Category: Regional Rail

Transportation-Development Symbiosis

The RPA’s Regional Assembly has included the following idea submission: expand reverse-commuter rail service. The proposal calls for surveying city residents to look for the main available reverse-commuter markets, and for expanding reverse-peak service on the model of Metro-North. It unfortunately does not talk about doing anything at the work end – it talks about looking at where city residents could go to the suburbs on commuter rail, but not about which suburban job markets could be served from any direction.

I don’t want to repeat myself about what transit agencies have to do to be able to serve suburban jobs adequately (if “suburban” is the correct way to think of Providence and New Haven), and so I’m going to sound much harsher toward the idea than I should be. Suffice is to say that talking about development requires a lot of reforms to operating practices. With that in mind, let’s look at some suburban job centers in the Northeast: Providence, Stamford, Hicksville, New Haven. As can be seen, those stations all look very suburban, and even Providence is surrounded by sterile condos, with the mall located a short, unpleasant walk away. Compare this with the urbanity that one finds around major suburban train stations in Tokyo, such as Kokubunji and Tachikawa.

But really, the kind of development that’s missing around suburban train stations in the US is twofold. First, the local development near the stations is not transit-oriented, in the sense that big job and retail centers may be inconvenient to walk to for the pedestrian. And second, the regional development does not follow the train lines, but rather arterial roads, or, in cities with rapid transit, rapid transit lines – for example, one of Long Island’s two biggest edge cities, East Garden City, is diffuse and far from existing LIRR stations (the other, Mineola, is relatively okay).

In both cases, what’s missing is transportation-development symbiosis. Whoever runs the trains has the most to gain from locating major office and retail development, without excessive parking, near the train stations. And whoever owns the buildings has the most to gain from running trains to them, to prop up property values. This leads to the private railroad conglomerates in Tokyo, and to the Hong Kong MTR.

The same symbiosis can be done with government actors, but isn’t, not in the US, and the RPA’s attempts to change this and promote integrated planning have so far not succeeded. Hickville recently spent $36.4 million on a parking garage adjacent to the station plus some extra sum on expanding road access, but none of the relevant actors has made any effort to upzone the station area for commercial, to allow easier commuting. Providence is renovating the station, with pretty drawings, but doing far short of a redesign that would add development to the area.

The importance of this symbiosis, coming back to the original idea, is that the correct question to ask is not, “Where can city residents go to the suburbs to work?” but rather “Which suburban and secondary-urban destinations can be adequately served by rail?” In all four Northeastern cities under discussion, there is more than one direction from which commuters could come. From the commuter railroad’s perspective, a rider who takes the train in the traditional peak direction but gets off in a suburb short of the CBD is a free fare, just like an off-peak rider or a reverse-peak rider.

The task for regional planners (as opposed to service planners and railroad managers) is then a combination of the following priorities:

1. As noted above, ensuring edge city and secondary CBD development is both close to train stations and easily accessible by pedestrians.

2. Aggressively upzoning near potential station sites, with an eye for junctions, such as Sunnyside, Secaucus, and New Rochelle.

3. Examining where people working in secondary centers are living, and which rail lines could be leveraged to serve them and where new construction would be needed. For example, Providence could use rail to Woonsocket and the East Bay and more local service to Cranston and Warwick, but reviving the tunnel to the East Bay could be expensive and needs to be studied carefully. Note that north of South Attleboro, there are very few people living near the Providence Line working in Providence, and so reverse-peak service is useful mainly in the original sense of people reverse-commuting from Boston, in contrast with service to Massachusetts suburbs of Providence such as Seekonk.

The problem with doing all three is political: current regional rail traffic is dominated by suburbanites using it as an extension of driving into the city. This influences local thinking because the economics of residential development are not the same as those of commercial development. Agglomeration and density are less important. Transfers and long access distances are more acceptable. People traveling within the suburb go toward the station in the AM peak rather than away from it, and so parking availability is more important. Take all of these together and you get a powerful constituency supporting continuing to choke suburban train stations with parking and sterile development for city-bound commuters, no matter how many tens of thousands of jobs are nearby.

This is why some symbiosis is necessary. One way to do it is via market mechanisms: if a well-capitalized company gets ownership of the transit infrastructure and is free to develop with few zoning constraints, it could decide to build office towers in Hicksville on top of the train station, or develop the empty lots near New Haven and Providence. This is possible, but may well be too hard politically, even more so than direct zoning reform, because every trope used by the community to oppose the changes (namely, fear of outsiders) would apply and also there would be explicit loss of control.

