout beyond the core is car-centric, the off-peak and reverse-peak traffic that supports high all-day bidirectional frequency on the Tokyo rail network, or for that matter on most New York City Subway lines, does not exist. The preference of American commuter rail agencies for peak-only service comes partly from an operating model that makes it impossible to run frequent off- and reverse-peak service, but also from a job distribution that makes the market for such runs small even under the best industry practice.
A corollary of this fact is that the multipolarity of other cities, for example Los Angeles, is not an asset. It would be an asset if those job centers were intense and could be easily served by transit; in reality, they have moderate intensity, nothing like that of the secondary centers of Tokyo or even New York, and serving many of them requires digging new subway lines. Burbank, on the legacy Metrolink network, could make a reasonable site for a transit-oriented secondary center, if commuter rail operations were modernized and local transit lines were extended to it; the Westside and Santa Monica do not, and the hope is that the investment in the Subway to the Sea could enable them to grow to reasonable size.
The key here is that the reason Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Shibuya are as transit-oriented as Central Tokyo is that they historically arose as connection points between the Yamanote Line and the private railroads. In particular, they already had rapid transit fanning out from multiple directions when they became major job centers. But Tokyo’s transit development history is peculiar; most other cities did not have large electrified rapid transit systems terminating at the edge of the urban core prior to building local subway lines.
A second corollary then is a strategy that sought to make New York a more transit-oriented city would treat centralization differently. It should turn the secondary centers into transit nodes in their own right, with tails extending as far out as reasonably possible. Jamaica already has some of the infrastructure, but it’s used poorly because of antiquated LIRR practices; the same can’t be said of Flushing, so a priority should be to build reasonable-quality transit from multiple directions, connecting Flushing with College Point and Jamaica and modernizing the LIRR so that it could connect it with Bayside.
A point that many people writing about this neglect (with pleasant exceptions like Cap’n Transit, the Streetsblog crowd, and Paul Barter) is that this requires both the carrot of more transit and the stick of less parking. In any case it’s hard to create high job densities when much of the land is used for parking. But on top of that parking mandates make it difficult for transit to be competitive when it’s expected to include railyards and depots in its budget and roads are not.
But what a transit city doesn’t need is job dispersal. The importance of creating secondary centers is strictly as alternatives to auto-oriented edge cities and edgeless cities, since whatever happens, not all jobs will be in the CBD. A large city with rapid transit connecting to all major neighborhoods will automatically have high transportation capacity. Rapid transit is good at transporting tens of thousands of people in one direction in the peak hour; let it do what it’s good at.
New York-New Rochelle Metro-North-HSR Compatibility
Let me preface this post by saying that there should not be any high-speed trains between New York and New Rochelle, except perhaps right at the northern end of the segment. However, to provide reasonable speeds from New York to Boston, it’s desirable to upgrade the maximum speed between New York and New Rochelle to 200 km/h or not much less. The subject of this post is how this can be accommodated while also permitting some regional rail service, as proposed by the MTA. There are two reasons to bundle the two. First, some of the work required could be shared: for example, new stations could be done at the same time as rail and tie replacement. And second, the presence of both upgraded intercity rail and regional rail on the line requires some four-tracking and schedule optimization.
The physical infrastructure required for boosting speeds within New York City is fairly minimal by itself. The right-of-way in the Bronx has some curves but they are not very sharp and can be somewhat straightened without knocking down buildings, and even the curves in Queens and on the Hell Gate Bridge, while unfixable without major viaduct modification, are not terrible if superelevation is high and tilting is enabled.
A big question mark is what the maximum speed permitted by the physical layout of the East River Tunnels is. Current speed is 97 km/h (60 mph), but top speed today in other sections of the network are below those achieved decades ago (for example on Portal Bridge), and trains with specially designed noses, as the Shinkansen rolling stock is, could potentially go even faster. Regardless, it is not important for HSR-regional rail integration, since the East River Tunnels have no stops and will be running far under capacity once East Side Access opens. Thus, all travel times in this post are between New Rochelle and Sunnyside Junction, which is notionally considered to be located at 39th Street. This is a 25-kilometer segment.
