Category: Transportation

Austerity and State Support for Transit

The debt ceiling deal between the administration and Senate Democrats on one side and House Republicans on the other includes significant discretionary spending cuts, though not as much as the Tea Party had hoped for. It is not clear yet which programs will be cut, but since all discretionary spending is fungible, money for transportation is going to become much tighter.

In a climate of austerity, and one in which transportation is not considered as untouchable as Social Security, transit agencies must find alternative sources of funding. Multiple transit blogs have proposed state and local government support instead, including The Transport Politic and Portland Transport; on the Infrastructurist, commenter Progressive Capitalist suggested the same with respect to the gas tax, which is about to lapse independently of the debt ceiling.

Let me pour some cold water on this idea: in a climate of austerity, states will lose federal support, and need to cut spending or raise taxes, of which the former is more likely. The AP wire documents some instances of state budget gaps that will get worse under the new austerity program; even in Connecticut, one of the biggest per capita tax donor states, 16% of non-transportation funding comes from the government. In other states, which are poorer and sometimes net tax recipients, the problem is much larger. Although the drying of federal aid may well skip transportation, states will still be under pressure to cut everything. Money is fungible like that.

Simultaneously, the New York Times published an article documenting Rhode Island’s transit service cuts, in its attempt to plug its own budget hole. Although the article’s tone is very politically pro-transit, noting that it’s critical for small business, and spends much time uncritically quoting job numbers from APTA as well as Brookings’ shoddy transit accessibility study, one can glean the political priorities in Rhode Island from it. I’ll come later to the technical side of Rhode Island’s service cuts, but for now note that there seems to be no political will to raise taxes to keep buses running, although the state is very liberal.

At the above-linked Portland Transport post, Engineer Scotty went further and said that austerity would actually change transportation priorities, perhaps even making transit better off in the long run by making people less able to afford cars. He says the following consequences are likely:

  • A lower standard of living overall.
  • Higher prices for fuel, especially petroleum products. Most of the oil we use is imported; and a devalued dollar would make oil more expensive. A reduction in US military presence could affect the stability of oil shipments, and the continued rise of emerging economies such as China, who will have their own increasing needs for oil, will further increase prices.
  • Fewer funds for capital projects. In an austerity-focused economy, there would be less money available for infrastructure projects–or for anything other than debt service, for that matter.
  • More migration to urban areas.
  • Wage adjustments in the public sector. This section is above and beyond any reductions in wages to affect the broader economy.
  • More people unable to afford cars. The combination of increased fuel costs and decreased overall disposable income will likely increase the number of households unable to afford an automobile, or cause wealthier households to cut back, perhaps to a single family car rather than one per driver.

As a result, he suggests, there will be more local and private-sector involvement in transit, regulations will be relaxed in order to reduce costs, investment in highways and rail will decline in favor of on-street BRT (of the kind that only requires paint), and an end to the transit stigma.

My analysis is a good deal more pessimistic. States do not have money for transit operating subsidies, or even for the in-house expertise required to reduce the amount of subsidy required without enormous fights with the unions. Declining gas tax revenues mean less money for transit rather than more; although the marginal rider who switches from driving to riding the bus produces a net increase in revenue to the agency, other drivers who respond to lower incomes by traveling less produce a much larger net decrease in revenue. Furthermore, the stigma that only poor people ride the bus is not going to change merely because more people are poor.

On the contrary, the situation is going to force even more federal involvement in transportation, assuming that all else is equal, i.e. that the bipartisan austerity plan to be released at the end of this year does not specifically target transportation funding. The states are genuinely cash-strapped. Their revenues come from income taxes and from sales taxes that exclude basic necessities, of which the former are quite cyclical and the latter extremely so. They can only issue bonds for so long before they get their credit rating downgraded.

In contrast, the federal government can borrow at a negative real interest rate, and is embarking on an austerity plan for purely political reasons. I fully expect states to start begging for more federal help a year or two from now. This will be especially egregious if after the 2012 election one party takes control of the White House and both houses of Congress, in which cases all promises of austerity will be a distant memory. But even if austerity persists, a few self-serving reports by the construction industry saying that infrastructure requires even more trillions than previously thought are all it takes. At the end, the federal transportation bill may well stay the same size, while state transportation funds are certain to shrink.

Quick Note: Barcelona Rail Tunnel

Barcelona’s rail tunnel connecting the existing high-speed rail station, Sants, with city center, has just been completed. The tunnel’s total length is 5.8 km. As for cost:

The tunnel has cost over €179·3m to build, including extensive measures to protect historic buildings such as Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia from any settlement.

