Category: Transportation

Brookings Folly

People who have read Brookings’ awful report saying San Jose is the second most transit-accessible city in the US and New York the thirteenth already know not to trust what Brookings says. Even at the level of collecting facts, it seems to get service frequency wrong, making sprawling suburbs with hourly bus service look like they have service every few minutes.

So it’s not surprising that senior Brookings fellow Robert Puentes’ article about infrastructure in the Wall Street Journal is full of misunderstandings and frankly amateurish claims about US infrastructure problems. Puentes opens with a standard claim that “we do a great job of building new roads” (no mention of the Big Dig, Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, or proposed Tappan Zee replacement, each substantially costlier than undersea tunnels in Europe) but smarter investments are needed. He proposes the following:

1. Boosting exports. Puentes complains that US border crossings are congested, and hints that more are needed, for example the proposal for more bridges between Michigan and Ontario. He mentions some interstate cooperation as a solution, but never says anything about international cooperation, which is the real problem.

The Ambassador Bridge carries 10,000 trucks and 4,000 cars per day; the Holland Tunnel, which has the same number of lanes, carries 90,000 vehicles per day. The problem with the bridge is the border crossing, not the infrastructure. Nowhere does Puentes say the US and Canada should build more border checkpoints or process people faster. If Michigan doubles the number of border control booths or halves the time it takes to process a vehicle, it’s equivalent to building another bridge, but at a vastly lower cost.

2. Getting greener. Puentes praises Obama for proposing to put one million electric cars on the road in 2015. Then he talks about charging stations and the need for national standards encouraging them. In reality, the US has 240 million cars on the road, so Obama’s proposal would, even assuming zero-emission electricity, cut car emissions by 0.4%.

On the subject of cars and transit, Puentes wisely mentions that the government funds roads more liberally, but instead of railing against highways to nowhere and high construction costs says “We need equal treatment of all possible transportation projects, so cities don’t have to give up on, say, transit systems that fit their needs and help us go green, just because they cost more than highways.” It’s not that there aren’t examples of severe waste; it’s that Puentes doesn’t seem to care.

3. Adding Innovations. This is a boilerplate blurb for electronic toll collection, bus tracking, and, of course, public-private partnerships. Individually the things proposed are not bad – they’re just the most important things. For mass transit, fare integration and tighter schedule adherence are more important, but were not invented here and involve messy fights with the bureaucrats Brookings represent.

The PPP part indicates what this is really about: kickbacks to technology companies, often defense contractors looking to diversify. Many US transit systems have a smartcard using vendor-locked proprietary technology; defense contractor Cubic is the top vendor. New York’s smartcard proposal is instead a kickback to credit card providers, which is slightly less bad because the standard is open but is still far behind best practices. The best practices do not involve PPPs – instead, agencies develop technologies in-house, or instead rely on open standards. Minimal collusion offers minimal opportunity for corruption.

4. Connecting Workers With Work. Here Puentes repeats his institution’s flawed study’s findings as if they’re universally recognized facts. He does not even say “According to a recent Brookings study” – people are supposed to know it like they know Pearl Harbor happened in 1941. Then, based on said study’s conclusions, he declares the problem is that the poor are disconnected from their workplaces and makes relevant suggestions.

Since the Brookings study got things wrong in the direction of too much transit accessibility, the suggestions are for the most part not bad. The problem is that he says nothing about the problems of connecting people to where they work. The biggest problem for metro area transit is that while downtowns are reasonably connected (e.g. downtown LA workers have a 50% transit mode share), secondary downtowns and suburban job centers are not.

The common theme of all the proposals is that they’re makework for the bureaucrats and consultants who are Brookings’ base. Adopting best industry practices is useless to Brookings fellows, because pointing out that Europe does it better also means that the consultants who should implement reform are European managers. In contrast, PPP means coming up with new standards and new ways of doing things; it’s attractive to government administrators as much as it is to the companies that get the contracts.