The other way is the public way, which is where integrated planning comes in. Even on the level of intransigent railroads, it may work if all done together. In other words, there would be simultaneous effort to add reverse-peak service on the LIRR and the MBTA, upzone surrounding station areas and make them more walkable at the expense of some parking spaces, direct major developments such as malls and office complexes to the resulting TOD, and integrate local transit with the changed commuter service in all directions.

But whatever is done, it’s critical to integrate the two functions, of transportation and development. There’s no need for an overarching bureaucracy to take care of it all, even – just cooperation between regional planners, local planners, and transit managers. Transit needs thick markets, and if all development outside the primary CBD is diffuse and auto-oriented, there will not be any thick markets for it to serve. A transit revival necessarily requires new markets, and this means going after what are now hopelessly auto-oriented suburbs. And what needs to be done is not just figuring out where new service is required or where car-free urbanites commute to, but also what kind of TOD can be done at each secondary job center.

Train Weights, Bilevel Version

My previous table of train weights covered single-level trains, with the exception of the ultralight (for a bilevel) TGV Duplex. By request, here is a similar version for bilevels. Note that very light trains such as the E231 or DB’s Class 423 are inherently single-level – though a bilevel Green Car trailer version of the E231 is quite light, even at 50% heavier than a single-level trailer.

Recall that Lng is length in meters, Wt is empty weight in (metric) tons, Width is in meters, Pow is maximum short-term power in megawatts, P/W is power-to-weight in kilowatts per ton, Ld is average load per axle in tons, and Wt/Lng is weight in tons per meter of train length.

Train Lng Wt Width Pow P/W Ld Wt/lng
E231 series Green Car 20 36 2.95 0 0 9 1.79
215 Series 200 368.5* 2.9 1.92 5.2 9.2 1.84
TGV Duplex 200 380 2.9 8.8 23.2 14.6 1.9
Bom. BiLevel Coach 26 50 3 0 0 12.5 1.91
KISS, Regional 150 297 2.8 6 20.2 12.4 1.97
KISS, Interregio 100 212 2.8 6 28.3 13.3 2.11
E4 Series 201 428 3.38 6.72 15.7 13.4 2.13
NS DD-AR (w/ mDDM) 100 221 2.8 2.4 10.86 13.8 2.21
GO Transit MPI hauling 12 Bom. BiLevel Coaches 332 734 3.24 3 4.1 14.1 2.21
Metra Highliner 26 59 3.2? ? ? 14.8 2.28
Caltrain Coradia 213 517 3.2? ? ? 16.2 2.43
X40 (Coradia, Sweden) 81.5 205 2.96 2.4 11.7 17.1 2.52
Caltrain MPI hauling 5 Bom. BiLevel Coaches 150.5 384 3.24 3 7.8 16 2.55
CityRail A-sets 78 201 3.04 ? ? 12.6 2.57
MI 2N 112 288 2.9 4.5 15.6 14.4 2.57
Colorado Railcar, bilevel 26 74 3.2? 0.96 13 18.5 2.86

*Caltrain claims the same weight – see pages 36 (which partially confuses the train with a heavier Shinkansen) and 45 of its document about bilevel EMUs. Japanese Wikipedia claims a much lower weight, coming from substituting 2 for the leading 3. Given everything else, the higher figure seems more likely (with thanks to Miles Bader for pointing the above link out).

The observation here is that FRA compliance no longer neatly separates trains. Part of it comes from the very heavy low-speed trains in France, of which the MI 2N is an example. I do not know whether this is caused by special regulations – on the one hand, the TGV reportedly has 500 tons of buff strength, but on the other hand, Sweden’s X40 is also quite heavy.

The reason for this is that while high buff strength adds weight, its effect is much larger on lightweight frames than on heavyweight frames. A train that is already heavy will become heavier if it is required to be FRA-compliant, but typically only by a few tons. New Jersey Transit’s ALP-46 locomotive is 7 tons heavier than the European locomotive it is based on, of which 4.5 come from FRA regulations. This applies equally well to low-power bilevels. Even lightweight, high-power products such as the KISS would be considered middleweight by single-level standards.

Observe, however, that to achieve acceptable average weight, FRA-compliant products have to sacrifice power (as is done in Toronto or on Caltrain) and also to have a heavy locomotive drag many relatively light coaches, raising axle load. For fast service, one must use a product like the Colorado Railcar, which is the heaviest train per unit of weight on both this table and the single-level table, and which also awkwardly is a high-level train with much greater height than permitted by any European loading gauge, avoiding the low-floor weight penalty.

