Category: Transportation
The Mother of All Interest Conflicts
Best industry practice for cutting transportation capital costs, found in Madrid, is to separate design from construction and keep the project management in-house. The FTA’s practice is different:
Parsons Brinckerhoff said Wednesday it has been awarded a contract by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to develop and document a transit asset management framework and implementation guide that will support the FTA’s State of Good Repair and Asset Management Programs.
The FTA estimates there is a nationwide backlog of $50 billion to $80 billion in deferred maintenance and replacement needs, the vast majority of which are rail-related.
PB is going to decide what projects are necessary and how to build them, and will also be able to bid on design and construction. Naturally, the numbers it will come up with are going to be favorable to its private interest; the common interest is not profitable for the company.
This is especially egregious in state of good repair (SOGR) money, which is often a series of rent-seeking scams. Agencies do not impartially judge how much money they need for maintenance and then ask for it. Instead, they massage the numbers based on whether the political mood is such that they could get more or less money. In 2005, the Amtrak board fired President David Gunn for insisting on competing SOGR before attempting to move to profitability; by 2009, when the stimulus provided plenty of money, Amtrak suddenly remembered it had deferred maintenance and came up with the $10 billion NEC Master Plan, essentially SOGR plus a few small upgrades.
A few agencies, such as New York City Transit, treat SOGR seriously (this was thanks to Richard Ravitch and David Gunn) and push for it even when the politicians want something different; most just use it as an excuse to justify high capital costs without anything to show for it. Look again at Amtrak, which even as it cries poverty about SOGR is trying to portray its finances as very good, for example listing a farebox recovery ratio that, unlike the practice at peer national railroads, excludes depreciation and interest. Heads Amtrak is profitable and competent and should get what it wants, tails it has a backlog of deferred maintenance and needs more money.
This is more a political than technical problem, but normal political advocacy is not going to help. Politicians can get credit for massive overhauls or new infrastructure involving ribbon cuttings; they won’t get credit for adding to the design and management budget, no matter how much money it will save in the long run.
Therefore, politicians who care more about being seen as fiscally conservative than about saving money force agencies to cut their in-house expertise. Instead, agencies outsource everything to consultants; this can work sometimes, but the people who would oversee them have been cut, so that there’s nobody in charge who’s loyal to the interests of the agency or the public. As a result, nobody in the US knows anything about good practices for rail infrastructure construction except people with the mother of all conflicts of interest, and nobody knows anything about rolling stock except New York City Transit, which designs rolling stock in-house or buys designs and prototypes separately from revenue equipment.
The agencies have bought into this system, since they share in the overly expensive designs and must defend them. Madrid doesn’t separate design from construction just because of interest conflict issues; the reason stated by Madrid Metro CEO Manuel Melis Maynar is that changes are unavoidable, and a construction crew uninvolved with the original design would be less stubborn about sticking to the blueprint. Since such separation does not exist in the US, and on the contrary the people currently in charge are used to the system so much that they bring up design/build contracts as an improvement, agency inertia is directed toward making the agency even less competent.
California HSR is perhaps the worst example of this. The HSR Authority consists of nine politicians, overseeing a skeletal crew of professionals (I believe there are only six engineers/planners). Unsurprisingly, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) Peer Review Group wrote a peer-review report accusing the HSRA of having no expertise in project management or even in negotiating a good PPP so that the private sector could do it. Even more unsurprisingly, hiring more staff to bolster an agency that’s currently incompetent is risky and nobody wants to be responsible for either potential delays or spending good money after bad, despite the possibility of large cost savings in the medium and long runs.
24/7 Rapid Transit
It’s a commonplace in New York that the New York City Subway is almost the only one that runs 24/7, and that the rest – PATH, PATCO, and two lines of the Chicago L – are small operations. The reason for this operating plan is that the main Manhattan trunklines have four tracks, making it feasible to shut down tracks for weekend and late-night maintenance and skip a few stations in one direction. Occasionally, even midday midweek service is disrupted. This leads to complaints from passengers who actually ride transit in the off-peak, as well as various politicians, and exhortations from political defenders of the MTA that it’s a necessary byproduct of 24/7 operation.