I believe this sets a new modern-day record for low construction costs – about $40 million per km – certainly in cases of inner-urban construction. It balances out the city’s Line 9 boondoggle, which has run so many times over budget it’s now a full $180 million per km.

Racism and Accidents

As has been widely reported in the news, China had a major rail accident three days ago, killing 43 people. A positive train control system that was supposed to prevent accidents didn’t; it was reportedly shut down due to severe weather, and as a result, when one train stalled on a bridge, another train rear-ended it and derailed, and two of its cars fell from the bridge. The Chinese government’s response was secretive and authoritarian, as can only be expected of a regime that treats breathing exercises as an act of subversion, and a leaked set of propaganda instructions to reporters contains such gems as “From now on, the Wenzhou train accident should be reported along the theme of ‘major love in the face of major disaster.'”

However, more interesting is the reaction of Western media to the disaster. Bloomberg quotes several financial analysts who raise doubts about China’s ability to export technology. A Financial Times blog analogizes high-speed rail to China’s fast-growing economy and warns of overheating. The general mood is one of treating accidents in China as evidence of a defective culture, which does not care about safety. More abstractly, it’s evidence that Asians don’t care about the individual, only about nationality and prestige. It comes from the same place as the San Francisco transit planner who, Richard Mlynarik reports, answered a question about Japan’s short turnaround times with, “Asians don’t value life the same way we do.”

The biggest HSR accident in history is still Eschede. The cause of the accident turned out to be a series of errors in maintenance and design. And yet, nobody doubts the safety record of Germany. They know that German industry turns out high-quality products. Siemens successfully distanced itself from the accident, claiming that it was only partially responsible to the manufacturing and that it was really DB’s train, and has sold its Velaro train in multiple foreign markets. An accident on its maglev test track that killed 23 hasn’t prevented it from marketing its maglev technology, and Germany’s continued rejection of maglev is on grounds of cost rather than safety. DB too was unfazed, made cosmetic changes, and was more recently hit with a less deadly egg on its face in Berlin; it too gets contracts abroad.

Eschede is emblematic of reactions to accidents in the West; Wenzhou is emblematic of reactions to accidents in Asia. (Amagasaki was as far as I can tell somewhere in the middle.) Individual incidents merely confirm what everyone knows.

The reality, buried at the bottom of few articles and unmentioned elsewhere, is that China’s overall safety record is not that bad. If one believes that Wikipedia’s list of accidents is exhaustive, then China’s record is very good. Even if not, on any reasonable estimate of Chinese HSR traffic (including traveling at lower speed, as the trains in question were), its safety is better than in many of the scoffing Western countries. Assume 150 billion passenger-km a year; this compares with an actual figure of 300 million HSR passengers per year as of 2010 and an average trip length of a little more than 500 km on all lines, not just high-speed (computed from data here). To beat the last twenty years’ American railway safety, China’s HSR division will need to have no additional fatal accidents for a year. To beat Germany, make that three years.

The sort of racism that would lead commentators and investors to think less of China’s safety over Wenzhou but not of Germany’s over Eschede is subtle; it’s nothing like overt discrimination in jobs or immigration or housing. As a result, it’s more or less self-solving in the long run: in the 1960s, Westerners thought Japan made shoddy products, in the 1990s they thought the same of South Korea, and in the last decade they’ve shifted the target to China. In twenty years, when China’s GDP starts approaching that of developed countries, they’ll find another target. They’ll of course not stop thinking that Asians are an undifferentiated mass of insects with no thought or creativity (or that Muslims are terrorists), but they’ll appreciate that they can make and even design manufactured products.

The significance is that it’s a telltale sign of the Not Invented Here syndrome. Convincing Americans to adopt European practices and vice versa is hard enough; but convincing them to adopt practices from Japan, let alone China, is anathema. You might as well try to convince an Orthodox Jew to switch from beef to pork. Attacking the assumption that other countries’ experiences are always part of a grand cultural essence is not just good humanity and antiracism; it’s also good technical planning.

In contrast to both the cultural approach and China’s apparatchik guidelines, I’d propose the following way to report accidents, terrorist attacks, and other major disasters:

1. Put individual events into broader statistical context. An aircraft or train crash should be accompanied by a reminder that those modes are still safer than all others.

2. Report on the causes of the accident, both immediate (as described in the first paragraph of this post) and fundamental, including any political or economic pressure to skimp on safety.

3. Avoid overinterpreting high-impact, low-probability events. Thus, avoid questions such as which train design standard is safer unless either directly relevant to the disaster (the wheel broke, the car crumpled, etc.) or backed up by extensive multi-year evidence.