Another question mark is what the speed limit on the S-curve south of New Rochelle is. Currently the limit is 48 km/h (30 mph). Raising it requires grade-separating the junction between the NEC and the current New Haven Line. It can be raised further via curve straightening, but the question is how much eminent domain can be done. The maximum radius that can be achieved with minimal or no eminent domain is 700-800 meters. Some further eminent domain may be required to have this curve start far enough from the southbound platform that full 200 mm superelevation is achievable without subjecting local train riders to too much cant excess. For comparison, slicing through New Rochelle and the Pelham Country Club allows essentially eliminating the curve and allowing maximum speed through the area, which taking surrounding curves into consideration is about 240 km/h.
Assuming 150 km/h (about 700 meters radius, 200 mm cant, and 175 mm cant deficiency), the technical travel time for a nonstop intercity train between when it passes New Rochelle and when it passes Sunnyside is about 9 minutes; this includes slowdowns in Queens and the Bronx and on Hell Gate. A nonstop M8 with a top speed of 145 km/h would do the same trip in about 11:15. (Amtrak’s current travel time from New York to New Rochelle is about 25 minutes, of which by my observation riding Regional trains 6 are south of Sunnyside.)
Even the above travel time figures require some four-tracking, independently of capacity, in order to limit cant excess. Unlike the Providence Line, the Hell Gate line has some curves right at potential station locations – for example, the Hunts Point stop is located very close to the curve around the Bruckner Expressway, and the Morris Park stop is located in the middle of a curve. The Bruckner curve radius is about 500 meters, and 200 mm superelevation would impose 80 mm cant excess on even a fast-accelerating commuter train (1 m/s^2 to 72 km/h), and an uncomfortable 140 mm on a slower-accelerating one (0.5 m/s^2 to 51 km/h). The Morris Park curve is even worse, since it would impose a full 200 mm cant excess on a stopped train. So we should assume four-tracking at least at the Morris Park station, which is located in the middle of a curve, and Hunts Points, and potentially also at Parkchester.
Now, a local train would be stopping at New Rochelle and four stops in the Bronx, and should be stopping at Sunnyside. Although a FLIRT loses only about 75 seconds from a stop in 160 km/h territory, assuming 30-second dwell times, the M8 is a heavier, slower-accelerating train, and for our purposes we should assume a 90-second stop penalty. This means that, counting New Rochelle and Sunnyside together as a single dwell-free stop (they involve one acceleration and one deceleration in the Sunnyside-New Rochelle segment), local technical travel time is 18:15, about the same as what Amtrak achieves today without stops but with less superelevaiton and inferior rolling stock.
Now, 18:15-9 = 9:15, 9:15 times the schedule pad factor is 9:54, and modern signaling allows 2-minute headways up to 200 km/h; thus we can accommodate 4 tph intercity and 4 tph local Metro-North without overtakes except at New Rochelle and Sunnyside.
There is only one problem with the no-overtake scenario: the MTA plans on a peak traffic much higher than 4 tph, in line with the New Haven Line’s high demand. It’s planning on a peak of 6-8 tph according to what I’ve read in comments on Second Avenue Sagas. This naturally breaks into 4 tph that make local stops and 4 that do not (though my suspicion of MTA practice is that it wants fewer than 4 local tph); if there are fewer than 8 trains, one slot could be eliminated.
Let’s look then at a 4/4/4 scenario. Assume that trains depart Sunnyside in order of speed – HSR first (passing rather than stopping at Sunnyside), then express Metro-North, then local Metro-North. A local train will be overtaken first by the following HSR, and then by the following express. If we could move the overtake point to New Rochelle, the local would not need to wait for trains to pass it. In reality, 4/4/4 means the local departs Sunnyside 4-5 minutes after the HSR train passes it, and has 9 minutes of time penalty before being overtaken again. If the stop penalty could be reduced to 75 seconds, then the overtake could be moved to New Rochelle, demonstrating the use of top-quality rolling stock. But the M8s are good enough for many purposes, and therefore we will not assume a noncompliant replacement, unlike in the case of the MBTA, whose rolling stock is slow and very heavy.