In fact, there’s one additional system not mentioned above: the Copenhagen Metro, which began 24/7 operation in 2009. Although around-the-clock operation on weekends is common in some European cities, such as Berlin, Copenhagen took the extra step to run 24/7 reliably. It has only two tracks, like some lines in New York, but made sure it would be possible to single-track at night for maintenance. Late-night headways in Copenhagen are 20 minutes, like in New York, and this gives enough time to reduce long segments to a single track and run wrong-way service. Copenhagen’s trains are automated and this helps with wrong-way signaling, but it’s not a prerequisite and wrong-way operation is already done late at night on the subway in New York.
What this means is that there’s a technical solution to the problem of late-night and weekend service disruptions: make sure that there are crossovers placed at regular intervals to allow 20-minute service on single track. Installing switches requires extra capital construction money, but is orders of magnitude cheaper than building extra tunnels, and would make late-night maintenance much easier. Headways are such that a switch would be required every 7 or 8 minutes, which means every 2.5-5 km. At some places, crossovers already exist at that density, for example at all four tunnels from Queens to Manhattan, and all that’s required is schedule modification.
The result would still not be as satisfactory as in Copenhagen, ironically because of the multi-track trunklines. Under the slow-fast-fast-slow system used in New York, as well as most other four-track lines, it’s impossible for a local train to cross over to the opposite track without fouling the express tracks. This would create serious problems even on the three-track lines in Queens and the Bronx, since extra switching moves would be required, shortening the acceptable crossover spacing. It would still be possible, say with crossovers 6-7 minutes apart, but the maintenance requirements would be higher.
On the four-track mainlines, I don’t see any solution that unequivocally improves on the status quo. It’s possible to have the same crossovers, but at even tighter spacing, and without any express traffic. Weekend express traffic could possibly still be retained, but not late-night express trains, and late-night frequency would be reduced to 20 minutes even on combined lines, for example the local 1/2 in Manhattan.
What this means for future trunklines is that, if four-tracking is required for capacity or for express service, it should not run as was built in New York a hundred years ago. Instead, the slow tracks should be in the middle, and the fast tracks on the outside; this allows more operational flexibility as well as short-turning local trains, at the cost of making it harder to build infill stations. While the subway short-turns some local trains, for example the C at 168th and at Euclid, this requires flying junctions, which contributed to the IND’s excessive cost.
Maximum flexibility could be obtained by building every station with two island platforms, as if it were an express station, and having express trains skip low-traffic stations. This way, two tracks could be shut down for maintenance along the entire line with no ill effect on reliability, except that retaining express service would required timed overtakes. The problem is of course the much higher cost of such a line, especially if it is underground.
For underground lines, there’s very rarely a reason to four-track. Washington may complain about lack of flexibility and express service, but modern subway lines with good rolling stock and wide curves can achieve acceptable average speed even with medium stop spacing. The Copenhagen Metro averages 40 km/h, a speed previously reserved for systems with very long (~1.6 km) interstations such as the Moscow Metro, even though its stop spacing is just 1 km. Capacity is the only serious drawback of two-track lines, but if it is so pressing then the city should built two separate two-track lines, which with tunnel boring machines cost about the same as one four-track line.
Quick Note: Are HSR Transfers Acceptable?
When SNCF built the first TGV line, it did not have funding to complete the full line from Paris to Lyon. Instead, it built two thirds of the line’s length, with the remaining third done on legacy track at reduced speed. The travel time was 4 hours; when the full line was completed a few years later, it was reduced to 2. The one-seat ride remains the TGV’s current operating model, to the point that one unelectrified branch got direct service with a diesel locomotive attached to the trains at the end, and was only electrified recently.
In Japan, transfers are more common, because of the different track gauges. At the outer ends of the Shinkansen, it is common for people to transfer to a legacy express train at the northern end of the line, though on two branches JR East built two Mini-Shinkansen lines, regauging or dual-gauging legacy track to make TGV-style through-running possible. In Germany, the entire system is built on transfers, typically timed between two high-speed trains.