The interests of the riders are not the same as those of the service providers. That labor does not have the same interests as riders is clear, but management benefits from bloat just as much: if things run smoothly, managers can’t look like they’re continually saving the day. Thinktanks like Brookings represent certain interest groups, and Brookings’ interest group excludes transit users.

New York-Area Track Maps

The original purpose of this blog was to give me a domain name to upload things related to transit. The resource I was uploading was track maps of the New York area due to Rich E Green, whose site unexpectedly vanished last month without caching the maps on Google. Here are the maps I’d saved or gotten from helpful commenters:

LIRR
NJT/SEPTA
Metro-North
NEC in Maryland and DC

If you have any of the rest of the maps, please send them over so that I can make them publicly available again.

Update: all links scrubbed 12/7 by the author’s request, due to copyright issues.

Philadelphia Link, or Organization Before Concrete

Pedestrian Observations commenter Steve Stofka has a blog post treating Amtrak’s $117 billion high-speed rail proposal for the Northeast Corridor with all the criticism for extravagance it deserves. Focusing on his hometown of Philadelphia, he explains how Amtrak’s proposal for new urban tunnels under the city and a new stop at Market East is insane, and how using mostly existing rights-of-way and stopping at the existing 30th Street Station is a vastly cheaper alternative.

Criticizing Amtrak’s plan is like shooting fish in a barrel. The reason I’m linking to Steve’s post is that it underscores a general theme in transit cost overruns. He explains the reasoning behind Amtrak’s choice of new tunnels:

How expensive is freaking expensive? The kind of bore being proposed is the single most expensive type of tunnel possible: it runs through a soft geological environment with zero tolerance for surface subsidence. It would cost more, mile by mile, than even the Gotthard Base Tunnel. The expense of this tunnel is so great that it amounts to about a tenth of the total budget of the plan (about $10 billion, or a billion a mile, out of a budget of roughly a hundred billion). When a single budgetary item commands that much expense, one must analyze and ask why: why do we need to spend a ludicrous amount of money in Philadelphia for what amounts to marginal access improvements? Knowing SEPTA, politics–and SEPTA’s “get-off-my-lawn” attitude–is most likely to blame.

The relevant answer is the slogan Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton: organization before electronics before concrete. Getting agencies to cooperate is hard on the managers, but cheap. Electronics, for example modern signaling to increase train capacity, costs more, but is affordable in a rich country. Concrete requires labor-intensive construction and is expensive.

The existing right-of-way in Philadelphia has no capacity constraint. It has four tracks, and a peak commuter rail frequency of six trains per hour. In contrast, the S-Bahn tunnel in Munich has two tracks and 24 30 trains per hour (thanks to ant6n for the correction); the above German link is concerned with cost overruns on a project to construct a second S-Bahn tunnel, currently estimated at half the per-km cost of the Philadelphia extravaganza. And Munich is far more advanced on organization than Philadelphia, where Amtrak and SEPTA have separate tickets, station staff, and schedules.

The same could be said about the LIRR/Amtrak grade separation. From a technical perspective, it is unnecessary. From a political one, it requires Amtrak trains to use the Penn Station’s lower concourse, currently monopolized by the LIRR; said concourse has better passenger flow and has station staff and ticket vending machines, but because of artificial separation into LIRR and Amtrak turf, New York State has to fork over $300 million for concrete.

High Costs Should not be an Excuse to Downgrade Projects

In an environment of high construction costs, there’s an impulse to downgrade projects: build light rail instead of subways, BRT instead of rail, commuter rail on existing tracks instead of greenfield light rail, shared-lane buses and streetcars instead of ones running in dedicated lanes. Some of those downgrades have already gotten flak individually from transit supporters, of which Jeff Wood’s recent article about commuter rail and Mike Dahmus‘s repeated attacks on BRT and the Austin commuter rail are good examples.