4. If the official story or the source is not credible, pursue a separate investigation, using your own knowledge, or that of outside expert sources; pressure the institutions involved to be more candid about their own failures.

5. Follow up on the lessons learned, and whether they are helpful or not. As an example, consider the various measures taken to improve air safety since 9/11, and think which have been effective and which have not.

6. Avoid fluff at all costs.

For the most part, this list of items boils down to “Report on disasters involving non-Westerners as if they involved Westerners.” People are people, and societies are societies.

Followup on the FRA and Amtrak

My posts about the FRA and American railroad incompetence are getting a lot of traction nowadays, thanks to links from Aaron Renn and Stephen Smith, of which the latter has been relinked by Matt Yglesias. The comments to those posts have often brought up the question of why I believe that come 2015, the buff strength requirement will be gone. They also sometimes propose that FRA regulations are useful in the unique circumstances of American railroads. Let me address both concerns right now.

In 2009, Amtrak published its first document proposing higher-speed trains in the Northeast. In this document Amtrak states that,

Subsequent analysis by Amtrak suggests achieving 2 hour and 15 minute service between New York and Washington in the long-term by 2030 will require modifications to existing equipment, or deployment of next generation rolling stock, to allow required speeds through curves, as well as expansion of capacity into and through Manhattan, NY. Table 2 includes estimates of costs required to replace Amtrak’s existing NEC fleet with next generation equipment. As discussed above, this next generation of equipment has the potential to be lighter, and thus faster, than the current generation. However, performance specifications for such equipment will need to be developed and will depend in part on emerging standards for positive train control (PTC) and crash avoidance systems.

My reading of this is that the Amtrak believes the FRA will indeed waive buff strength requirements once PTC comes online; this is buttressed by the fact that Caltrain got a waiver, based in part on a requirement that it install PTC first. The PTC discussed doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere good – note the discussion of developing performance specifications rather than using the emerging worldwide standard that is ERTMS – but it does indicate that Amtrak’s new premium-cost locomotives could be much lighter.

As an aside, this document is what first clued me in to Amtrak’s incompetence. For example, immediately below the paragraph quoted above, Amtrak proposes to raise cant deficiency (“underbalance”) on Metro-North territory from 3″ to 5″; the Acela trainsets can do 7″, and Pendolino trainsets close to 11″. Based on this rather low standard, Amtrak claims “an additional five minutes of trip time reductions are potentially available with the deployment of modified or new equipment.” (Try half an hour.)

As for the second concern, usually the arguments in favor of FRA regulations hinge upon exaggerated claims that the US railroad system is unique. One commenter claims that railroaders call cab cars coffin cars because of the possibility of grade crossing accidents. In reality, lightweight trains safely cross roads at-grade abroad, to say nothing of light rail networks in the US.

There are still plenty of old-time railroaders who believe that in crashes, FRA compliance offers extra protection. It does not. Please read Caltrain’s structural report and compliance assessment for the FRA waiver, which include a technical explanation of the mechanisms for accident survivability used in Europe. Caltrain’s simulations show that high buff strength is only relevant at relative speeds between 15 and 25 mph, and that European EMUs and compliant cars are equally safe in grade crossing accidents. The FRA seems convinced of the safety of European EMUs; it is reportedly harassing Japanese manufacturers about compliance with European survivability regulations (for example, in collisions with a 6-kg steel ball) rather than American ones. Finally, high weight is a liability as much as it is an asset: at Chatsworth, the loss of life came from the fact that the first passenger car telescoped into the heavy locomotive.

Update: the Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility, an organization supporting Amtrak’s NEC Master Plan, published an article claiming Amtrak made the right choice to buy the aforementioned locomotives, claiming that Amtrak is underfunded. Recall that the Master Plan is the document that came out of the report referenced above, complete with the same laconic assumptions on train performance, as well as false claims about capacity constraints. The Business Alliance’s article’s greatest sin is the claim at the end that,

Smith also ignores the question of funding when he suggests that Amtrak should purchase Electric Multiple Units (EMUs) for the NEC. Unlike locomotives and non-motorized passenger cars, currently in use on the NEC, EMUs have smaller engines on each passenger car. The debate between investing in EMUs vs. locomotives + cars is beyond the scope of this post. Still, what’s clear is that EMUs would need a significantly higher up-front investment and require an even larger amount of government support, which is highly unlikely at this time.