I mention this because the California HSR activists are talking about the possibility of transfers as an initial phase. Some politicians occasionally hint about forced transfers at San Jose, even though it is relatively easy (in fact, planned) to electrify Caltrain and run trains through to San Francisco, but more intriguing is Clem Tillier and Richard Mlynarik’s proposal about running to Livermore first:
This is predicated on prioritizing the San Francisco to Los Angeles connection. It has nothing to do with Sacramento or the East Bay… those are just the cherry on top. Focus on the cake, not the cherry.
LA – Livermore HSR 2:06
Transfer in Livermore 0:10
Livermore – SF Embarcadero BART 0:57
TOTAL SF-LA via Altamont/Livermore BART 3:13LA – Gilroy HSR 1:57
Transfer in Gilroy 0:10
Gilroy – SF 4th & King by Caltrain 2:00
TOTAL SF-LA via Pacheco/Gilroy Caltrain 4:07It’s simply not a contest. Even for San Jose, LA – SJ downtown times would be approximately equivalent via Livermore BART once BART to SJ is built. So let me reiterate: No other alternative, least of all Pacheco, provides such a “Phase Zero” access to SF.
The one possible problem: Livermore’s quality of service will be low after BART goes there. From their 1982 opening until 1985, the Tohoku and Joetsu Shinkansen only served Omiya, located 30 km north of central Tokyo; however, Omiya was already connected to Tokyo by multiple high-capacity rapid transit lines, and an additional line was built at the same time as mitigation for the line’s construction impacts.
Quick Note: Road Boondoggles
With all the focus on poorly done transit investment on this blog, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the primary source of US transportation waste is still roads. Consider for example the following projects proposed in Southern California, not all funded:
– $1 billion fully funded for adding one carpool lane in one direction for 10 miles to the 405 through Sepulveda Pass; since the 405 will have to be closed for two days, this is locally dubbed Carmageddon. This is about $60 million per unidirectional lane-km, which is to my knowledge a record for above-ground highways.
– $3 billion proposed for 4.5 miles of twin tunnels to complete a gap in the 710, of which $780 million is funded by Measure R, which generally funded transit projects. The cost, $400 million per km, is not high by global tunnel standards, but compared with the opportunity cost of building transit in the area, it’s enormous.
– $4.1 billion for widening the 5 from 8 lanes to 12-14 for 27 miles, not yet funded. It’s about $18 million per unidirectional lane-km, a figure that’s cropped up elsewhere in the US and should be compared with about $15-80 million per double track-km for light rail, which has about eight or ten times the capacity per unidirectional track or lane.
Those projects are cheaper than the Big Dig or the Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, but also provide much less – two are routine widenings, and one is a minor tunnel. The point is that even small upgrades to road capacity cost as much as a major transit project.
The US road network has been a money sink going back to the first federal-aid highway act, in 1917. The reference here is 20th Century Sprawl, by Owen Gutfreund, who describes how motorist lobbies complained about license fees, fuel taxes, and other fees since the 1910s, and created road lockboxes for the revenue generated. Even though gas taxes were treated differently from cigarette and alcohol taxes, which do not go toward funding tobacco and distilleries, they were still not enough to pay for roads. In fact the only paid for about half the cost of highways, and there was a huge subsidy from gas tax-ineligible urban roads to the national and state roads.
The situation today is hardly different. Although proportionally there’s much less cross-subsidy than in the 1930s, due to the growth of suburbs connected by Interstates or other gas tax-eligible numbered roads, roads’ financial performance is still low. Under the fiction that local streets are paid by the tooth fairy, US roads are $75 billion a year in the hole: as of 2008, all gas tax and toll receipts are $122 billion, including the portion diverted to non-highway purposes, whereas total receipts to be spent on gas tax-eligible highways are $197 billion, including $4.3 billion spent on collection expenses. That’s 62% cost recovery.
It gets worse when one does a total lifecycle cost analysis and does not deed all local gas tax money to state highways: in Texas, the best-performing highways have 50% cost recovery, and most have much less. In Maryland, one transit advocate computed a 20% cost recovery for state highways, based on an analysis that treats most of the gas tax as just a sales tax on gasoline; but even if one considers the gas tax to be a user fee for roads, the extra money only raises cost recovery to 32%. Even tollways frequently lose money when interest on capital is included, and in one case even when interest is not included.