I do not think anyone has made the following point connecting those projects: the same causes that lead to incompetence in running one mode will lead to incompetence in running all other modes. Regardless of the mode chosen, a project in the US can expect to cost several times as much as a comparable European projects. (As a single exception, FRA-compliant commuter rail can be expected to be especially bad, because there the regulations and operating traditions are especially bad.) With very few exceptions, building BRT in a corridor that begs for rail, suburban transit in a city that needs urban transit, peak-only commuter rail, and other apparent cost savers will incur the same cost escalations as in every other mode.

In particular, downgrading service will not save any money, and going to the FRA will actually raise costs. This affects both the choice of technology and the choice of how to use it: American light rail lines keep the per-km costs reasonable by building out to exurbia, creating ersatz commuter rail with low ridership. This is epitomized in Dallas, whose light rail is setting records for low per-km ridership, and whose plans for the next decade are projected to cost $2.4 billion for 60,000 additional weekday riders, i.e. $40,000 per rider. In contrast, Houston’s urban Main Street Line cost $300 million for 34,000 riders, which is about $10,000 per rider in today’s money, the lowest per-rider cost in the US in the last 15 or so years. And Houston is unusual; more common is the Portland Milwaukie light rail extension, projected at $55,000 per rider and $110 million per km.

If we start looking abroad, we see the same pattern. When European LRT is more expensive, as for example in Nice, it’s because it’s very high-ridership urban infill. And Nice is an exceptionally expensive case; Lyon’s trams are cheaper. Few European light rail lines go over $10,000 per rider, and on Yonah Freemark’s list of recent and planned projects in Paris, a few lines are below $5,000.

Something similar is true for bus transit. Despite Jaime Lerner’s admonition that “Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget,” American cities have failed to create good BRT under budget constraints. The Los Angeles Orange Line is expensive for the ridership it has ($15,000/rider in construction, with the high operating costs of a bus) and has mediocre signal priority. Under a budget constraint, Los Angeles still built something inferior to the Blue Line, or even the expensive-to-build, cheap-to-operate Red Line subway.

As an aside, this also holds for the costs of transit versus highways. In the rest of the developed world, prudent cities invest most or all of their transportation money into mass transit, and try to restrain traffic. This should also be true in the US, where subways and light rail are expensive, but so are highway projects: see the 8-times-over-budget Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, the Big Dig, and the proposed Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, and compare them to the more complex Øresund Bridge-Tunnel connecting Denmark and Sweden.

At worst, the high costs of transportation in the US imply that government should spend its money elsewhere – on health or education, or perhaps tax cuts. Even then I’m personally skeptical about the efficiency of the marginal dollar: American health care is infamously expensive, tax expenditures are byzantine and in such cases as the mortgage tax credit create the wrong sort of incentives, and so on.

Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 is by far the most expensive urban rail project in the world today, but its per-rider cost is only $25,000, high by European and Japanese standards but lower than any other rail line proposed or under construction in the US today. It would not be approved in today’s pennypinching climate, and even ten years ago it was funded only thanks to legislative blackmail by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district would be served by Phase 3. Of course at normal cost it would be very cheap, just as at normal cost everything else in the US would become much more affordable, but it is still more cost-effective than seemingly cheap commuter lines.

The upshot is that from the perspective of transit planning, high costs should not deter anyone. Other than the special rule that FRA-compliant commuter rail is practically never justifiable, the relative merits of projects are about the same in the US as in all other developed countries. Agencies all over the world have to choose between a subway, five trams, and twenty busways. In an environment of high costs, it still make sense to draw plans as if the costs are normal, and when the costs are not normal, build more slowly and start with the most cost-effective lines. If agencies and activists behave as if there’s no money for good transit, they will only get bad transit.

Suburban TOD

Hicksville is located 43 kilometers east of Penn Station on the LIRR Main Line. It’s a major job center of eastern Nassau County, with 25,000 jobs and a rather large shopping center adjacent to the train station. The station itself gets about 8,000 weekday boardings, more than any other suburban LIRR station except Ronkonkoma.