With 9 minutes of time to make up, it’s tempting to have an overtake at a four-tracked Co-op City station. But then the local would have to be overtaken by two trains in a row, and moreover the two trains would become quite separated by then due to differing top speeds, and this would force a penalty on the order of 6 minutes.
I claim that the best would be to four-track a segment between two or even three stations; the right-of-way is wide enough anyway. In addition, the Morris Park curve could be straightened if the Eastchester Avenue overpass were modified, and doing this in conjunction with four-tracking would be cheaper than doing each alone. Under this option, the local would leave Sunnyside much later than 2 minutes after the express, just enough to be overtaken by HSR at Morris Park. It would then keep going to Co-op City until overtaken by an express. This would essentially save about 2.5 minutes out of the 6 in penalty, since the train would be in motion for that time.
New Rochelle-Penn Station Regional Rail
Last week, the MTA again floated proposals for connecting Metro-North to Penn Station once East Side Access comes online and frees track space currently used by the LIRR. The New Haven Line is to be connected to Penn Station via Northeast Corridor trackage that only Amtrak uses today, with four new stations in the Bronx. The new station locations include one near Co-op City, a dense middle-class housing project that is underserved by transit, and three more neighborhoods that are inconveniently between the 5 and 6 or on the wrong side of a freeway. In sum, it is a positive development.
However, since the New Haven Line already has a Manhattan terminal at Grand Central, this project involves splitting the line in two in its inner section. Thus, frequency will be cut in half, unless there is extra service added north of the merge point at New Rochelle. At the peak, this is not a very big problem, since the New Haven Line runs 20 trains into Grand Central between 8 and 9 am every weekday; although this is misleading since most stations are only served by a small subset of these trains, it is not difficult to have trains make a few more stops to restore the existing frequencies.
The problem is off-peak service. The current pattern is one train per hour serving stations north of Stamford and running nonstop between Stamford and Harlem-125th, and two Grand Central-Stamford locals per hour in the weekday off-peak and one on weekends. While poor by any international standards, the service afforded to the lower New Haven Line is tied for best in the US with just a handful of lines with half-hourly off-peak service. Splitting frequency in half would be a disaster for such service, to say nothing of not being useful to regional riders in the Bronx. Moreover, adding service just so that it can be split south of New Rochelle is counterproductive: the greatest need for frequency is close to the center rather than in the suburbs, because the shorter the trip time, the more pronounced the effect of a long wait time is.
I claim that the best way to compromise on frequency under the current service paradigm is to run short-turning trains terminating at New Rochelle, with timed connections. Since some passengers prefer a one-seat ride, half the local trains should serve Penn Station and half should serve Grand Central. In other words, frequency should be split among the two Manhattan destinations, but each branch should have a short-turning train connecting with the other branch’s trains. Express trains should make a station stop at New Rochelle with a reasonable connection from the local trains, but should otherwise only serve one destination. Then, Grand Central is the better destination for express trains, since it minimizes interference with intercity trains.
The alternative is to turn New Rochelle-Penn Station into a modernized regional rail line, run somewhat independently of the rest of Metro-North, with through-trains from the rest of the New Haven Line only at rush hour. Maybe select few off-peak trains, no more than 1 per hour, could extend to Stamford. This requires a change in paradigm; it cannot be done with the current staffing levels or turnaround times, but since it’s a service expansion, it’s plausible if unlikely that the union will accept reduced staffing, in line with best practices.
I envision the following scenario for modernized regional rail:
– Trains go from New Rochelle to Penn Station and beyond, to New Jersey. Through-service to the Hudson Line via the Empire Connection avoids agency turf battles but is less useful for passengers. They can hook into existing services and go all the way to Trenton and Long Branch, or provide new service and only go as far as Newark.
