Category: Transportation
Staten Island’s Closed BRT Disaster
After having constructed something like bus rapid transit in the Bronx and Manhattan, the MTA is moving forward with its plan to have a line in each borough and has made a proposal for Staten Island Select Bus Service. Buses would run from the Staten Island Mall to Hylan Boulevard, the main corridor serving the South Shore, and thence to Brooklyn over the Verrazano Bridge to connect to the subway. As Ben Kabak reports, this is intended to resuscitate the idea of SBS after the cancellation of the 34th Street Transitway.
To see why this is such a bad plan, let us look at Staten Island’s existing bus map. The S79 follows the route proposed by the MTA and would become an SBS line under this proposal. But there are nine other lines on Hylan: the S78, which goes to St. George and connects to the Ferry, and eight express routes, which cross to Brooklyn and use expressways to get to Manhattan. The S78 has about two thirds the annual ridership of the S79; the eight express routes have between them about 30% more ridership than the S79.
The problem with MTA-style BRT is that it’s inherently closed, because it bundles lane separation with innovations that should be applied everywhere, such as proof of payment. Although buses could run partly in mixed traffic and partly in dedicated lanes, as they should, the fare collection systems and incompatible, and the MTA has ruled out off-board fare collection on non-SBS routes. Recall from the MTA’s smartcard report that:
Local and express buses will continue to have a farebox unit
o Accept contactless cards as primary payment method
o Accept coins (nickels, dimes and quarters) as secondary method
…
o Bus operator must be able to confirm fare paid by all means of payment
In other words, the best industry practice is ruled out, and the attempts at fixing it within the MTA’s rules only make things worse. On First and Second Avenues, where local and select buses use the same bus lanes, the stations are separate, reducing the effective frequency of buses on the corridor. On Hylan, which is a much lower-traffic and therefore lower-frequency route than First/Second, this is devastating to frequency on the shared trunk line. If the inspectors keep forcing buses to sit still during inspections, as they have on the Bx12 and M15 SBS routes, then reliability will drop as well.
The configuration of Hylan is such that open BRT, used in cities from Berlin to Brisbane, would be perfect for the corridor, if the fare collection were done right. The entirety of the Hylan corridor (except perhaps in the far south of Staten Island) as well as the approaches to the Verrazano Bridge would get dedicated lanes, and buses would be free to use parts of the infrastructure as needed. People with express bus passes who don’t mind taking a local or SBS pass for the trip could even board and transfer.
Because under open BRT dedicated lanes would not involve special branding, it would be easy to extend this to congested portions of Staten Island’s two other batches of relatively busy buses: the S53, which runs from the North Shore to the Verrazano and Bay Ridge, and the S44/S46/S48, which run on parallel streets from the North Shore to St. George. The S53 would be especially important, as it runs orthogonally to the borough’s rail infrastructure, and does not compete either with the Staten Island Railway or with a future North Shore service on the existing railroad corridor.
Once you count the need to pay first-world wages to more drivers, BRT infrastructure is not cheaper than rail for equal capacity, unless traffic is very low. The advantage of BRT is that it can branch out and run in mixed traffic. Closed BRT, as the MTA is proposing, is the worst of both worlds – high operating costs, no branching – and with the splitting of frequency for riders who stay on Hylan, it may not even be much of an improvement over local buses. It deserves no support from good transit advocates.
Quick Note on Cities Where Transit Share is Increasing
In most large US cities, the transit mode share for commute trips is stagnant. If it’s increasing, it’s not by much – for example, Seattle is up from about 7% in the early 2000s to 8.7% in 2009. However, in Canada and Australia, there are multiple cities where the transit share has increased by 2-4 percentage points over the decade; all numbers are 1996-2006. Melbourne had the highest increase, from 13.1% to 17.7%. Car use declined by a little more than transit increased, at least in Canada. (Any information about similar increases or decreases in Europe and high-income East Asia will be appreciated.)
Even Melbourne’s performance is not going to be enough by itself to get car use to sustainable levels. Much more is needed: less distance traveled per car, less driving and more walking for non-work trips, and higher vehicle fuel economy, to name the three most important. But in four decades a city with Melbourne’s performance can raise transit use by 18 percentage points by 2050 and cut car use proportionately, and in conjunction with the other three points, it could make a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions.
Agency Turf Accidentally Leads to Good Results
The government had always made conflicting statements on security theater on trains. In a town hall last year, President Obama bragged that high-speed trains do not require the passengers to take their shoes off. On the other hand, later that year Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano talked about tightening security on trains.