In reality, a new unpowered Amtrak coach costs $2.2 million, about the same as a decent FRA-compliant EMU on the LIRR and Metro-North. And the three European EMU orders in Railway Gazette’s April 2011 compilation cost between $1.3 and $2 million per car.

Uncompetitive Transit

In general, government at all level should be encouraging a mode shift away from cars and toward trains, using legacy lines for regional service outside urban areas. Here is a canonical example of such a proposal, unfortunately completely unofficial, in Medford, Oregon. A key point is that transit needs to provide a competitive trip time, and connect people to where they want to go, or else there’s no point in running it.

Sometimes, it’s impossible given present infrastructure. One example of this, routinely mooted on California High-Speed Rail Blog, is a system connecting to Gilroy and feeding high-speed rail. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that the current FRA regulations and US rail practices have been completely gutted and replaced with Swiss or Japanese practice, and, more speculatively, that the legacy line can be made passenger-primary, despite Union Pacific ownership. The system would connect Gilroy, Santa Cruz, Salinas, and Monterey, using a now-abandoned right-of-way to get to downtown Monterey and legacy lines elsewhere.

The result can be seen on this map. There would be timed transfers at Castroville and Watsonville (running one-seat rides everywhere at acceptable frequency would require too many trains), and several additional intermediate stops, such as Marina, Seaside, Capitola, and Aromas. In terms of pure railroad operations, it could be a well-run system. Unfortunately, it could not be a successful one: the largest and densest city on the line, Salinas, is connected to the others in a very roundabout way. Salinas-Gilroy is 60 kilometers by rail and only 45 by road. Frequent curves would make it impossible to maintain a high average speed. Even a 55-minute trip time, allowing two trainsets to provide hourly service, would be ambitious, though possible with a wide stop spacing and good rolling stock; in contrast, driving takes 37 minutes according to Google Maps.

Monterey-Gilroy and Santa Cruz-Gilroy would be a little more competitive – they’re 50 and 54 minutes by car respectively. However, the markets are much smaller, especially in the case of Santa Cruz, where to get to any regional destination other than Gilroy, it’s faster to drive to San Jose. In addition, Santa Cruz-Gilroy is the hardest pair to get on a reliable clockface schedule: it’s 65 km, and the segment west of Watsonville is 34 with many curves, some of radius going down to about 220 meters, restricting speed even under optimistic performance assumptions to 75 km/h.

Since the congestion level in this part of California is not very high, cars could always beat the train, and for many trips so could buses. Therefore normal origin-and-destination travel would not produce much ridership on such a system. The worse trip time would be tolerable to some high-speed rail travelers if the transfer to high-speed rail were well-configured; however, high-speed travel alone does not generate enough ridership to justify an entirely new rail system, especially at an outlying station such as Gilroy. It would be the high-speed rail equivalent of an airport express.

There occasionally arise such cases, of lines that look good in principle but can’t be made competitive in practice. That is one example. A few more, not all seriously proposed by transit proponents: many international high-speed rail links in general, and some in particular, for example Minneapolis-Winnipeg (it would dominate the market, but the market is so small it’s not worth it). The only thing that can be done is spend scarce transit funding elsewhere. There are enough regional and intercity lines that could work well and no shortage of local transit supporters, some with political clout, who want them. Urban lines, which routinely get the short end of the stick in California in favor of low-performing outward extensions, would clamor for some of the money required to get a Santa Cruz-Monterey-Salinas-Gilroy system up to acceptable performance standards.

Quick Note on Food Transportation

It’s a commonplace among some environmentalists that an oil- or carbon-constrained world is one where it’s prohibitively expensive to ship food long distances, and therefore people should eat local. For example, James Kunstler argues that cities will shrink and people will return to locally grown agriculture. For the benefit of society, let me debunk this fantasy with some hard numbers.

Suppose the price of diesel rises by $20 per gallon – $5.25 per liter. This is somewhat higher than the E3 Network‘s 95th-percentile estimate for the economically correct carbon tax in 2050, and twice as high as the estimate for 2010. It could come about due to an apocalyptic oil shock, though such a world and a world with a very high carbon tax are mutually exclusive. Today’s Class I freight trains are capable of moving about 450 short tons of freight one mile on one gallon of diesel – about 170 ton-km per liter. (Large cargo ships are about equally efficient, so this holds equally well over oceans.)

Let’s now look at rice, a very cheap retail food item that can’t be grown in every climate and is thus vulnerable to an increase in price that’s essentially constant per unit of weight. Under the above assumptions, shipping rice from Arkansas to New York, a distance of about 2,000 km, would require an extra $60 per ton. The actual retail price of rice in the US is around $1,700 per ton, so the oil shock would raise the price of transporting rice long-distance about 3.5%. First- and last-mile transportation at both ends uses trucks and would become much more expensive, but this would be equally true of long-distance food shipping and locally grown food.