Surreptitious Underfunding

One third of the MBTA’s outstanding debt, about $1.7 billion, comes from transit projects built by the state as part of a court-imposed mitigation for extra Big Dig traffic; interest on this debt is about two-thirds the agency’s total present deficit. Metra was prepared to pay for a project to rebuild rail bridges that would increase clearance below for trucks and cut the right-of-way’s width from three to two tracks. Rhode Island is spending $336 million on extending the Providence Line to Wickford Junction, with most of the money going toward building parking garages at the two new stations; Wickford Junction, in a county whose number of Boston-bound commuters is 170, is getting 1,200 parking spaces.

Supporters of transportation alternatives talk about the inequity between highway and transit funding in the US, but what they’re missing is that the transit funding bucket includes a lot of things that are manifestly not about transit. At their best, they are parking lots and other development schemes adjacent to train stations, which would’ve been cheap by themselves. At their worst, they are straight highway projects, benefiting road users only.

The situation in Boston, while unique in its brazenness, is not unique in concept. In the US, where there are no pollution taxes on fuel, the only way to mitigate air pollution is by regulation and by building alternatives simultaneously. Put another way, combined highway and transit construction is in most cases not really a combined project; it’s a highway project, plus required mitigation. Requiring the transit agency to shoulder the debt and the operating subsidies is exactly requiring transit users to pay for highways. It’s equivalent to charging transit multiple dollars per gallon of gas saved from any mode shift. And it may get even worse: the proposed House transportation bill includes a provision to allow spending national air pollution control funds on regular highway widening, in addition to the current practice of spending them on carpool lanes.

Historically, the diversion of funding from transit to roads took such insidious forms. For an instructive example from Owen Gutfreund’s book, roads advocates fought to get driver’s license fees and even inspection fees for fuel trucks recognized as road user fees, whose proceeds must be diverted toward roads. For another example from the same book, in Denver, the streetcar system was required to cover 25% of the cost of road maintenance on one-way streets and 50% on two-way streets, and as car traffic rose, streetcars both became slower and had to send over more money toward roads.

Another instructive case study is grade separations. It is to my knowledge universal that expressways and high-speed railroads, both of which must be grade-separated, pay for their own grade separations. In all other cases, who pays is determined by which mode is more powerful, and in the US, this is roads. As the national highway system was built in the 1920s, interurban railroads were required to pay for grade-separations, even when the rail came first. The practice continues today: in Kentucky, the railroad has to shoulder the full cost if it’s from 1926 or newer (Statute 177.110), and half the construction cost and the full planning cost if it’s older (177.170). In contrast, in Japan, grade separations are considered primarily a road project, and so the Chuo Line track elevation project was paid 85% by the national and city governments and only 15% by JR East (page 36). The segment in question of the Chuo Line was built in 1889; I believe, but do not know, that new rail construction in Japan is always grade-separated, at the railroad’s expense.

The situation in the US today is a surreptitious underfunding of transit, and at the same time a surreptitious overfunding of roads. It is not subject to democratic debate or even to the usual lobbyist funding formulas, but, like the obscure regulations that impede good passenger rail, hidden in rules nobody thinks to question. To pay for road mitigations and for parking, transit agencies will cut weekend service and reduce frequency. It’s bad enough when done in the open, but it’s done while claiming that transit is too expensive to provide.

Table of Train Weights

Here are some trains, and their weights. The headline figure is weight per linear meter of length, but also includes other metrics of interest. Not included is any feature of interior design, such as the number of seats or the number and location of doors, as those reflect choices about seated vs. standing capacity and about the relative importance of quick boarding and alighting.

Most trains on the list are low-speed commuter trains, but a few are high-speed. All are EMUs, except for high-speed trains with dedicated power cars and two DMUs that are included for comparison. All are single-deck except the TGV Duplex, which is as light as a single-deck TGV.

All figures are in metric units. Length and width are in meters, weight in tons, and (short-term) power in megawatts. Load is the average weight in tons per axle; it is not the same as the axle load, which is the maximum loaded weight per axle. To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to give dry weights, without passengers, though I believe the N700 Shinkansen number is with passengers.

For English units, 1 metric ton per linear meter equals 0.336 short tons per linear foot.