A few months ago, as reported by Trains magazine, the TSA converged on Savannah’s Amtrak station and did a full security check to all passengers disembarking the train through the main station hall. (Unlike on the Northeast Corridor, Savannah offers easy access to the train straight from the parking lot, without needing to pass through the station.)
Amtrak’s response to the incident was severe. Amtrak’s police chief said he had not been informed and did not even believe the incident was real, and when it was confirmed, he barred the TSA from Amtrak property. Amtrak will continue to do security on its own.
Bear in mind, this is pure agency turf. Amtrak cares little about best practices for train security, which is to not have any. Any passenger in France and Germany, and any passenger in Japan who can cross the faregates, can walk on a high-speed train without security; Japanese and German bullet trains have never been bombed, and French ones have been only bombed once, and the attack killed so few people (2) that terrorists never tried again. In contrast, at the major stations on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak makes people queue single-file while checking tickets, in addition to staffing each train with multiple conductors to check tickets on board. Sometimes, boarding stands still while Amtrak police walk with trained dogs along the line of passengers; this happened to me at South Station two months ago.
However, this agency turf is in this case helpful to passengers. American railroad chiefs may be incompetent, but they are not evil. They do not wake up every morning thinking about new ways to harass passengers. Amtrak’s main loyalty is to its traditional way of doing things, and cares for neither outside reformers nor outside harassers.
The upshot is that for advocates of good transit, it creates openings for change. If such change can reliably be sold to people on the inside as doing things the normal way but with slight modification, then it can quickly become the new dogma in lieu of the traditions. Not everything can be so argued, but for some infrastructure projects as well as community-level questions, it can be a way to create a new consensus around good transit.
High-Speed Rail Operator Profit
I intended to write a post debunking the myth that high-speed lines do not pay for themselves, but Paulus Magnus has written one instead. He posts the revenue and net income figures for the mainland JRs, SNCF, DB, and RENFE. All but RENFE have positive net income, and even RENFE has positive EBIT.
The only thing I want to add is that there’s a myth going around that the Shinkansen isn’t really profitable because the government wiped its construction debt. While it’s true that the government wiped JNR’s debt, that debt was predominantly operating losses before restructuring; since JNR got few subsidies, it had to keep borrowing to cover its losses: see pages 46 and 88 on this PDF. Construction was only one eighth of the debt burden, and that part the JRs did have to pay. In other words, the government really just subsidize JNR’s operating losses from its inefficient pre-restructuring days.
Development-Oriented Transit
Occasionally, people faced with very high transit construction costs propose value capture, where some of the increase in land value coming from transit access is directed to the transit agency. Yonah Freemark has just brought up this issue again, in the context of Toronto’s failure to find private investors willing to put money for its extravagant suburban subways in exchange for greater land value.
Despite the list of examples of value capture used to fund transit, the idea remains a poor one. Jarrett Walker gives a list of consequences of value capture, one good (it ties transit success to density) and two bad (it is bad at serving existing density, and at social justice).
In New York, Second Avenue Subway and the 7 Extension are both very expensive, but the 7 Extension is getting funded by value capture whereas to construct Second Avenue Subway, backroom deals by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver were required. If anything, Jarrett’s first bad consequence is understated: politicians prioritize projects they can find private support for, especially reformists, and ignore transit lines that merely have very high ridership potential. At worst, it encourages collusion with developers and therefore corruption.
Jarrett misses one additional problem: nobody expects developers who build near highways to contribute to highway construction costs, and until they do, to tax developments near transit is to give developers an incentive to build near highways. Transit agencies should either reform themselves to become profitable or seek a reliable source of tax subsidy, but they should not tax people who do the right thing and build compact, transit-oriented development.
There’s a common misconception that in Japan and Hong Kong, both famous for the integration of rail construction and development, development is used to subsidize transit. Reality is the other way around: in most cases, Japanese private railroads use development to raise transit ridership, and although the real estate dealings are often higher-margin, the rail transportation is profitable by itself without exception. The Hong Kong MTR, too, is profitable on transportation alone, but keeps engaging in development to raise profit margins and provide patronage for the trains.
Many cities do in fact follow the model of Hong Kong and the private railroads of Japan, but entirely in the public sector. They upzone around transit stations, reduce or eliminate parking minimums, and restrain or avoid expanding auto capacity. This was done intensively in Calgary and Vancouver, which in recent years have been North America’s leaders in both efficient transit construction and transit modal share increase.