In other words, the entirety of the US road program is one giant money hole, of proportions that far exceed even the worst transit projects. I talk less about it because the best industry practice is to toll the roads and build far less of them rather than to control costs; there’s a good way to build a subway, but not to build 14-lane freeways.
Sunnyside Junction Proposal
The in-progress East Side Access (ESA) project linking the LIRR to Grand Central is scheduled to open in 2016, and Metro-North is already studying options to use space vacated by the LIRR to run its own trains to Penn Station along the Northeast Corridor. Thus the basic service pattern will look as in this map. Observe that alongside Sunnyside Yards, there’s a stretch of track between the split between the Northeast Corridor and the LIRR Main Line, and the split between the access tracks to Penn Station and the ESA tunnels.
This should be turned into a new junction station, Sunnyside Junction. At this junction, passengers could transfer cross-platform between trains to Grand Central and trains to Penn Station, just as they do at Jamaica between trains to Penn Station and trains to Brooklyn today. If Metro-North diverts half of its 20 peak New Haven Line trains per hour to Penn Station, and the LIRR diverts two thirds of its 36 peak tph from Penn Station to ESA, then the service to each Manhattan terminal will be about equal.
Since both Manhattan destinations are of high importance, no train should skip Sunnyside Junction, not even peak-of-peak LIRR express trains that skip Jamaica. (Trains should not skip Jamaica, either, but that’s another matter.) Thus off-peak frequency could be assured to be fairly high, comparable to that to Jamaica (about a train every 10 minutes), and peak frequency would be so high that the transfer penalty would be negligible.
An advantage of this setup is that even at the peak, one-seat rides to each destination would become unnecessary. Therefore the interlockings and switching moves could be simpler, and new grade separations should not be necessary. In the off-peak, the transfers should be timed, even across agencies; this should be the first step of good regional rail service. Note that I advocated something similar as part of a comprehensive regional rail plan for New York, but Sunnyside Junction could be built independently of it. Indeed the interlining that minimizes switching moves and conflicts is not the same as the through-running in my original plan, which is based on matching ridership at the New Jersey end to ridership at the Long Island or Connecticut end.
Because a stretch of straight track for this station already exists, all that is necessary is platforms. Because all trains should stop at this station, and the capacity limit lies elsewhere in the system (namely, in the ESA tunnels), it would suffice to have two island platforms and four tracks serving them, and two additional bypass tracks to allow Amtrak to skip the station even at peak hour. If the station became very busy then two additional stopping tracks could be required, and construction should leave space for them.
To ensure the station is well-patronized by transferring passengers, like Jamaica and unlike Secaucus, it should not feature fare barriers or other obstacles between the platforms. Transferring should involve walking a few meters from one track to another, on the same platform. This is perfectly compatible with the current regime of requiring conductors to check every ticket on the train, because Penn Station and Grand Central are both in the CBD and thus the fare to them should be the same. The rationale for the faregates at Secaucus is that fares to Hoboken and Penn Station are different, and conductors would not have time to check that everyone on a train from Secaucus to Penn has a valid ticket to Manhattan; this is irrelevant to Sunnyside.
In the future, the LIRR and Metro-North should consider lowering in-city fare and raising frequency, which could work with more modern operating rules (i.e. proof-of-payment instead of conductors checking all tickets). Seamless fare integration with the subway would open the door to direct Queens-Bronx service; Metro-North is already considering Bronx stops for its Penn Station service. It would also give Queens another access point to Manhattan, slightly decongesting the near-capacity Queens Boulevard subway; the reason I say slightly is that the worst problems are far east of Sunnyside. And frequent service to the rest of Queens and to Manhattan would provide another public transit option to the area.
Unfortunately, the LIRR seems to not make any plans for such a station. It had plans for a station west of the split, serving only Penn Station: see page 13 here. I do not know if such plans will ever materialize in light of ESA’s cost overruns; I cannot find a more recent official reference to them. A cross-platform connection seems to never have been on any official agenda. Fortunately, even now it should be possible to add one, at relatively low cost since this station would be entirely above ground, and with minimal disruption to service since the site is a wide railyard with 6-8 active through tracks.