However, the station has no TOD. The shopping mall is transit-adjacent, but the route to it from the station passes through parking lots at both ends. The station is surrounded by thousands of parking spaces; a recent reconstruction of a parking garage cost $364 $36.4 million for 1,400 spaces, which at $26,000 per space is more than the per-rider cost of such expensive transit lines as Second Avenue Subway. As a result, the total number of people getting off at Hicksville in the AM peak is 700, for a rail share of 3%.

Such failure is quite common in the US. Leaving aside stations explicitly configured as park-and-rides, such as Metropark or Ronkonkoma, off-CBD stations have to have at least some retail and office space usable by reverse commuters, on the pure financial grounds that reverse-peak service is nearly free to provide. Otherwise, light rail and subway trains run empty in the reverse-peak, and commuter trains park downtown, leading to outsized costs for CBD railyard expansions.

For a comparison of how good TOD looks like, see this industry presentation about Tokyo’s Tsukuba Express. As is normal in Tokyo, the line is very expensive: $140 million per km for a line that’s just 26% in tunnel, though the tunnel percentage is much higher within the central city. But per rider this is not too bad, because as the images in the presentation demonstrate, intense TOD followed construction. Stations are surrounded by high-density office and residential buildings and not parking lots.

A theme I am going to revisit is that high construction costs should not be an excuse to scale down service levels. It may be expensive to develop on the parking lots adjacent to the station, but the ridership is always worth it.

If there’s to be a transit revival, it’s imperative to increase mode share at major suburban centers. The transit mode share for people working in Manhattan is 75%, while the auto share is only 14% – and the auto mode share is dominated by the suburbs that use the GWB, rather than Long Island. There’s some room to expand Manhattan employment, but not enough to make a dent in the region’s car use. It’s critical to instead make it easier to use transit and harder to drive to work in such secondary downtowns as Flushing and Jamaica, and in such major suburban centers as Mineola and, yes, Hicksville.

More on Driving vs. Transit Costs

Thanks to Elizabeth Alexis of CARRD for finding and giving me a link to the AAA’s methodology for computing driving costs, used in APTA’s flawed study about the high household savings coming from switching from driving to transit. The AAA methodology indeed assumes perfect rather than realistic maintenance and tire changing, and has elevated depreciation and warranty charges.

The full list of problems with the AAA methodology, according to Elizabeth:

You are spot on about the misuse of data.  The AAA study is really misleading It represents the costs for someone who buys a new car from the dealer  with the extended warranty, overinsures it, drives it for 5 years, buys a new set of tires and then trades it in to the dealer, getting totally ripped in the process.  If everyone did this, the average car fleet would be 2 1/2 years old (instead of 9).     The only thing this study tells you is that you should never buy a new car and that you are an idiot to do anything but buy used cars off craigslist.

They are also assuming:

1) You buy a new car every five years.
2) Even though you know you will sell the car, you buy the extended warranty.
3) You accept the dealer’s trade-in price (which is very low generally).
4) Even though you know you are going to sell it to the dealer for no money, you go ahead and put on a new set of tires right before doing so.
5) You buy insurance with really low deductibles.
6) Because on average you have a 2.5 year old car, your annual car tax and your insurance are very high (in most states, the taxes are based on the value of the car).
7) And you finance the car @ non-deductible 6% interest. It should be noted that most car loans are 3-5 years.  So if you kept a car after it was paid off… this cost would go away.

A better study for the costs of driving was done by Steven Polzin, of the National Center for Transit Research, who also serves on “several APTA committees.” Using various government survey data, he finds an average saving of $3,600 from giving up a car; this is less than the cost of an average car, since households might give up the lesser used car or take more transit or drive the remaining car more. I encourage everyone to bookmark the study and refer to page 18 for comparative spending on transportation in the US versus the EU-15; it’s a difference of 19.5% of household budget versus about 14%. Any figures for world public transit leaders Japan and Switzerland will be appreciated.