This actually overstates the supposed problem of shipping food across regions, because high fuel prices lead to both higher efficiency and lower consumption. In 2009 BNSF said it would take $10 billion to electrify its mainline network, including purchasing dual-mode locomotives, and pegged the breakeven point for such a venture at $4/gallon gas. A carbon tax would also cause the source of such electricity to shift to greener sources than coal.

While locavores insist on shaving off the small, small portion of their carbon footprint coming from food transportation, many ignore the much larger issue of what they eat. Not all – the environmental movement is full of vegetarians – but the attitude that buying local is more helpful to the environment than avoiding red meat is sufficiently widespread that it’s important to note that the opposite is the truth.

Everyone should read the study linked in the above paragraph. Even when accounting for the full transportation cycle of food, including fertilizer and other materials, transportation is a small percentage of food emissions. Ruminant animals emit large quantities of methane; large mammals hog feed and thus require more fertilizer and energy to grow; manure adds more emissions of nitrous oxides and methane. As a result, red meat consumed in the US emits 22.1 kg-equivalent of CO2 per kg. The average carbon cost posited by E3 – $400 per ton, one fifth the apocalyptic amount used in the rice transportation calculation – would tax red meat $9 per kg, $4 per pound, roughly doubling its retail price.

Thoughts on Carmageddon

I’m not talking about the controversial computer game of my childhood, but about the closure of the 405 in Los Angeles for 53 hours. The predicted massive traffic jams failed to materialize, just like every time there’s a closure due to construction, an accident, or an earthquake. The reason is that traffic engineers and planners, the media, and even airlines talk up the possibility of gridlock so much that people choose to stay home or use other modes of transportation. The Huffington Post’s warning that the closure could actually increase carbon emissions because people would take longer detours or cause more traffic jams failed to materialize.

Although normally the induced demand phenomenon is more in the long term than in the short term, if the closure is known to take a very short time, then people can make short-term behavioral changes. They’re not going to move closer to where they work or agitate for better public transit, but they’re going to move non-essential trips to another day, carpool or take transit or bike just the one time, or even sleep one night at the office. Indeed,

Dennis S. Mileti, a sociologist, has spent his career analyzing human behavior around natural and man-made disasters. He advises everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to hazmat workers on how to deliver effective warnings that make people pay attention without panicking and guide them to take precautions and other appropriate actions.

In this case, he said, the message got through because of the blanket of media coverage.

“The public doesn’t change its behavior on its own,” Mileti said. “It behaves on the perceptions formed by the information people are provided.”

Ironically, transit strikes do lead to worse traffic, even in Los Angeles. It’s not because transit is more significant to the population of Southern California than the 405; although more people ride transit in Greater Los Angeles than take the 405 across Sepulveda Pass – about 1.2 million per weekday vs. 500,000 – the transit ridership is much more dispersed, and is dominated by people who can’t afford to drive alone. Instead, the issue is one of media forewarning. Strikes are sudden, and even when they’re threatened, the media focus is never about mitigating the extra traffic, not even in New York.

Potentially, this may be one reason why in the long term, building more roads creates induced demand, and demolishing them causes demand to disappear. Highway openings are widely advertised: politicians love ribbon cutting ceremonies, and the media runs stories about developers and drivers complaining about traffic on parallel roads. Highway closures are more sudden – the two test cases, the Embarcadero Freeway and the West Side Highway, were caused by disaster – but afterward the media coverage and the short-term spike in traffic teach the public that those highways do not exist, leading the traffic to vanish.

Of course, reduced demand isn’t just trips vanishing into thin air. Some trips do get diverted to low-traffic side streets. Others get diverted to mass transit, just as the original construction of the Interstates destroyed transit ridership in the US. Slate has an article about how Carmageddon is teaching the locals that mass transit exists in the first place; it’s possible that it’s going to lead to a long-term increase in ridership, just like short-term spikes in gas prices.

This does not mean long-term road use is going to decline – in fact, it’s going to increase because of the added capacity on the 405. Although the construction of rail transit leads to a reduction in traffic (P.S. if you follow the link, bear in mind its pollution estimates are really low, coming from among other things only counting global warming damage to the US), this assumes business as usual. The main lesson here is not about transit, but about what Los Angeles can expect to happen if an earthquake forces the 405 to be permanently closed, just like the Embarcadero. Although drivers and many business groups are guaranteed to warn about traffic, in reality if such a disaster happens, high traffic will not happen, not in the long run.