Is Technical Activism Necessary?
Since my post on technicals and politicals is getting some wider traction, with a discussion on Auckland Transport Blog, I should raise the question of whether technicals are even necessary. Recall that technicals are the transit activists who tend to mistrust transit authorities, especially when they claim a certain project or project component is required when it is unnecessary abroad or just very expensive. It’s a sort of activism that’s created by agency incompetence. I can imagine being technical about New York; I can’t imagine the same about Zurich.
Not knowing enough about the level of government competence in New Zealand, I can’t know how relevant what I’m going to say is to Auckland. Reading Auckland Transport Blog suggests that Auckland’s expansion projects are well-run, and the primary obstacle is political opposition by the National Party. In Auckland based on the impression I get from the blog, or in most major European cities (for example, Paris), the major divisions among transit advocates are either about pure politics (social services versus profitability) or value questions concerning how express lines should run or whether there should be more investment into buses or rail. Once the investment plan at each given level of funding is optimized, the question becomes how much funding to provide.
The political/technical division thus seems to be primarily North American and maybe Australian/New Zealander, certainly not European. In Europe, because the average quality of local projects is much higher, it is much easier to tell the bad projects apart.
Take Stuttgart 21, an expensive boondoggle that only looks good on a map. The need for massive takings and the high and escalating cost of the project led to massive protests, catapulting the Green Party to a state election victory for the first time in German history. But unlike unpopular rail projects in the US, the response was not to cancel all investment (the Green-SPD coalition wants to give more priority to rail investment and put it on equal footing with roads) but instead look for better solutions, hiring Swiss rail experts and coming up with an alternative plan. In other words, there was no difference between politicals and technicals.
In the US, such a response would be unthinkable. There’s no way for a mass movement to support transit investment in general but also oppose specific projects that are bad and promote more cost-effective alternatives. The Tea Party is heavily against all transit and urbanism, regardless of merit, and should not count. The opposition to Stuttgart 21 gathered in weekly protests by the tens of thousands; the opposition to ARC gathered in small rooms with about ten people in attendance.
Premium Cost, Substandard Quality Locomotives
I’m a little late to the game here, but let me just say that Amtrak’s just-funded contract for new electric locomotives is supremely expensive: $560 million for 70 locos, or $8 million each, $466 million for 70 locos, or $6.7 million each (see comment by aw with this link). The locomotives are an FRA-compliant version of Siemens’ EuroSprinter product, which has recently been sold in Europe for €3.7–4 million per unit, as has Bombardier’s competing TRAXX locomotive (in fact, the TRAXX even sold for €3.2 million). Amtrak is paying a premium of about 60-80% 35-50% for these locomotives, depending on exchange rates.
It gets worse. The new locos will enter service in 2013, just two years before the national mandate for positive train control goes in effect, allowing trains to be lighter and avoid the most onerous FRA regulations (in fact, the Northeast Corridor, where most of the locos are to run, already has a PTC system). The special modifications and design are what caused an increase in both weight, from 86-87 metric tons for the standard EuroSprinter to 97 for the Amtrak Cities Sprinter, and cost.
To put things in perspective, Sweden recently bought 180 km/h EMUs for €1.6 million per car. And the 700 Series Shinkansen cost $2.5 million per car. In other words, Amtrak could have gotten 3 EMUs for the price for one locomotive. (Amtrak’s new single-deck coaches cost $2.3 million per car, the same as EMUs abroad.)
The US Department of Transportation is announcing that “Siemens Industry USA is adding 250 new manufacturing jobs in order to design and build 70 new energy-efficient locomotives for Amtrak.” The cost premium works out to about $200-250 million $100-150 million, or $800,000-1,000,000 $400,000-600,000 per job added; the total cost is $2.2 million $1.9 million per US manufacturing job. Needless to say, most of this money is not going to American manufacturing workers, but to consultants and Siemens’s train designers.