Train Lng Wt Width Pow P/W Ld Wt/lng
E231 Series 200 256 2.95 1.52 5.9 6.4 1.28
E231 Series motor 20 28.5 2.95 0.38 13.3 7.1 1.43
DBAG Class 423 67.4 105 3.02 2.35 22.4 10.5 1.56
Talgo AVRIL 200 315 3.2 8.8 27.9 15 1.57
E233 Series 200 319 2.95 3.36 10.5 8 1.59
FLIRT, Swiss 74 120 2.88 2.6 21.7 12 1.62
A-Train, Japan (E257) 185.5 306 2.95 2.9 9.5 8.5 1.65
Desiro Classic 41.7 69 2.83 0.55 8 11.5 1.65
E751 Series motor 20.5 34 2.98 0.58 17 8.5 1.66
DBAG Class 425 67.5 114 2.84 2.35 20.6 11.4 1.69
FLIRT, Finnish 75 132 3.2 2.6 19.7 13.2 1.76
N700 Series 405 715 3.36 17.08 23.9 11.2 1.77
CAF Regional 98 175 2.94 2.4 13.7 14.6 1.79
E351 Series 252 456 2.84 3.6 7.9 9.5 1.81
BR Class 357 83 158 2.8 1.68 10.7 9.9 1.9
TGV Duplex 200 380 2.9 8.8 23.2 14.6 1.9
X60 107 206 3.26 3 14.6 14.7 1.93
Coradia Cont., 4 cars 71 140 2.92 2.88 20.6 14 1.97
Francilien (SNCF Z 50000), 8 cars 112.5 235 3.06 2.62 11.1 13.1 2.09
Zefiro 380 215 462 3.4 10 21.6 14.4 2.15
A-Train, UK HSR (BR 395) 121 265 2.81 3.36 12.7 11 2.19
LIRR M-7 26 57.5 3.2 0.8 13.9 14.4 2.21
Velaro CN 200 447 3.27 8.8 19.7 14 2.24
MNRR M-8 26 65.5 3.2 0.8 12.2 16.4 2.52
Silverliner V 26 66.5 3.2 0.8? 12? 16.6 2.56
Colorado Railcar, 1-level 26 67 3.2? 0.96 14.3 16.8 2.59
Acela Express 202 566 3.16 9.2 16.3 17.7 2.8

The table separates Japanese, European, and American trains, the latter two with hardly any overlap. I did not include too many French and British commuter trains, and those are fairly heavy by European standards, but even they are a bit lighter than the M-7, the lightest modern FRA-compliant train (British trains tend toward 2 t/m, French trains toward slightly more). I did include the lightest European trains I know of but not all the Japanese trains, selected mainly for the big Tokyo-area workhorses (E231, E233) and longer-range, higher-speed JR East trains that I thought were comparable to the needs of longer-distance American regional lines.

Eyeballing the non-American trains, I think it’s fair and unambitious to think of a train of the future that weighs 1.8 tons per meter, can achieve 15 kW/t, and is capable of 160 km/h. Multiple vendors beat that, often by a large enough margin to cushion against the slight weight increase coming from a wider loading gauge. The upshot of this is that any regulatory overhaul and regional rail revival in the US has to be coupled with a large train order replacing older, less capable trains over time, which means dropping an order for several thousand EMUs over 20 or so years. No single company can make all of these, but sharing in the order, as was done for the R160, could work.

Commuter Rail Stop Distribution

One of the features of American commuter rail is that it’s intended to be used by suburbanites. The propensity for making nearly every station a park-and-ride, with poor pedestrian access, is one effect of this. Another effect is stop distribution. It’s not just stop spacing – many commuter lines have tighter stop spacing than some European and Japanese lines – but rather where the stops are dense and where they aren’t. Normally, a commuter line will have densely spaced stops in the city, where the population is denser and there are more connection points and important destination, and thin out in the suburbs, where speed is more important. American commuter lines are different – in the city they make very few stops, since they don’t connect well to local transit and are treated as too special, but in the suburbs, at least the inner suburbs, they have very frequent stops.

For examples, let us compare Metra and the Paris RER. I’m choosing the RER because it’s an express system, meant to provide fast service within the city rather than comparable stop distance to the subway. Some RER lines even have a slightly American-style station distribution, if they don’t go deep into suburbia, making them more like express subway lines in New York, though even then the difference is much smaller than in the US, without even such long nonstop segments as 59th-125th Streets on the A/B/C/D. Metra is where the American stop distribution tendency is the most extreme, though the lines I picked are those for which Wikipedia lists mileage for stations. All distances in the following table are in kilometers and start from the Chicago terminus or from Châtelet-Les Halles.