Note that this is still to a large extent development-oriented transit, and still creates problems with politicians who overfocus on greenfield TOD, but not to the same extent as value capture. Vancouver is seriously planning a rapid transit line to UBC, the main neglected urban line, just later than it should have. In contrast, New York is sidelining future phases of Second Avenue Sagas entirely; even PlaNYC only incorporates the first two of four phases, which are too far advanced to ignore.
Toronto could not follow the positive example of Vancouver and Calgary; there was too much NIMBYism along the routes proposed. This same problem also plagued the proposal for land value capture. The problem is that Toronto’s bad government is so suburban-focused it really believes in building transit to low-density suburban regions, and at the same time in enhancing auto accessibility (Mayor Rob Ford demagogued about a war on cars in his campaign).
In this sense, land value capture, and in general development-oriented transit, should be viewed as a failure of consensus for good transit, regardless of whether this consensus allows transit to be profitable or to be stably subsidized. At its best, for example in the Vancouver suburbs, development-oriented transit is a political price to be paid for suburban support for high-ridership urban lines. More commonly, as frequently happens with value capture, it sidelines the high-ridership lines completely. And at its worst, as is happening with the 7 extension, it’s a transfer of wealth from the public to private developers in the hopes of future tax revenues.
Quick Note: Midwest HSR Study
I’m usually skeptical of industry-funded studies about the value of megaprojects, but despite the involvement of Siemens I recommend reading the 2011 Economic Study for Midwest high-speed rail.
Building up on previous ideas for the 110 mph Midwest high-speed rail and on SNCF’s proposal, the study goes through all the nitty-gritty details that are often missing from publications geared toward investors and urban boosters. The technical report addresses questions about alignment, transfer convenience, integration with commuter rail, and FRA regulations. It discusses such issues as how to build a tunnel for Metra providing useful regional rail service, why the FRA is likely to let lightweight high-speed trains operate in the US, or whether to route trains through Eau Claire along I-94 or through La Crosse and Rochester on a greenfield alignment.
The proposed cost of the project is $83.6 billion, in 2010 dollars (compare $69 billion in SNCF’s proposal, or $117 billion in year of construction in Amtrak’s one third as long Northeast Corridor proposal). It works out to $35 million per kilometer, which isn’t outrageous but still a little higher than normal for flat terrain; the total contingency in the proposal’s budget is 35% of the base, which is higher than the norm, which is 25%. Construction costs on the French LGV Est‘s second phase are $24 million per km, and those on Belgium’s HSL 3 were $29 million per km.
Comparative Rail Safety
Using Wikipedia’s list of rail crashes and its UIC-sourced list of rail passenger-km by country, one can compare different countries’ mainline passenger rail accident fatality rates. The US turns out to be the least safe among the regions I’ve checked, even worse than India; much-maligned China comes out first.
I constructed the list below by averaging accident rates going back to 1991, to smooth out fluctuations coming from low-frequency, high-impact disasters. Crashes involving only freight trains are ignored, and pedestrians and car and bus passengers struck by passenger trains are included. Bombings are excluded, but sabotage incidents leading to accidents are included.
China: 876.22 billion passenger-km/year, 317 deaths over 20 years. This is one death per 55.3 billion passenger-km.
Japan: the UIC claims 253.55 billion passenger-km/year, which only includes JR companies. Figures including private railroads and excluding subways range from 360 to 395.9 billion passenger-km; I believe the higher number since it is slightly less dated. Over 20 years there have been 154 deaths, so this is one death per 51.4 billion passenger-km. Including subways would put Japan on a par with China.
EU-27: 386.24 billion passenger-km/year (presumably mainline only), 603 mainline deaths over 20 years. This does not include 155 deaths from a fire on a funicular. This is one death per 12.8 billion passenger-km, or 1 per 10.2 billion if the funicular fire is included. This varies a lot by country: the safest European countries, such as France and the Netherlands, are on a par with China and Japan, but the EU average is pulled down by Germany (due to Eschede) and the periphery.
South Korea: 31.3 billion passenger-km/year, 93 deaths over 20 years. This is one death per 6.7 billion passenger-km. Here the mainline-only rule is a problem because a) the Seoul subway is even more integrated with commuter rail than the Tokyo subway, and b) a subway fire in Daegu killed 198 people.