Boosters’ Romanticism
One would expect that boosters of unbridled growth, such as Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Ed Glaeser, and countless proponents of urban growth would constantly look to the future and deprecate the past. They certainly deprecate attempts to recreate the past. But do they? Despite unabashed pro-Americanism, they crow about the fast growth of China. Glaeser looks back to an era of great infrastructure spending on water works in turn-of-the-century America. Infrastructurist and urbanophile bloggers look back to Daniel Burnham and early-20th century public works (though the Infrastructurist and Urbanophile themselves are very self-conscious and are more thoughtful in their boosterism).
Instead of writing about history as a series of epics, let us examine it with the same critical eye we examine the present. This means looking at historical paths not taken, much as we should examine alternatives for projects today; this also means looking at costs and benefits. In most cases, the inspirational projects of the past tend to not look very good under the microscope.
For a concrete example, consider the Interstate system. Examples of writings on infrastructure that take its greatness for granted are numerous, even on Streetsblog as far as job creation is concerned. But in reality, it was an epic disaster for most involved. The original 1954 estimate for the cost, enshrined in the 1956 act creating the network, was $25 billion; by 1958 it had already climbed to $40 billion, and the final cost was $114 billion. The construction required demolishing thousands of dwellings in each city the highways went through. Even burying the highways does not help: the scar of Boston’s Central Artery is still there despite the Big Dig, because amidst cost overruns they dropped the option of building above the tunnel.
The utter failure of the USA’s road-building program goes further back. As explained by Owen Gutfreund in his book 20th Century Sprawl, urban streets, on which it was illegal to spend gas tax money until the late 1930s, subsidized the early highways and rural roads; overall, roads only covered about half their capital costs through gas taxes. Tollways faced intense opposition from the AAA and the auto and tire industries. Instead an entire bureaucracy was created to ram roads through, paving the way to the large-scale neighborhood destruction of the 1950s. Tellingly, New York and San Francisco, the first two major cities to have freeway revolts, had a smaller population decline through 1980 than the other major non-Sunbelt cities, and are now the only two to have since surpassed their 1950 population peaks.
Transit investment in that era was no better. New York’s major project in the 1920s and 1930s was the construction of the IND, competing with the existing privately-run IRT and BMT networks. The new lines generally did not add transportation options. The Crosstown and Queens Boulevard Lines added service, but did not connect to existing IRT or BMT stops; to this day, the G train has no transfer to non-IND lines in Downtown Brooklyn, and only one, difficult transfer in Queens, which opened just a month ago. The remainder simply paralleled existing elevated or subway lines, which were subsequently torn down.
Part of it was the general opposition to elevated rail in that era, coupled with fascination with both subways and elevated highways. But only part: one IND line, the Sixth Avenue Line, required building new track alongside and later below the existing Hudson Tubes (now PATH), dooming previous plans to extend them to Grand Central for greater regional connectivity. On top of it, the difficulty of building next to an active subway created massive cost escalation, dooming future expansion plans that would add new service.
Although both of the above examples are from the middle of the 20th century, previous infrastructure investment was not much better. It’s a commonplace that New York’s first subway line was built in four years, versus ten for just one phase of Second Avenue Subway. It’s less widely known that ground broke on the subway in 1900 only after multiple decades of political bickering, route changes, and scandals; a short underground demonstration line using pneumatic tube technology had opened in 1869.
Even before then, Britain had undergone a pair of Railway Manias, one in the 1830s and one in the 1840s (thanks to Danny in the comments for the link). Relative to GDP, the latter mania dwarfed both the 1990s’ tech bubble and the 2000s’ housing bubble. Costs ran over estimates by a factor of 2 or more, and ridership underperformed estimates. Although by the end of the Victorian era the lines had surpassed the mid-19th century predictions and were profitable, the investment was too fast, and ruined many investors.
Nobody romanticizes the present, because its problems are apparent to all. Some people romanticize the future; those are the boosters, for whom every problem with growth has a simple solution. But even those can easily slip and romanticize the past, whose main actors have since become national heroes and whose main battles have turned into epic legends. Obama and Bloomberg are controversial; Eisenhower and LaGuardia are heroes.