UP North BNSF Line Milwaukee North RER A to Marne-la-Vallée RER A to Cergy
4.5 2.9 4.7 2.8 1.8
10.5 6 10.3 4.8 4.5
15.1 11.3 13.2 7.8 9.1
17.7 14.5 14.5 12.3 10.5
19.3 15.5 16.4 14.5 14.8
21.4 16.1 18.7 ~15.5 17.5
23.2 17.7 23 17.6 18.8
24.5 18.8 26.1 20 25.6
25.4 19.8 28 22.7 29.7
26.7 21 30.3 24 ~32.5
28.5 22.1 34 30 34.8
30.9 22.7 36.9 35 38.6

Observe that the stop spacing for the first 3-5 stops is very express, but drops to that of an average subway for the Metra line beyond that. The UP-North line is especially egregious – despite serving the densely populated North Side, it barely stops there, letting the Red Line do all the work. Meanwhile, on the RER A, this is not the case – although stop spacing tightens slightly beyond the first few stops, the effect is small. Even the long nonstop segment between Etoile and La Défense (the second and third stop on the RER A to Cergy) is not enough to create the same effect seen in Chicago, and to some extent other American cities.

Bear in mind, the RER is explicitly an express railroad, though it is fare-integrated with local transit within Paris proper. Systems called S-Bahn, as well as commuter rail in Japan, range from operationally indistinguishable to operationally barely distinguishable from wholly-urban rapid transit. Thus their stop spacing is much smaller, especially in the urban core.

Part of the issue is that there’s not much development around railroads in American cities, since development follows arterial roads and urban transit instead. This is related in both directions to the failure of commuter rail to provide good urban service: there’s upzoning around subway and light rail stations, but not around commuter rail stations. But even when there is development near commuter rail stations, such as around Forest Hills in New York, service is suburban-focused (midday LIRR frequency to Forest Hills is hourly).

Whatever the ultimate cause of this, the result is that commuter rail is not usable where people are most likely to ride transit. Thus it is not too useful for a transit revival. The present revivals proceed from the inside out, starting from the urban core and expanding to outer-urban neighborhoods and then inner suburbs. At each stage, it’s useful to expand transit a little bit beyond the reach of the revival to capture additional ridership, and perhaps hit an anchor, and so there’s room for additional transit use from farther out. This is short-circuited when urban and suburban transit are kept segregated. So far it’s not been enough to prevent some transit revival in some American cities, such as New York and Washington, but it’s a problem in such cities as Boston and Chicago and may prove a problem everywhere once cities run out of subway-accessible areas.

Park and Rides, and Good Planning

Some people with experience in American bus planning have come strongly for park-and-rides, as a convenient means of concentrating all people boarding buses at one spot in order to improve frequency. The charge is led by Joel Azumah of Transport Azumah, who, responding to my question of whether it’s worth it to have strongly peaked buses, says,

Instead of running a separate park & ride and regional service, you can broaden the span of park & ride service. That would allow you to use some buses more than once or to add the early & late buses for flexibility. Park & riders that use services with a narrow span will drive in if they think their schedule is going to change. The extra buses will reduce that tendency.

In this view, the primary purpose of off-peak service is to provide peak riders with extra flexibility, making it a loss leader. This is indeed one of the main purposes of an all-day clockface schedule, as opposed to the essentially peak-only service provided by nearly all North American commuter lines. And yet, one part of Joel’s response bothered me. Observe that he contrasts his view with “running a separate park-and-ride and regional service.” In other words, a bus that serves a park-and-ride can’t serve walkable residential and commercial suburban strips. While this is a plausible constraint for an express bus, it is not a real issue for commuter rail, as long as the commuter rail is done right: trains make multiple stops, and those can include both walkable towns and some regional park-and-rides.

Of course, American commuter rail is without exception done wrong. This manifests itself in three different problems, all of which make park-and-rides look much more important than they actually are.

First, the rolling stock used, except on the LIRR, SEPTA, and Metro-North, is substandard. In particular, trains hauled by adapted freight locomotives take a long time to accelerate to even medium speed: the MBTA’s current trains lose 70 seconds just accelerating from 0 to 60 mph, and the FRA-compliant improvement, using Colorado Railcar DMUs, only cuts this to 42, as established in Table 3.1 of the Fairmount Line study. For comparison, modern EMUs, even of the FRA-compliant variety, lose about 13 seconds. The result is that trains can’t make frequent stops while maintaining acceptable average speed. Thus the service pattern already includes widely separated stops, forcing people to drive to stations, and moreover involves complex patterns with express trains.

Second, nearly all agencies, assume because of tradition that they can only serve peak riders to the CBD. Occasionally there’s some reverse-peak service, but its usage as a percentage of employment in the suburbs served is trivial. Even Metro-North, perhaps the most forward-thinking agency for reverse commuting, is uncompetitive for suburban employment. Stamford has a ridership of about 4,000 employees, in addition to about 3,000 residents working in New York; the total number of transit users working in Stamford is 8,600, itself only 11% of the city’s employment. This pattern in which nearly all ridership is inbound peak reinforces itself, and agencies do not usually try to provide adequate off-peak and reverse-peak service. The MBTA provides two-hour service off-peak on most lines. The LIRR runs trains one-way on the Main Line during peak hour, to allow the peak frequency of 20 trains per hour to run express trains rather than just locals.