Update: as Herbie notes in the comments, St. Louis closed a segment of I-64 for two years, and not only did predicted congestion barely materialize, but also the economic impact of the closure according to business surveys was zero.

Peak Driving

The Infrastructurist links to and summarizes a study in World Transport Policy and Practice by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy positing that driving in the US has hit a peak and is now in decline. The study’s contribution is not the trend, which has already been identified and described in previous research, e.g. by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, but some explanations for why it’s happening. Newman and Kenworthy are attributing the decline in driving to six causes:

1. The Marchetti Wall. People budget a constant amount of time for travel, about 60-90 minutes per day (Marchetti’s research suggests 60), and respond to faster travel by living farther from where they work or taking more trips. Research has confirmed this not only within developed countries, but also in rural Africa; for a lit review, read section 2.2 of Gary Barnes’ article on density.

The Marchetti Wall refers to the fact that today’s American cities have sprawled to the maximum range of this constant travel time at automobile speed; therefore, infill is required to add more density. Exurbanization is still happening – the fastest growth in US cities today is in the gentrified center and in the exurbs – but is often low-income, i.e. people are violating the wall’s limit because they can’t afford any better. This is also noted in a 2006 study by Steven Polzin predicting stagnant driving: commute times in the US have been inching up, which suggests current development trends are about to hit a wall.

2. Public transportation growth. Public transit ridership in the US bottomed in the early 1990s and has been increasing faster than population since; for one famous example, New York’s annual subway ridership went from 1 billion in 1990 to about 1.6 billion today.

Newman and Kenworthy posit further that since the empirical relationship between driving and transit ridership is exponential, small increases in transit ridership will produce large decreases in driving; I’m skeptical, since the causality seems to go the other way (very low transit use requires vast sprawl, raising the amount of driving), but the increase in transit traffic can still produce measurable decreases in driving.

3. The reversal of urban sprawl. Standard, unweighted densities of many US urban areas stopped declining or are even rising. Newman and Kenworthy don’t mention this, but some cities outgrow their suburbs – e.g. New York and San Francisco in the US (as usual, going by more accurate ACS data rather than the failed Census), as well as some European cities. Exurbs are still growing quickly, but those are a small proportion of population; they can’t account for much.

4. The aging of cities. As the population is getting older, people are driving less. A related trend, again one not mentioned in the study, is the reduction in the proportion of households with children, making the usual crime and school concerns of the American middle class less relevant. The study does mention empty nesters as a related trend, in point #5.

5. The growth of a culture of urbanism. This is an issue Litman touches on as well – young people are less enthusiastic about driving today than they were in the 1960s, and are getting licenses at lower rates. Newman and Kenworthy cite previous literature about the rise of urban coolness, what I would call the culture of urban romanticism; they compare the popularity of Friends in the 1990s with that of Father Knows Best in the 1940s and 50s.

6. Rising fuel prices. Those make driving more expensive (especially since fuel prices are visibly and directly proportional to the amount of driving, unlike more fixed costs of driving), and reduces the desirability of exurban housing. This is attested in previous studies in the 1970s. Although there’s a return to normal after fuel prices come down, the general consensus is that the oil prices of the future is going to be much higher than that of the 1990s, if perhaps not the $200 per barrel predicted by Matthew Simmons. In other words, the new normal is not the same as the old normal, and this is going to be reflected in reduced driving.

Rising fuel prices are probably the most important of the six. The reason is that even outside urban areas, it’s possible for an auto-oriented region to require much less driving than is standard in suburban America. Raise fuel prices to European levels, and the result could well look like France, where most people outside Greater Paris and Lyon drive, but the distances driven are shorter (13,000 km per car, vs. nearly 20,000 for cars and light trucks in the US), and the cars are much more fuel-efficient. Provincial France is not livable or urban – on the contrary, it resembles suburban America in many ways, complete with hypermarkets; the largest chain, Carrefour, is the second largest retailer in the world after Wal-Mart. Urbanism is for the rich, as is increasingly the trend in the US.

Newman and Kenworthy do not mention the social issues coming from this new urbanization, in which the cities are for the rich. But they do have pointed suggestions to planners for how to deal with a future in which fewer people drive: plan cities and engineer traffic for more pedestrian- and transit-friendliness, do not assume more road capacity will be needed, finance more urban construction, do not treat cars as a perfect proxy for economic growth. In short, do not continue to act as if the regime is still that what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA and vice versa; driving is entering decline, and cars are just one consumer good among many.