Overperforming Rail Lines

Amtrak’s latest addition to the Northeast Corridor network, the once daily Lynchburg extension, is overperforming. Both Amtrak’s press release and local reporters brag that this train has overperformed ridership expectations by a factor of 2.5 and revenue expectations by a factor of 3. As a result, it has been consistently operationally profitable, in fact the only train to have this distinction other than the Acela.

The remarkable thing about it is that service levels aren’t high. The average speed south of Washington is mediocre, about 80 km/h. NARP talks about the importance of frequency; but the train is once daily, and is offset by only two hours from the Crescent, a long-distance train covering the same route. There were weak signs of pent-up demand on the Crescent – it sometimes sells out due to limited capacity, but even then it loses money like all other long-distance trains.

The best explanation for this success is that, although the route is slow, so are the competing highways. There are no Interstates that realistically compete with this train; I-81 is too far west. Google Maps gives a Washington-Lynchburg travel time of 3:32, versus 3:46 on the Regional and 3:30 on the Crescent. Add in traffic and the train can beat the car.

A more general point is that bad service that is failing could become more successful if it were improved. German regional trains that were closed due to low ridership when they ran just a few times per day are now flourishing after reopening on an hourly clockface schedule. And several Amtrak corridor runs improved their ridership and finances after more than daily or twice daily frequency was added; they just have to compete with faster roads, so they still lose money.

The next issue is then what other gaps there are in the Interstate network to be filled by trains. I’d say the biggest is Chicago-Kansas City, on which the Southwest Chief takes 7:11 and, since the only all-freeway route detours through St. Louis, driving takes 8:33. But this is a much longer distance, and the route is served by air. At shorter range, some other options I’m thinking of are Chicago-Fort Wayne and New York-Albany-Burlington. Any other suggestions?

Edit: for a similar view on frequency, see this rant, sourced to, I believe, the URPA. There are a lot of things in there that are just insane, but the point about financial performance improving with service levels is true. Too bad the implication is that those extra frequencies belong on long-distance rather than medium-distance trains. With the same equipment as just one extra long-distance run, Amtrak could run 4-5 times daily frequencies on an important corridor run.

US Rail Construction Costs

Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my static construction cost page. The long and the short of it is that in non-English-speaking developed countries, the typical range for urban subways is $100-300 million per km, with a few outliers in both directions.

This is a placeholder post, in which I’m just going to summarize the costs of projects in the US and the rest of the world. I will focus on subway tunnels, but also put some above-ground rail for comparison. No average is included – all I’m doing at this stage is eyeballing numbers. As far as possible, numbers are inflated or deflated from the midpoint of construction to 2010, and exclude rolling stock. The PPP exchange rate is €1 = $1.25, $1 = ¥100. For now, only dense infill subways are included.

East Side Access: $8.4 billion; excluding preexisting tunnels, this consists of 2 km of new tunnel in Manhattan and a new connection in Queens. So this is about $4 billion per km. Update 2011/6/21: the link here stopped working. Here‘s a slightly older link, saying the cost is $8.1 billion.

Second Avenue Subway Phase 1: $4.9-5.7 billion in 2007-17 for about 3 km of new tunnel. This is $1.7 billion per km.

7 Extension: $2.1 billion in 2007-12 for 1.6 km of new tunnel. Note that this has only one station, an unusually sparse spacing for a dense urban area. This is $1.3 billion per km.

Crossrail: £15 billion in 2008-18 for a line of more than 100 km, of which the primary component is 22 km of new tunnel under Central London and Heathrow Airport. Due to the extensiveness of the London Underground network, this is the most complex project on the list. The cost per unit of tunnel is about $1 billion per km, making this the only outside New York to cross the 1 billion line.

Central Subway: $1.58 billion in 2010-6 for 2.7 km of light rail tunnel. This project is only on this list because it has to cross under the double-decked subway (Muni and BART) under Market; the standards, including station size, are for light rail. This is about $500 million per km.