Politicals vs. Technicals: the Primary Division of Transit Activists
There are two distinct streams among modern American transit activists, both of which support more transit investment but in ways so different that the arguments between them have taken over debates on such transit issues as California High-Speed Rail and New Jersey’s ARC, and led to scores of back-and-forths on transit blogs. It’s a wonky division rather than a culture war like the mode war between cars and transit, but it discusses issues that are critical for transit revival.
Lacking better terms for the two camps I’m going to call them politicals and technicals, but there’s a fair number of people on the political side who are quite technically minded, and vice versa. Politicals are the people who tend to trust the transit authorities, support a general expansion of all rail transit projects, and believe the primary problem is defeating oil-funded anti-transit lobbies. Technicals are the people who tend to distrust what the authorities say, and prefer their own analysis or that of technically-minded activists; they support transit but are skeptical about many projects, and treat agency inertia and turf wars as the primary obstacles for transit revival.
Because the politicals are much more likely to be rooted in activism, predominantly of the progressive kind, they are better-represented in the major transit advocacy organizations; Streetsblog, Transportation Alternatives, and Transportation for America all deal with the politics and almost never with the little regulations, except for various road engineering standards. NJ-ARP, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, and other ARC critics are perhaps the few organizations that focus on attacking bad transit projects and promoting better alternatives.
Concretely, the best was to understand this division is to compare Clem Tillier’s writings on timetables and train control with anything on California High-Speed Rail Blog or with Bruce McFarling’s Sunday Train series. While the major bloggers are politicals, the split is more even than among the major activist organizations. In addition to the aforementioned, the Infrastructurist‘s views tend to echo those of the agencies that support more infrastructure investment, and Second Avenue Sagas‘ Ben Kabak is a major-league fan of the MTA’s work today. On the technical side there are Systemic Failure, Clem Tillier’s Caltrain-HSR Compatibility, this blog, and increasingly even The Transport Politic on such issues as the Fairmount Line. Writing on other issues such as urbanism can avoid these battles, but it’s almost impossible to transcend them; the only people who can are those who represent well-run agencies, and on the Internet the only blog that has done that is Human Transit.
Despite the name, being technical does not mean ignoring politics, or supporting technocracy. On the contrary, the primary impetus for the technicals, mistrust of transit and government authorities, is often bundled with mistrust of engineering standards, and with preference for practices that have worked abroad (European commenters on American blogs almost invariably side with the technicals). The difference is that the political battle lines we draw are less about mode wars and more about the interests of agencies versus those of riders, how broader political ideas affect transit and cities, or just plain corruption and incompetence.
Conversely, being political does not mean ignoring everything other than the effort to get projects built. Although the politicals are less picky about what projects to support (Bruce McF once referred to the position that only true high-speed rail be funded, rather than medium-speed lines such as the since-canceled 110 mph Ohio Hub plan, as another form of HSR denialism), they often do care about alignment and regulatory choices. For example, opposition to security theater on trains is universal. The difference is that they subsume them into the main political fight, treating them as less important issues, or just believe that truly incompetent decisions such as airline-style security will not happen. Insofar as the government’s statements on train security send mixed signals, they may be right; on the other hand, the FRA’s self-reforms are half-baked.
Although transit activists of both groups tend to tilt left of center, the political distribution in the two camps is different. The politicals’ emphasis on being part of the progressive fight has attracted many down-the-line progressives, who write for Daily Kos and attend Netroots Nation. In contrast, the technicals’ emphasis on mistrust of authority has attracted both radical leftists and right-wingers: the complaints about train overstaffing and government incompetence appeal to conservatives and libertarians, while the unfavorable comparisons of the US with Europe appeal to anti-American leftists such as Richard Mlynarik (see e.g. here).
It’s important to note that the division is not as rigid as depicted so far. Although technicals tend to oppose more transit projects than politicals, some projects (for example, Second Avenue Subway) enjoy near-universal support, while others (for example, the Oakland Airport Connector) enjoy near-universal opposition. ARC is more or less split down the line in New York – politicals supported it, technicals preferred Alt G; in California, technicals universally opposed the choice of the Pacheco Pass alignment for HSR, while politicals had no opinion and prefer to stay the course. But apart from these two, projects often have a different split. Jeff Wood of Reconnecting America and The Overhead Wire, who has never mentioned the FRA or agency turf, opposes new commuter rail on account of its poor performance as well as some exurban rapid transit extensions. And Systemic Failure’s Drunk Engineer supported Florida HSR, and despite complaints about grandiosity and incompetence (“Diridon Intergalactic,” as San Jose’s overbuilt station is named after local power broker and former HSR board member Rod Diridon) Clem Tillier still seems to support California HSR.