Rumors of the Death of HSR Greatly Exaggerated

Aaron Renn has a post on New Geography pronouncing American high-speed rail dead. His reasoning: the stimulus spread the money around too much, Republican Governors rejected the HSR stimulus money, rail advocates have called 110 mph legacy lines high-speed rail, the FRA hobbles good passenger rail. All of those factors are true – though some cancel out, e.g. the 110 mph pretend-HSR lines in Wisconsin and Ohio were the first on the chopping block – but California HSR marches on.

Reading California HSR Blog gives an impression that the project is controversial, but in no real risk of disappearing. While some of the money from the canceled lines went to chaff, a lot went to California, which already has enough money to build a demonstration line in the Central Valley and is already looking at leveraging other money it will get to reach either Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Moreover, although the authority still carries over a lot of past incompetence, the current administration of Roelof van Ark is looking at alternatives to reduce costs, such as reducing the number and length of viaducts and even revisiting past alignment decisions. The adults are more firmly in charge today than a year and a half ago.

There’s still NIMBYism, particularly from Central Valley farmers and from suburbs on the San Francisco Peninsula, but the former is no big deal by the standards of what TGV construction has to go through, and the latter has simply led the authority to focus on connecting HSR track to Los Angeles first and use legacy track at slightly lower speed with much less local impact to get to San Francisco. Whether the project will ultimately have a useful starter line or remain a Bakersfield-Fresno-Merced shuttle depends on how much private funding it can attract, but Japan promised to fund 50% of the line, and the authority has had meetings with Spain and China. It’d be enough to do at least LA-Fresno, which is quite useful, if not as good as LA-Fresno-San Francisco.

Moreover, calling HSR dead on New Geography and saying it’s because Republican Governors rejected the money is ironic, in light of who owns the site. Aaron is interested in reform and efficiency; the same can’t be said of New Geography executive editor Joel Kotkin, an anti-urbanist so uninformed and desperate he blamed megacities for AIDS.

Kotkin may be just uninformed, but contributing editor Wendell Cox goes further: he and fellow Reason transportation hack Robert Poole wrote a report claiming, on flimsy evidence, that Florida’s high-speed rail line would have huge cost overruns and ridership shortfalls (a later report released by professional consultants said in fact the line would have been more profitable than expected). The report is a lie, and Rick Scott’s cancellation of the Florida HSR line, based on the report, involved additional lying to the court.

My explanation, hoisted from a comment I wrote on the subject on the Infrastructurist, responding to commenter Colin Prime:

1. The executive summary – i.e. what most people would read – says, “This report estimates that the cost to Florida taxpayers could be $3 billion more than currently projected.” As it turns out, in the body of the report in the section on Flyvbjerg the report says $0.54-2.7 billion, with $1.2 billion as the likeliest. None of these lower figures appears in the executive summary. That alone suggests massive deception.

2. In fact, Flyvbjerg either talks about megaprojects in general or focuses on urban rail. HSR projects don’t run over budget frequently, and when they do, it’s not by 100%. In Norway, a 50% cost overrun on the HSR line to the airport (coming from geological problems) was considered so unusual it triggered a government investigation.

3. Here’s the report on California [the projected per-km cost of the Central Valley segment is much higher than that of the Florida line]: “The California segment is not being built to full high-speed rail standards, because of a legal requirement that the line be usable by conventional Amtrak services if the Los Angeles to San Francisco project is not completed. The line would be upgraded to full high-speed rail standards when and if the much longer route is completed.”

This is technically known as “a lie.” Making the line Amtrak-usable is actually a cost raiser rather than a cost saver, because Amtrak trains are heavier and therefore elevated structures would have to be beefed up. Otherwise the line is built to HSR standards in terms of the expensive bits, i.e. track geometry and physical infrastructure; the only component that may not be included in California in this round is electrification, which is a fraction of the total cost of HSR ($3 million per mile kilometer at Acela costs).

4. In general, of the 11 factors cited for California-Florida differences, the ones on which Florida would be more expensive than California are all small things like stations and electricity; the big items involve physical infrastructure, and there Florida would be cheaper.

5. To support the assertion that HSR can suffer from a ridership shortfall, the report mentions Eurostar and THSR. Unmentioned are the many TGV lines that exceeded projections. The report also makes a spurious comparison to the Acela; it even doubles-down on the Acela comparison, and uses a false comparison to make the Florida line look slow. Florida’s travel time is compared not with end-to-end travel time on the average fast train (an average of 80 mph on the Acela NY-DC, and 140 mph on the Sanyo Shinkansen) but with the fastest intermediate segment on the fastest train of the day, connecting two small cities (100 and 170, respectively). On top of it, the Acela is priced for premium travel, with coach travel provided by the 66 mph Regional.