And third, invariably, the suburban stations are all park-and-rides themselves. Some are explicitly configured as such, such as Metropark and Route 128. Those are good and need to be there. The problem is that pretty much all stations are friendlier to cars than to pedestrians. Sometimes they’re located outside the towns they purport to serve – for particularly bad examples, look at satellite photos of Plymouth and Westborough. Plymouth’s station is to the north of the old train station and town center, robbing the station of pedestrian traffic, and because Plymouth’s ridership has to come from drivers, the MBTA prefers to have most trains skip Plymouth entirely and just serve Kingston-Route 3, a standard park-and-ride. In a similar manner, Hicksville has a fair amount of development near the station, but so much parking that it’s poorly connected to the station for the pedestrian. Even Providence, Worcester, and New Haven get stations without much pedestrian-oriented development nearby; Providence, the best of the bunch, has development, but it’s sterile residential plus a mall flanked by pedestrian-hostile arterials.

The result of all this is that there isn’t a single example in the US of a commuter line, rail or bus, where most people walk to the station. Thus, issues including off-peak ridership and development near the stations look unsolvable. Those park-and-ride users grumble about difficult parking and do not take trains except to the city during rush hour. Who will drive to take a train that comes every two hours when it’s possible to just drive to the city?

Commuter rail done right does not have this problem, because it runs good (high-performance, low-energy consumption) trains with only one or two staff on board, and so it can run with long span and high frequency while serving many stations. This is roughly how many modern light rail lines in North America operate: there are a few park-and-rides, and a lot of stations located in between that are accessible to pedestrians and interface with feeder buses.

But for mainline rail, one has to look for examples outside the US. In Japan, new transit construction outside the dense city cores is accompanied by intense development near stations: see, for a recent example, the Tsukuba Express. Shopping centers and dense residential areas will generate ridership all day and in both directions; park-and-rides exist, but do not occupy center stage as they do in the US. Likewise, in Germany, one of the practices that evolved in the recent transit revival is closely spaced stations, located everywhere a railroad intersects a walkable place; speed is maintained via trains with good acceleration and level boarding, resulting in average speeds that match those of American commuter lines despite the shorter interstations.

The political infrastructure that exists in Germany and Japan and allows this and is absent in the US is coordinated planning. There is no way a single entrepreneur can create all the required development and local transit coordination. Transportation isn’t web entrepreneurship; it has no Mark Zuckerbergs or Larry Pages, who can almost singlehandedly create all the agglomeration required to support the new technology. Most of the time, this is done by cooperative government planning. The rest of the time it’s done by established conglomerates, usually combining real estate and transportation, including the Hong Kong MTR and the private railroads in Japan.

There is also some component of technology there. Small-scale entrepreneurs can run express buses, which can’t adequately serve many stations while maintaining competitive speed, much more easily than they can run trains, which can. They cannot run trains at all in the closed-access paradigm that rules American (and Japanese) railroading; they have an easier time in open-access Europe, and yet even then most private players are again big conglomerates, such as Veolia and Virgin.

Although transit must make room for the private sector, a transit revival that relies on uncoordinated private players will necessarily fail. Britain, the most privatized of the countries with a revival (high-income East Asia has no revival, as in the big metro areas transit never declined in the first place), needed to revert to public infrastructure planning with Network Rail, and maintains some of the key features of cooperative planning, including integrated tickets and fares. The rest of Europe contracts out services, but still strives to improve intermodal and interagency transfers; in Switzerland, transfers are timed even when multiple operators are involved. The role of people like Joel and the other private-sector players is to bid for operating routes that fit into a combined system, and add service (still within a fare union!) on thick routes where timetable coordination is less important.

What this means is that a transit revival must include more competent government planning. If there had been no Interstates, and certainly if there had been no expressways built by the states from the 1930s on, some of the railroads would’ve survived to do planning entirely in the private sector, as is the case in Japan. But given that there’s nothing like Japan’s private railroads in the US to plan integrated transportation using market principles, the government needs to do it, and it needs to do it well. It can’t privatize everything; the operators will just loot it for subsidies and neglect any components of development that don’t lead to immediate profit. And it needs to learn from some of the practices of express bus operators, but recognize when it can do better than just copy them.