Jubilee Line Extension: £3.5 billion in 1993-9 for 15.9 km of route, of which about 80% is underground. The line went over budget by 66%, crosses under the entire London Underground network, and crosses under the Thames four times. This is about $450 million per km.

Amsterdam North-South Line: €3.1 billion in 2009 money for 9.5 km of new tunnel. The project has run over budget by a factor of more than two, leading to accusations of boondoggle and remarks that the project should not have been built. This is $410 million per km.

Toei Oedo Line: ¥1.4 trillion (Japan has no inflation, so year of construction does not matter) for 40.7 km of new tunnel. While the stations are normal subway stations, the subway tunnels are of smaller than normal diameter due to the use of linear induction technology. This is $350 million per km. A short subway extension of the Mita Line cost nearly $500 million per km, but the information about it is on a Toei factsheet that’s been scrubbed from the net.

Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line: ¥250 billion for 8.9 km of new track. This is $280 million per km. Tokyo Metro has claimed future lines will be $500 million per km as a reason to not build future extensions.

Berlin U55: €320 million for 1.8 km of tunnel in 1996-2009. While this line does not cross or connect to any older subway, it is in the center of the city, and thus qualifies as urban infill. This is $250 million per km.

Paris Metro Line 14: €1.13 billion in 1998-2003 for 9 km. This line crosses under the Seine and had construction problems due to catacombs. This is $230 million per km.

Circle MRT Line: S$10 billion for 35.7 km, to be opened in full next year. This includes a 50% cost overrun, and a substantial delay coming from a highway collapse in 2004 that killed four workers. Because the exchange rate, including PPP, has changed considerably in the last ten years, I’m not inflating, and instead using the present rate, making this the least certain conversion on the list. This is $220 million per km.

Copenhagen Circle Line: DKK21.3 billion in 2010 for 15.5 km. At today’s exchange rate, this is $4 billion and $260 million per km in exchange rate, but the Danish currency is severely overvalued, and in PPP (judging by the ratio of PPP to exchange rate GDP per capita) this is $170 million per km.

Durchmesserlinie: CHF1.82 billion in 2007-13 for 9.6 km of new commuter tunnel under the city, relieving the existing tunnel. This is $215 million per km in exchange rate, but the Swiss franc is severely overvalued, and the PPP value is only $136 million per km.

Barcelona L9/10: €6.5 billion in 2006-14 for 47.8 km. This line is fully automated and is nearly 100% underground, and has gone over budget by a factor of more than three. This is $170 million per km.

Naples Metro Line 6: €533 million in 2007-12 for 5 km of fully underground metro. This is  $130 million per km.

Milan Metro Line 5: €500 million for 5.6 km of fully underground driverless metro. This is about $110 million per km.

Seoul AREX: 4.2 trillion won ($4.2 billion) for 61 km of line, about 60% underground, linking Seoul with Incheon Airport. This is a combined commuter and express line, and even all-stop trains only make 10 stations, by far the sparsest spacing on this list. This is about $110 million per km of tunnel – realistically a little less since the above-ground segments are greenfield.

Seoul in general gives its tunneling construction cost as $100 million per km in context of a proposal of an extension of the Sin Bundang Line that assumes a much lower budget, only $40 million/km.

Madrid gives the construction costs of its 1999-2003 expansion as €42 million/km, including rolling stock; translated to today’s dollars, this is $65 million per km. But those projects were not all infill and not all fully underground.

Observe from the low costs of Italian subways that corruption alone cannot explain high American and British costs. High Japanese costs can be explained by strong property rights protections and a process that favors NIMBYism; Paul Barter‘s thesis quotes sources arguing that the high costs of land acquisition in Japan are a reason why its cities never engaged in American-style urban renewal or massive freeway building.

Observe also that developing countries’ PPP costs aren’t very low: Beijing’s subway extensions cost about $150 million per km – see e.g. here and apply a PPP exchange rate of about $1 = 3.8RMB. The labor costs in developing countries are lower, but so is labor productivity.