6. To add insult to injury, Cox and Poole dismiss Florida’s tourism as such: “The metropolitan areas in both markets [NEC and Florida] have substantial tourist volumes.” In reality, the tourist volumes in Florida relative to the metro area size are much larger than in the Northeast, and the Florida line directly serves tourist attractions (airport to Disneyland) whereas the Acela does not (minimal airport service, premium brand).

Given the above issues the study, I’d say calling it a lie is fair.

High-speed rail has challenges, many correctly identified by Aaron. The FRA is an obstacle (though the people most interested in changing it tend to be good transit activists); spreading the money around was a problem. But right-wing populists who can’t govern soon become unpopular, and are thus an ephemeral phenomenon. Rick Scott’s approval rate is 27%, John Kasich‘s is 35%, Scott Walker‘s is 37%. And it’s deeply troubling to go on a website and say that high-speed rail is dead when one of the reasons it’s dead is shoddy or dishonest work done by another contributor to the same website.

Fortunately, in California, the real obstacle is so far not a huge deal (California is planning to run on dedicated tracks, or at least on tracks shared only with commuter trains), and the ephemeral obstacle lost the gubernatorial election. Money is a problem and so is incompetence, but the incompetence seems to be waning, albeit slowly, and the money is likely to materialize. Don’t count HSR out yet.

Airport Access vs. City Access

New York’s MTA and Port Authority have just released slides from a meeting discussing alternatives for transit access to LaGuardia. While the airport is the nearest to Midtown Manhattan by road and thus the option of choice for many business travelers, its transit options consist of local buses within Queens or to Upper Manhattan, and as a result its passengers are the least likely to use transit: about 10%, vs. 15% for JFK and 17% for Newark. Transit to the airport has been on and off the agenda for quite some time, with the most recent attempt, a Giuliani-era proposal to extend the Astoria Line, torpedoed due to community opposition to elevated trains.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have little positive to say about transit geared toward airport travelers. Business travelers are much better at demanding airport transit than using it. However, LaGuardia’s location is such that it could serve as a useful outer-end anchor for multiple lines providing transit to underserved areas. One is north-south service in Queens east of the Astoria Line, for example along Junction Boulevard; there’s already a bus that goes on Junction, but it’s slow and infrequent, and the lines do not combine into a single trunk except on airport grounds. Another is east-west service along 125th Street, which is replete with traffic and supports higher combined frequency on the four lines serving it than any other bus corridor in the city. Yet another is any service to East Elmhurst, which is a very dense neighborhood far from the subway.

The alternatives analysis seems biased in favor of Select Bus Service, i.e. not quite BRT, but such a question can just as well be asked of any mode of transportation, up to and including subways. However, even if the proposal is to physically separate the bus lanes, much good can be done on those corridors, independently of airport traffic. Because BRT can be done open rather than closed, the airport travel market could in principle even be served by a few direct buses from 1st/2nd Avenues through the Triboro Bridge, or perhaps over the Queensboro if the city adds physically separate lanes on Northern or Queens Boulevard. Those business travelers who are willing to use airport transit put a premium on direct service to the CBD: circumferential lines such as those proposed here would do more good for ordinary city residents than for air travelers.

In a world in which New York’s construction costs are normal rather than very high, it would be possible to speculate about subway extensions. Although city officials have favored an extension of the Astoria Line, there are better ways to serve that segment of Queens, providing north-south service to East Elmhurst and perhaps additional east-west service north of the Flushing Line. My preference is something like this: a shuttle under Junction intersecting all existing and possible future radial subways, and a continuation of Second Avenue Subway along 125th Street. Although it has a gap in service from Harlem to the airport, Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 has a natural tie-in to 125th, making the airport less important as an anchor than it is for surface transit; and even with a subway, 125th may well have enough remaining bus traffic to justify physically separated median bus lanes.

Although the possibility of subway extension is remote given current construction costs, an SBS extension is likely. It’s affordable at current costs and willingness to pay, and provides lines on a map that political leaders can point to and say “I did it.” In addition, boosters and business leaders tend to like airport expansions, and those are sometimes useful for the city.

Although New York currently prefers closed to open BRT, it’s still possible that airport access will indeed be used as an excuse to improve city transit with circumferential SBS routes in Queens and Harlem. It’s unlikely much good will come of it – note how the slides talk about “service to the airport and Western Queens” instead of “service to Western Queens and the airport” – but it’s feasible.