India: 838.03 billion passenger-km/year, 2,556 deaths over 20 years. This is one death per 6.6 billion passenger-km.
US: 27.26 billion passenger-km/year (both Amtrak and commuter rail), 159 deaths over 20 years. Note the rate is more than twice that of China per capita, let alone per rail passenger. This is one death per 3.4 billion passenger-km.
For comparison, the US road network has 33,000 accident deaths and 7.35 trillion passenger-km per year, which is one death per 220 million passenger-km.
On a closing note, China not only has the safest passenger trains, but also by far the busiest tracks. Freight density beats that of the US and Russia and passenger density beats that of any European country.
Quick Note on High-Speed Rail and Flying
I have just come back home from my conference in Athens, GA. Total door-to-door travel time, from the hotel to my apartment: just under 8 hours. The road distance from Athens to New York is about 1,300 km, so the average speed is barely higher than that of the East Coast Main Line between London and York, and lower than that of modern high-speed rail even including connections at both ends.
The main factor raising travel time so much was getting to the airport in Atlanta. Athens-Atlanta is served by arterial roads with some grade separation, but not Interstates; the total travel time is about an hour and a half, and another 15 minutes to the airport. Add shuttle van schedule padding, much uncertainty about security, and very long legacy airline boarding times, and door-to-departure was 4 hours.
This lack of Interstate connection is part of what makes this a realistic option for rail. I do not know specifics about the freight railroad connecting Atlanta and Athens except that it’s owned by CSX and only moderately curvy, but if it were reactivated as modern intercity rail, it would be successful. It’s 111 km from Athens to Downtown Atlanta; 1:22 city-to-city (3 trains provide hourly service) making multiple stops along the way would be unambitious, and 1:22 Athens-to-Atlanta-to-the-airport would be feasible. UGA students traveling home or to Atlanta would flock to it.
Every time I fly domestically even somewhat beyond the optimal range for high-speed rail, I temporarily stop caring about cost-effectiveness and want fast trains, now. With this caveat, let me note that New York-Atlanta in 5 hours is ambitious, but possible. For me, it would mean the Atlanta-Athens line could get me home in about 7 hours door-to-door, by either train or plane. And if the preferred route from Charlotte to Atlanta detoured to the south to serve Athens, it would cut away the connection time and make the entire run take about 5.5 hours.
Of course, it requires either overcoming a lot of agency inertia or spending huge sums of money to build high-speed rail just down to Washington; building to Atlanta requires both. Even if the US could bring costs down to French or Belgian levels, Washington-Atlanta would cost nearly $30 billion. But once built, the line would be competitive even for trips that do not make use of Atlanta’s meager existing connecting transit. The value may end up higher than the cost of construction. And connecting transit on modernized legacy track should not be technically difficult to add.
The Problem is the FRA, not Amtrak
House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) has finally come out explicitly in favor of privatizing the Northeast Corridor and letting private consortia bid for high-speed rail construction. Mica’s rationale is that Amtrak is an inefficient government provider, and its proposal for spending $117 billion over 30 years to build high-speed rail in the Northeast is deficient.
Not mentioned anywhere in the article is the FRA, which is the real obstacle to modern rail operations. Mica has to my knowledge said nothing about the FRA, which is too bad, since it could feed into the Republican narrative of bad government and the need for privatization and deregulation.
Under present FRA regulations, not much more than NEC service levels can be done: rolling stock would have to meet guidelines developed for the steam era, curve speeds would be limited, and the signaling would not provide enough capacity for adequate service levels on shared track. This is independent of the incompetence of every FRA-compliant railroad; in fact part of the incompetence is manifested in unwillingness to try to get waivers, even though Caltrain, a small operator, applied for a partial waiver and got it.
On the other hand, under modern regulations, even Amtrak could provide somewhat better results, and an Amtrak that Mica and the Obama administration pressured to reform could provide much better results. Although such reforms would include less staffing per amount of service provided, ridership could increase so much that total employment would increase, making this at least in principle fathomable by the bureaucrats. If top management wants to make it happen, it will happen.
In contrast, no reform of the FRA is possible short of a complete overhaul. The appropriate passenger rail regulation in the US is that everything that’s legal in Japan or Europe is legal in the US, and the only local task should be a skeletal staff reconciling European and Japanese rules where necessary. A piecemeal approach leads to partial and suboptimal reforms, requiring additional testing of already extensively used trains. For example, in Europe, tilting trains can have up to 315 270-300 (corrected, see dejv’s comment below) mm of cant deficiency, but the FRA won’t permit more than 229 (9″).
