Category: Transportation

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.

How much does driving cost?

APTA has just come out with a press release touting large savings for households that do not drive but instead take mass transit. The average it claims is $10,000 per year per person nationwide; in some cities it’s higher, and Second Avenue Sagas seized upon the study’s claim of a $14,000 saving in New York.

The only problem: drivers in the US do not spend $10,000 a year, let alone $10,000 more than transit riders. The federal government has a detailed breakdown of household budgets, so that it can compute inflation rates accurately and set cost-of-living adjustments and monetary policy. The New York Times has a nifty graphic breaking down household spending as of 2008, and transportation was 18% of American households’ budgets, of which about 17% is on cars and 1% is on all other forms of transportation. Mean household income in the US is $68,000 per year as of 2009, so we’re talking about $11,560 spent on cars per household. There are on average a bit more than 2 cars per household in the US (246 million cars, about 113 million households), so we’re talking about $5,400 per car. Not $10,000.

At least it’s better than its shilling against a climate bill on the grounds that some of the carbon taxes it would raise from roads would not go to the Highway Trust Fund, to the point that it proposed an alternative that would raise less money for transit. But in either case, it cares less about a mode shift benefiting transit users and the environment than about lobbying for transit operators’ interests.

New York Provincialism, and the MTA’s Flawed Smartcard Report

New York’s MTA recently published a report proposing a next-generation payment system replacing the MetroCard. You can find it here: to read it, download it and add .pdf to the file extension. Sections 4-5 are the most relevant here.

The report is full of little facts about New York such as the number of transactions on each component of the MTA, but never once mentions case studies abroad – Hong Kong’s Octopus, Tokyo’s Suica and PASMO, or the many European cities that are happy with paper tickets. It uses factoids to intimidate more than to explain. For example, it repeats the fact that New York City Transit spends 15% of its revenue on fare collection, but never breaks it down to parts, does cross-city comparisons, or even estimates how much a smartcard system will save; the only purpose of the number is therefore to scare people into doing something.

Despite advertising its intention to save money, the MTA makes no mention of bundling smartcards with proof-of-payment, widely used way to speed up bus boarding and reduce train staffing levels, even with plain paper tickets. On the contrary, the report specifically mentions equipping commuter rail conductors (and not fare inspectors) with card readers, and only mentions inspectors in relation to Select Bus Service and the Staten Island Railway.

Even on the level of checking existing technology use, the report falls short. The MTA rates smartcard options as “medium-low” on “inter-modal interoperability,” on the grounds that they require card validators and card readers. In reality, card validators are cheap: in Singapore, they cost about S$950 per unit (about US$770); placing one at every bus stop and commuter train station and on board every bus door and commuter train door pair would cost $20 million, less than a tenth the cost of a smartcard implementation.

Similarly, the report rates internal transit smartcards’ lifecycle risk as “medium: mature technology, though standards are not.” The closest thing to truth in there is that there are two open standards, Sony’s FeliCa and a separate standard whose top vendor is NXP’s MIFARE, and the ISO chose the standard used by MIFARE over FeliCa (FeliCa was already in place in Japan and Hong Kong, so it still has the most users). In reality, both FeliCa and MIFARE date to the mid-1990s, making them older than the smartphone and broadband Internet.

The report mentions a foreign city exactly once: it says that “The technology risk is mitigated by Transport for London’s adoption of open payments, planned for 2012, and its role in advising the MTA and potentially sharing technology.” Optimistically, it means the MTA listens to other cities when they say what it wants to hear. Pessimistically, both cities are using each other to justify a prior decision. MTA Chairman Jay Walder, the primary proponent within the MTA of the credit card-based smartcard, worked in London until 2007 and was responsible for introducing the Oyster card.

And speaking of London, Oyster is bumpy at best. It is superficially similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus, down to the similar name, but in practice it is much more primitive. Octopus is licensed as anonymous electronic money (in a culture that according to Western stereotype is authoritarian and indifferent to privacy), generating additional profits to the MTR; Oyster is not, and the MTA report makes no mention of this possibility. Octopus comes in more forms than just a card – for example, there is an Octopus watch and an Octopus keychain, making tapping easier since the rider does not need to take out their wallet; Oyster does not, and when riders took out the chip to create a makeshift Oyster watch, TfL fined them even though they were not dodging the fare.

The MTA keeps underperforming because it doesn’t listen to other cities’ experience, unless it’s what it wants to hear. And this is perhaps the worst abuse, because here the person who’s leading the charge for reform in New York has a track record of screwing up abroad. New York has spent decades convincing itself that it is the best city in the world and needs to learn from no other, taking pride in its subway. The result has been a metro area transit mode share lower than that of European cities one tenth New York’s size. Walder speaks like a reformer who tries to change this, but the one time he’s proposing something concrete, it’s the usual New York provincialism.

New York’s Awful Grade Separation

After Rick Scott rejected the Florida high-speed rail funds, a bunch of states as well as Amtrak applied for the redirected funds. The money has just been redistributed – see breakdown here. New York State applied for $300 million to grade-separate a junction between Amtrak and the LIRR, which it spins as an important capacity upgrade and which some online commenters have misinterpreted as a speed upgrade. Let me dispel the myth here.

The track map of the LIRR (link scrubbed for copyright reasons) shows clearly that, in the westbound direction, the junction has no conflicts. Amtrak trains (blue) using the northern tunnel pair to Penn Station have no conflicts with any other trains, except for other trains using the same tunnels. This is not a grade crossing, but a simple switch. In the eastbound direction, trains using the northern tunnels do have an at-grade junction with LIRR trains (purple) – but only trains going to a track farther north than the tunnels to Penn Station, and those all stub-end at Hunterspoint Avenue or Long Island City.

There aren’t a lot of trains going to Hunterspoint or Long Island City: at the peak, only 5 per hour, and of those one uses the Montauk Line, so we’re really talking about 4 trains per hour; Amtrak never runs more than 2 trains per hour to New York from the east. To put things in perspective, the 3 and 5 train on the subway have more than 10 trains per hour each and have a similar conflict in Brooklyn. What’s more, Hunterspoint’s main use is that it has an easy subway connection to Manhattan’s East Side, so once East Side Access opens and LIRR trains can go to Grand Central, traffic there will go down even more, making the flat junction even less relevant than it is today.

So the $300 million the state applied to has no relevance to either Amtrak or LIRR traffic. The only use is to let Amtrak use the southern tunnel pair to Penn Station without conflicts. Since Amtrak can already use the northern tunnels without any conflict apart from the one mentioned above, it is a pure nice-to-have. It would be good for operational flexibility if the tunnels were at capacity, but they aren’t: total LIRR plus Amtrak traffic into Penn Station peaks at 37 trains between 8 and 9 am, where the capacity of the tunnels is about 50 – and as with Hunterspoint traffic, Penn Station LIRR traffic will go down once East Side Access opens.