Macrodestinations and Microdestinations

In her book Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs complains that freeways as built are good at getting people to macrodestinations (downtown) but not microdestinations (particular addresses within city center). In her example from Toronto, this is correct, but in general, each mode of transportation will be good at serving microdestinations in an urban form that’s suited for it. Cars are not good at serving an intact city center; but equally, transit is not good at serving suburban sprawl, and regional rail that’s not integrated with urban transit is not good at serving urban destinations away from immediate train stations.

The idealized job center in an auto-oriented city is the edgeless city. Even the edge city, as explained in Lang and LeFurgy’s now-paywalled article Edgeless Cities, is too dense, and becomes congested too quickly; indeed, Tysons Corner is infamous for its lunchtime rush hour conditions. Ideally, cars drive from low-density residences to low-density office parks, primarily on freeways but with fast arterial connections at both ends; the freeway network in the auto-oriented city serves an everywhere-to-everywhere set of origins and destinations.

In such an environment, transit can’t do well. The distance between suburban attractors is too great for an easy walk, and the roads are too wide and fast for a pleasant walk. Buses and trains can serve a general macrodestination (“Warwick Mall/CCRI”), but not individual microdestinations, not without splitting and cutting frequency to each destination or detouring and raising travel time. The buses serving Warwick Mall and CCRI have hourly frequency, and are a long, uncomfortable walk from the hotel in Warwick I needed to go to. Judging by the frequency, I’m not the only person who chose not to use them, and take a taxi instead; everyone who has a car or who isn’t extremely price-sensitive does. The only way transit can serve such a destination is by concentrating development near the station – in other words, making a mini-transit city in the sea of sprawl, which generally conflicts with the goal of easy station parking.

In a city, the opposite situation exists. It’s easy to just pronounce transit more suited to dense city centers than driving, but the situation is more complicated. Transit, too, thrives on good connections to microdestinations. It can’t serve employment that’s dense but evenly dispersed in a large area – people would need too many transfers, and the result would be service that’s on paper rapid and in reality too slow. Instead, it works best when all destinations are clustered together, in an area not many subway stations in radius.

In this view, one failure of urban renewal is its failure to recognize that most people who visit city centers are going to do a lot of walking, and amenities should make it easier rather than harder. Traditional urban renewal would build cultural centers and other projects at the fringe of the CBD, to help its growth: Lincoln Center just north of Midtown, Civic Center just southwest of the San Francisco CBD, Providence Place and Providence Station just north of Downcity. In New York and San Francisco, there’s at least rapid transit serving those destinations, mitigating the effects. In Providence, no such thing exists. It’s an inconvenient walk from Kennedy Plaza to the mall and the train station – it’s not too long, but it crosses Memorial Boulevard right when it turns into a freeway on-ramp. Walking to the Westin, immediately adjacent to the mall, is practically impossible without rushing across roads without crosswalks. Even the walk between the station and the mall, which were built together and are close to each other, is much worse on the street than on a map, again involving crossing auto-centric roads.

Organic city amenities do not look like this. If they cluster at the same location (for example, 125th Street in New York, or Thayer Street in Providence), they tend to be along roads that facilitate rather than hindering pedestrian movement. And if they don’t, they are all located along a rapid transit network in its shared service area, where it is still a tight mesh rather than a network of radial lines.

In view of the recent emphasis on parking policy, due to Donald Shoup but now mirrored by other urban planning and transportation experts, the observation is that in any city center, on-site parking is difficult to find. Even in cities that make downtown parking relatively easy to get to, people can’t hope to park at every single microdestination, so instead they trip-chain, driving into the city and parking but going to multiple points within the city, all within a short and easy walking distance from one another. This is roughly the urban geography of the French Riviera, which combines easy parking with a dense, lively center in Nice and a fair amount of urbanity on some streets even in auto-oriented secondary cities such as Monaco and Menton.

The connection to regional rail is that, historically, it descends from intercity trains, and therefore the conception of connecting the suburbs to the city is very macrodestination-driven. To name two egregious American examples, the Boston’s north side lines and Caltrain both connect many suburbs to the city while also connecting people to the suburban tech job corridor, but in reality miss the biggest job centers at both ends. North Station is two subway stations north of the CBD, and as a result ridership underperforms the south side lines; 4th and King is far enough outside the Market Street CBD that it’s not close to the CBD jobs – the proposed Transbay Center site, which is, is located near more jobs than all existing Caltrain stations combined. And if microdestination-level service to an already transit-oriented CBD is bad, then service to other urban destinations is worse: urban station spacing is wide, there’s no attempt to develop near stations, and the poor integration with local urban transit ensures that even people who could be willing to make the last-mile transfer don’t.