JNR’s problems in the 1980s involved overstaffing and operation of marginal lines; these are the things privatization could fix. This is not true of bad regulations, which remain no matter what. Private vendors could lobby for a fix, but they have other interests in mind than maximum efficiency – for example, making life harder for competitors – and besides, what’s the point of hoping for private lobbyists to do a task that as chair of the relevant committee you can do yourself? At the end, a government that’s too incompetent to do things by itself is probably too incompetent to be trusted to ensure the private sector will provide better service rather than looting the taxpayer.
Whither BRT?
The Institute for Transport and Development Policy has joined Brookings in publishing a completely pointless transit system ranking, this time focusing on the quality of BRT, the mode of transit ITDP advocates.
I want to like ITDP for its BRT planning guide tome, but this BRT ranking uses random criteria, with bad weightings. Every system is ranked out of 100 points, with points divided into small criteria and subcriteria. On page 17, we see the following:
Off-vehicle fare collection 7
Multiple routes use same BRT infrastructure 4
Peak period frequency 4
Routes in top 10 demand corridors 4
Integrated fare collection with other public transport 3
Limited and local stop services 3
Off-peak frequency 3
Part of ( planned ) multi-corridor BRT network 3
Performance-based contracting for operators 3
Enforcement of right-of-way 2
Operates late nights and weekends 2
Operational control system to reduce bus bunching 2
Peak-period pricing 2Bus lanes in central verge of the road 7
Physically-separated right-of-way 7
Intersection treatments (elimination of turns across the busway and signal priority) 4
Physically-separated passing lanes at station stops 4
Stations occupy former road/median space (not sidewalk space) 3
Stations set back from intersections (100 feet min) 3
Stations are in center and shared by both directions of service 2Platform-level boarding 5
Buses have 3+ doors on articulated buses or 2+ very wide doors on standard buses 4
Multiple docking bays and sub-stops ( separated by at least half a bus length ) 3Branding of vehicles and system 3
Safe, wide, weather-protected stations with artwork (>/=8 feet wide) 3
Passenger information at stops and on vehicles 2Bicycle lanes in corridor 2
Bicycle sharing systems at BRT stations 2
Improved safe and attractive pedestrian access system and corridor environment 2
Secure bicycle parking at station stops 2
Those criteria are for the most part not bad, but they’re weighted wrong. Observe that off-peak frequency counts for only 3 points, the same as contracting out the operations. It’s actually worse: a system gets 1 point for having any off-peak frequency, even if it’s worse than 15 minutes; 15 minutes is enough for 2 points. Peak-period pricing, which is absent or all but absent from many well-run rail and bus operations around the world, gets 2 points. The core elements of BRT – level boarding, physically separated median lanes, off-board fare collection, signal preemption – have 36 points between them.
In first-world cities, BRT has two uses. One, lower-capacity, slightly lower-quality transit on corridors with less demand. Two, dedicated guideways that can branch out and make local stops in shared lanes in lower-traffic areas, on the model of Brisbane. The full-fat BRT in Guangzhou and Bogota cited by BRT proponents requires a lot of concrete and many operators, and is best-suited to a city with low labor costs.
Many of the features touted for BRT can and should be used for all buses. Off-board fare collection with proof of payment is practiced systemwide in such cities as Singapore, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, and Florence; in conjunction with multi-door boarding, this reduces bus dwell times and increases speed with zero investment in concrete. Signal priority can be practiced independently of all else. Physical separation of lanes requires barriers only a few centimeters wide, and can be done selectively on the most congested and highest-demand segments.
Buses can be great buses; they make bad trains. By all means first-world cities should increase frequency, procure better buses with low floors and more doors, make sure riders know which routes are frequent and which are not, and give buses dedicated lanes when necessary. But the focus on specially branded rail-like BRT only detracts from this goal.
In American cities, BRT is more often than not an excuse to not implement those features on local buses. In New York, not only does the MTA rule out proof-of-payment on non-SBS buses, but also backroom state legislative dealings banned bus camera enforcement of painted lanes except on a closed list of six SBS routes. All this while SBS service levels are comparable to those of local buses in Singapore and many European cities – in fact lower if those local buses have signal priority. This and not low scoring on an arbitrary rubric is what ITDP should have complained about.
Pedestrian Observations 