– Minimum off-peak frequency is one train every 15-20 minutes, or perhaps 30 late at night. 10 is aspirational, if the service proves popular.
– Fares are integrated with local transit. This means intra-city trips cost the same as subway or not much more, and in either case, transfers to the subway or the buses are free. If people can ride trains and a ferry from Tottenville to Wakefield on one fare, people should get to ride direct from Co-op City to Penn Station on one fare.
– Trains make stops that interface with other transit options. A Sunnyside stop meeting with the LIRR is a must. In addition, if the grades permit, there should be a stop in Astoria meeting the subway, and perhaps one in Port Morris, so that the trains can offer fast frequent service between Queens and the Bronx. Perhaps there should also be a restored station meeting buses from City Island.
The Sunnyside stop has value no matter what: for one, it allows trains to Penn Station to also work as Grand Central trains, making the transferring process easier to implement. The other extra stops are not really useful unless commuter rail is made an attractive option for local trips – in short, an S-Bahn or RER rather than a traditional American commuter service.
I hope to discuss compatibility with modernized intercity trains tomorrow. Although half-hourly service is so infrequent there is no real interference with intercity trains, more frequent service could pose problems. This is not an issue if Amtrak is not modernized: the speed limit south of New Rochelle is at most 160 km/h and even that is only between the Hutchinson River and Pelham Manor, with 100-110 km/h on the rest of the line. Thus the only speed difference between regional and intercity trains comes from making station stops, and a glance at existing schedules shows that when the top speed is 130-140 km/h trains lose about 1.5 minutes per stop. Of course high-powered noncompliant trains lose much less time, but for the purposes of running punctually on a shared line, the M8s are good enough. Losing 6 minutes from the four planned station stops is not a problem even with the proposed peak frequency, once one remembers that most peak trains are not going to stop in the Bronx at all.
More Track Maps
A kind reader sent me the two maps on Rich E Green’s now-offline website that I did not have, namely maps of all of Connecticut and Rhode Island. These join earlier maps I’d posted of the Northeast Corridor in Maryland, and the commuter railroads in the Mid-Atlantic, separated into Long Island, Metro-North and Empire South, and New Jersey Transit and SEPTA.
Update: based on request by the author, I took down all the maps, and scrubbed the links.
Compromising with Agency Turf
Daniel Krause added his two cents to the politicals vs. technicals issue; his contention is that technical advocates are perfectionists and refuse to compromise. Writing about the Transbay Terminal design, which is slightly less wretched than originally planned but still severely constrains Caltrain capacity into downtown San Francisco, he says,
-It seems [technicals] have a difficulty in accepting design compromises. The Transbay Terminal situation is a good example. Even though the turning radius has been significantly widened, it is still tighter than they like, so the drumbeat continues about how bad and non-function the Transbay Terminal will be, even though (in my opinion) a reasonable level of service will now be accommodated within the terminal for both Caltrain and HSR.
-Things they find as deal-breakers in terms of design, are not deal-breakers to the general public. The public just wants a comfortable and reasonably fast way to get around. For example, they will not be bothered if trains go a little slower into the Transbay terminal because the turning radius is not ideal. They will still be perfectly happy to arrive into the heart of downtown SF despite the ongoing debate in the blogosphere.
The telltale sign that something is wrong is that there’s nobody to compromise with on this matter. Compromises based on community needs happen all the time. In fact one of my future projects for this blog is to propose an elevated alignment in Providence from the East Side Rail Tunnel to downtown, and this involves a series of compromises between cost, noise, takings, and speed. The problem is that the compromises leading to the Transbay design, or, worse, the design of San Jose Diridon, are not based on any local needs; they’re based on the needs of agencies that won’t cooperate. The same is true of the various caverns built or proposed in New York, and Harold Interlocking.
Although I’ve voiced the view that experts should be thought as one more constituency with its own special knowledge (namely, best industry practices), they should not be viewed as a constituency with its own interests. They should serve the public, not the reverse. And the public should pressure them to come up with designs that maximize passenger convenience.