Observe finally that Bent Flyvbjerg, known primarily for his work on megaproject construction cost overruns and strategic misrepresentation, wrote a paper on comparative US and European construction costs, which understated the conclusion that American costs are higher. The reason for his understating the conclusion is that the American projects examined are quite old, from the 1980s, and many have large above-ground parts.

Although the US projects included are only in New York and San Francisco, both high-cost cities, similarly high costs occur in other cities, just the projects are above ground. Portland’s light rail Milwaukie extension and Washington’s predominantly above ground Silver Line both have cost ranges of about $100-150 million per km, enough for a full subway in many European cities. Los Angeles’s Subway to the Sea is budgeted at $6 billion for the full Wilshire route to Santa Monica, i.e. $300 million per km; this is not really infill since it extends the subway out, but the neighborhoods served are quite dense, so it might qualify.

For some links of outward extensions abroad, see Brussels ($60 million/km) (deleted because the link is wrong and I can’t find the right one) the future plans in Paris ($100-200 million, with one line at $50 million; 2018 update: see updated costs around $200-250 million here and here) and Seoul’s upgraded Gyeongchun Line ($33 million).

Frequent New York City Buses

Following Jarrett Walker‘s repeated focus on frequency as the main distinguishing feature of local transit service, some people have gone and made maps of the frequent buses of their local areas, complementing official maps in such cities as Portland and LA. The importance is that regular bus maps are overly complex, and do not make it clear which buses can be relied upon all day and which are too low-frequency for show-up-and-go service.

So as a service to the New York City bus-riding public, here are my maps of frequent routes in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The standard I use is 10-minute service in the afternoon off-peak, barring slight one-time irregularities. Some frequent trunk lines have infrequent branches; only the trunk lines appear on the map. The color scheme is meant to help dissimilate routes and reduce confusion. If multiple routes sharing the same trunk line are frequent, then they all appear, helping indicate very high frequency.

A slightly stricter map of Queens, using an 8-minute standard, is available on Cap’n Transit’s blog.

Yes, Transit is Green

I’ve just found a post by Brad Templeton arguing that US mass transit is less green than high-efficiency cars, at least when compared per passenger-km. (He agrees that transit is overall better because it is more efficient when used more extensively, as in Europe and especially East Asia.) The analysis of how this can be given the numbers is cogent, but the numbers themselves are suspect, and are worse for transit than other numbers I’ve seen.

Better numbers can be found in this FTA presentation, on pages 10-11; the data is sourced to the National Transit Database. They’re expressed in pounds of CO2 per passenger-mile; if you’re more used to thinking in terms of passenger-miles per gallon of gasoline equivalent, then convert x pounds per passenger-mile to 19.374/x passenger-miles per gallon. The New York City Subway gets the equivalent of 114 passenger-mpg, versus 47 on Templeton’s page. Even FRA-regulated commuter rail does significantly better than cars – the low efficiency of the trains cancels out with the fact that there’s almost no off-peak traffic.

Another piece of evidence Templeton’s transit numbers are too low: he lists JR East’s energy use as equivalent to about 78 passenger-mpg. In reality, JR East claims much lower emissions, about 13 grams per passenger-km (400 passenger-mpg equivalent) or 19 (280), depending on whether one counts the emissions of the company’s buildings or just transportation emissions. It could be that Japanese power generation is that efficient; but given that Japan’s overall per capita emissions are not low by non-US developed country standards, I doubt it.

Finally, although it appears as if technology is about to make cars much more efficient, in reality technology is expensive if you’re a driver and cheap if you’re a transit agency. Take hybrids: the market share of new hybrid car sales is in the single digits, about 300,000 out of 8 million light vehicles sold in the US in 2008, but the market share of new hybrid bus orders was 22% in 2007. Electrified trains are also gaining efficiency, perhaps more slowly but the important thing for them is to transition to low-carbon power generation; if their emissions are nontrivial thirty years from now, then we have bigger problems than transportation to worry about.