Ultimately, the two camps are on the same side when it comes to supporting a transit revival. However, the strategies are diametrically opposed. Ask Clem Tillier or Systemic Failure’s Drunk Engineer how to do it and they’ll propose modernizing the regulations, minimizing community impact through smart engineering to reduce NIMBYism, and making sure to build the most cost-effective projects in order to appeal to fiscal conservatives. Ask a political, such as Bruce McF, and he’ll propose to build locally popular projects and spread money around until there’s a critical mass of train riders willing to lobby for more cost-effective regulations. The two camps’ goal is the same, and there can be agreement on individual issues such as the need for FRA reform or support or opposition for specific projects, but the general strategies have the opposite sequences of steps.
Why Transit Should be in the Fast Lane
Local buses tend to use the slow lane, which in North America means the rightmost lane; this is how they access the curb to pick up passengers. New York’s painted bus lanes on First and Second Avenues are to the right, with the buses slower than the cars both in perception and in actual practice.
Occasionally, transit uses the fast lane, especially if it’s BRT or a streetcar; for some of the access challenges of boarding not from the curb, see an old Human Transit thread on the subject. The issue of whether there should be sidewalk- or median-adjacent transit lanes came up in comments on Cap’n Transit’s blog. So let me explain why higher-grade transit than local buses, which means rail or BRT, should run in the median, with boarding from raised curbs either on the sides or in the center.
1. Service identity. This is probably the overarching concern, especially on the question of whether to have raised curbs or instead stop traffic in the slow lanes and have people cross to the bus from the sidewalk. ITDP’s magnum opus standards for full-fat BRT virtually take median running for granted, and only consider alternatives when the right-of-way is constrained. This is also mentioned as the highest grade of BRT in a conference paper examining BRT on city streets.
2. Fewer conflicts. Using pedestrian-friendly two-phase stoplights, it is impossible to eliminate turn conflicts, though in Delhi they found that median running (right lane in India) had fewer turn conflicts. In addition, it’s possible to eliminate conflicts with cars entering or exiting the parking lanes, as well as stopped cars left near the curbside lanes.
3. Median lanes are politically easier to physically separate, since separating them does not deprive cars of curbside access. If cars can physically violate transit lanes, they will, either accidentally or intentionally (my mother’s car’s GPS guidance routinely sends her along the tram-only lanes). As APTA mentions in its own standards for BRT,
One major advantage of a median busway is that there is typically no demand for other vehicles to stop in the center of the street for purposes such as parking or as a breakdown lane. As a result, there is a lot less reason for vehicles to want to occupy the center of the road and less resistance to creating a physical barrier separation between the busway and the adjacent general traffic lanes.
Point #3 is what killed the proposal for the 34th Street Transitway, which would have run two-way on one side of the street with one direction running contraflow. The NIMBYs on East 34th Street complained specifically about curbside access, using such language as “Delivery and service trucks… no longer have direct access to buildings and stores along stretches of 34th Street.” Most issues they raised involved curbside access or else bus noise adjacent to the street, both of which would have been solved by median lanes.
To add to what Steve Stofka is writing about grids, if I had to design a street from scratch, it would look a lot like a two-way version of a Manhattan avenue, with bus lanes in the middle. It would be 30 meters building to building, and about 20 curb to curb; this is enough space for two parking/loading lanes (2.5 meters) buffering pedestrians from moving traffic, two car travel lanes (3 meters), and two median bus lanes (3-3.5 meters), with room left for physical separation (measured in centimeters). Raised curbs for stations should add 3-4 meters, at the expense of either parking or sidewalk space once every few hundred meters; one advantage of trams, or buses with doors on both sides, is that they can use less space-consuming island stations.
Pedestrian Observations 