In the case of Transbay specifically, the agency turf is not just leading to high cost. The worst aspect of it is that most peak Caltrain trains will not be able to serve Transbay, but instead have to terminate at the present 4th and King terminal, separated from the CBD by a kilometer and a pedestrian-hostile freeway connector. Passengers will be forced to transfer to the Central Subway, a very slow and low-capacity line that isn’t expected to get much more ridership than the buses it’s replacing.
Although it’s tempting to view passengers as automatons who only care about glossy trains, the reality is that the little details matter. If the area around a station isn’t walkable, people will not walk to it. If the timetable is too inscrutable, or schedule reliability is poor, or the trains squeal, passengers will be more likely to look for alternatives. Of course laypeople may not be able to tell exactly what is wrong – they may complain that transferring is horrible but not know that transfers could be made cross-platform and timed, or they may complain about paying a series of fares but not know that fare unions exist – but they can tell something is wrong. Ordinary people are much less stupid than the elites think they are. The best argument against democracy may be five minutes’ conversation with the average voter, but the best argument for democracy is five minutes’ conversation with the average member of the elite.
I for one was not born hostile to American transit agencies. I became this way after, first, riding Amtrak; and second, stumbling across a cost per km figure for Tokyo subways that was much lower than the equivalent New York figure, eventually leading to my interest in comparative costs. And judging by the deteriorating position of HSR in the polls in California, the design incompetence is having a similar effect on many others.
Trust (Hoisted from Comments)
Robert Cruickshank’s much-anticipated reply to my posts about political versus technical transit supporters and their activism says that high-speed rail is a political issue, and therefore what’s important is to just get it done.
To me, the problem comes from my unfortunate choice of the terms political and technical. The main difference is not about technical concerns; it’s about whether one trusts American transit agencies. Thus I don’t really see the point when Robert complains about neo-liberalism and the evils of financial cost-benefit calculations. The terminology I picked may have reinforced the image of technicals as heartless engineers and technocrats, but in reality the opposite is true. Technicals have a much bigger standard deviation in their political attitudes than politicals; they range from Rothbardian libertarians to free speech advocates and people who make fun of the phrase “undisclosed location” in the context of US-sponsored torture. The common thread is mistrust of agency officials; the technical arguments are there because when we disagree with officials rather than just report what they say, we need to actually rebut their claims.
In contrast with Robert’s picture of the technical as a technocrat, my technical activism comes from the opposite end: it’s a rejection of a self-justifying bureaucracy that equates “build nothing” with “continue to build highways” and that thinks progress equals megaprojects. It’s a matter of supporting consensus politics and informed citizenry rather than subservience to agency officials. US government officials spend 2-10 times more on infrastructure projects as they have to. They have agency turf battles that make transit less user-friendly, and to cover up those turf battles they propose to spend billions of dollars on gratuitous viaducts, caverns, tunnels, and what have you. They write passenger rail-hostile regulations. And when called on it, they defraud the public and even tell outright lies. Trust in government agencies is so low that when the California HSR Authority admitted to the cost overruns, the LA Times treated it as a moment of honesty.
It’s precisely this trust that people care about, and it’s eroding when HSR becomes the equivalent of $600 toilet seats. Of course there is money for transit, but it’s either wasted or not given to transit because people can’t trust that it can be used wisely. I view it as part of my goal to showcase how good transit can be done, so that it doesn’t look so expensive for the benefit provided.
A fundamental tenet of risk perception theory is that people are most concerned about risks they find morally reprehensible – and this collusion between government and government contractors offends me. Just because it’s greenwashed doesn’t mean it’s any better than subsidizing oil drilling, paying military contractors $1,000 per day, or bailing out financial companies that then use the money to pay the executives who caused the financial crisis multi-million dollar bonuses. No wonder that when Republicans talk about the ingenuity of individual business leaders, they talk about Mark Zuckerberg, the Google guys, and Steve Jobs; they have to go that far out of the industries that give money to the GOP, such as oil, to find people who’ve actually innovated rather than just sucked public money. In fact one of the impetuses for the spread of neo-liberal boosterism in popular culture is the perception that entrepreneurs who are untainted by the public sector are good, while government is inherently incompetent and corrupt. When the government doesn’t do a good job, people stop believing it’s even possible for good government to exist.
Yonah Freemark writes that it doesn’t matter if costs are high because HSR costs are a small part of the transportation budget, which is itself a tiny part of GDP. But transportation is also not the biggest priority in spending. Most of the GDP, even most government spending, is and should be things that aren’t transportation; and most transportation funding isn’t and shouldn’t be intercity.
For an order of magnitude of what other issues are involved, Robert is proposing $1 trillion in student loan forgiveness as economic stimulus. My point is not to impugn him; I agree with him there. It’s that the big-ticket items are not transportation, but instead transportation is one of many small-ticket items of spending. But pool many small expenses – a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there – and you’re starting to talk about real money.
And this is true politically, not just economically. The Democratic Party has been advocating for universal health care since the Truman administration. After early successes with Medicare and Medicaid, its efforts stalled; its empathy-based appeals went nowhere. In Politics Lost, Joe Klein writes about how Bob Shrum would insert the phrase “health care is a right, not a privilege” into the speeches of every Presidential candidate he worked for – and how every candidate he worked for lost. Meanwhile, US health care costs were ballooning faster than those of other first-world countries. By 2005-6 it was impossible to miss, and liberal pundits seized and owned the issue, portraying American health care as not only inequitable but also inefficient. Five years later, they got their universal health care bill, flawed as it is. Nowadays the people who are pooh-poohing the idea of health care cost control are Greg Mankiw and the Tea Party.
Spending is a zero sum game, but economically and politically. The Great Recession won’t last forever. Any infrastructure building plan is going to outlast the recession, triggering real tax hikes, spending cuts, or interest rate hikes in the future. It’s fine if the infrastructure is cost-effective; it’s not fine if it isn’t. (In comments on CAHSR Blog, I was told that the example of Japan shows that the recession can last forever; if it does, the US will have bigger problems than transportation.)
And this is equally true politically. The amount of government spending is controlled tightly by the political acceptability of deficits. Some deficits are more politically acceptable than others – for example, military waste is acceptable to many right-wingers – but in this political climate, HSR is at least as controversial on the right as extending jobless benefits, and far less useful as stimulus per dollar spent. The unemployed tend not to fork over much of their benefits to international consultants. If a few billion dollars are enough to showcase workable HSR then by all means the administration should spend them, but if they’d eat $20 billion out of a $50 billion jobs bill that Obama’s going to run for reelection on, there’s no point.
I think that both on transportation and on health care, there’s a political not-invented-here reasons among the partisans. Liberals owned health care cost control, so Greg Mankiw started arguing that it wouldn’t help society much and that high costs are a good thing and Sarah Palin referred to cost control as death panels. The issue with transportation is a little different; while many technicals are leftists, it’s anti-urban conservatives and Koch-libertarians who cancel transit projects, use phrases like “the money tree,” and demagogue about how no rail project is ever affordable. My instinct is to point out that those conservatives have no trouble overspending on road projects and rationalizing highway cost overruns; but if you think in terms of spending, and treat transportation as one program of many stimulus projects, there’s a real not-invented-here issue here.
Ironically, despite Robert’s claim that costs don’t matter and benefits do, much of what I rail against is exactly benefits. I personally am reminded by how awful the turf battles are every time I have to buy an MBTA ticket at the cafe since Amtrak bullied the MBTA out of the Providence station booths, and every time I take the subway to Penn Station and need to change concourses to get my Amtrak ticket. The key for me is to make transit cheap enough that it can be deployed on a large scale, and to make it convenient and pedestrian-friendly, which park-and-ride-oriented commuter rail is not.
Pedestrian Observations 