MBTA Mode Shares

As a followup to my claim in my first post about improving the MBTA about the low mode share of commuter rail for trips into Boston, here are some figures about commuter rail use, by sector. All numbers exclude commuters from inner suburbs and from Boston itself, since those would use the subway. Only Boston-bound commuters are included. I’m providing wider and narrower numbers, wider numbers corresponding to the entire sector defined by a commuter line and narrower numbers including only towns within reasonable range of a commuter station.

All commuter rail numbers come from the Bluebook and are averages as of February 2009, from page 74; be careful not to use numbers from the map on page 70, as they inflate the ridership on the Providence Line. All commute market numbers come from the 2000 census; I do not believe commuting patterns have changed so radically as to significantly alter the picture.

Update: we obtain the following table, explained below (see also computation error fix for Haverhill):

Line Wide market Narrow market Riders Share of wide Share of narrow
Old Colony 43,587 34,934 20,907 48% 60%
Providence, Stoughton 23,297 17,490 11,719 50% 67%
Franklin 14,899 12,747 7,043 47% 55%
Worcester 19,997 15,581 7,479 37% 48%
Fitchburg 16,544 13,358 5,883 38% 44%
Lowell 15,551 11,912 5,586 36% 47%
Haverhill 19,196 16,902 8,922 46% 53%
Newburyport, Rockport 26,926 25,534 13,230 49% 52%

Old Colony Lines (including Greenbush)

Commute market (wider): all of Plymouth County; Cohasset, Weymouth, Randolph, Holbrook, and Avon towns in Norfolk County

Commute market (narrower): including only the above Norfolk County towns and Plymouth County’s towns of Abington, Bridgewater (including East and West), Brockton, Hanson, Hingham, Hull, Kingston, Lakeville, Middleborough, Plymouth, Rockland, Scituate, and Whitman

Commuter volume (wider): 43,587

Commuter volume (narrower): 34,934

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 12,065 (excluding JFK-UMass, Quincy, and Braintree)

Extra transit use: 7,244 subway and commuter rail boardings in Quincy and Braintree beyond those accounted for by those two towns’ commuter market; 1,598 commuter ferry riders, mostly from Hingham

Mode share: 60% of the narrow market, 48% of the wide market

Providence and Stoughton Lines

Commute market (wider): all of Rhode Island, all of Massachusetts’ Bristol County, and the towns of Sharon, Canton, Stoughton, and Plainville in Norfolk County

Commuter market (narrower): the three Norfolk County towns omitting Plainville, all of Rhode Island’s Providence and Kent Counties, and Massachusetts’ Bristol County’s towns of Attleboro (including North), Mansfield, Easton, Norton, and Seekonk

Commuter volume (wider): 23,297

Commuter volume (narrower): 17,490

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 11,719

Extra transit use: none

Mode share: 67% of the narrow market, 50% of the wide market

Franklin Line

Commute market (narrower): Norfolk County’s towns of Dedham, Westwood, Norwood, Walpole, Norfolk, and Franklin

Commute market (wider): the above plus the towns of Medfield, Medway, and Wrentham

Commuter volume (wider): 14,899

Commuter volume (narrower): 12,747

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 7,043

Extra transit use: none

Mode share: 55% of the narrow market, 47% of the wide market

Worcester Line

Commute market (wider): all of Worcester County except Fitchburg, Harvard, Westminster, Gardner, and Leominster; Wellesley; and Middlesex County’s towns of Natick, Ashland, Framingham, Marlborough, Hudson, Hopkinton, Holliston, and Sherborn

Commute market (narrower): Wellesley; Middlesex’s above counties omitting Hudson, Holliston, and Marlborough towns; and including only Worcester County’s towns of Southborough, Westborough, Northborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, Worcester, Auburn, and Millbury

Commuter volume (wider): 19,997

Commuter volume (narrower): 15,581

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 7,479 (west of Newton only)

Extra transit use: none, as all Green Line usage is accounted for by Newton commuters

Mode share: 48% of the narrow market, 37% of the wide market

Fitchburg Line

Commute market (wider): Worcester County’s Fitchburg, Harvard, Westminster, Gardner, and Leominster towns; Middlesex County’s Belmont, Waltham, Wayland, Weston, Concord, Sudbury, Acton, Maynard, Stow, Lincoln, Littleton, Boxborough, Ayer, and Townsend towns

Commute market (narrower): Worcester County’s Fitchburg and Leominster only; Middlesex County’s above towns, omitting Stow, Townsend, Wayland, and Sudbury

Commuter volume (wider): 16,544

Commuter volume (narrower): 13,358

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,883 excluding Porter

Extra transit use: two local bus lines (70, 70A) to Waltham with 4,343 trips in each direction and two more express lines (553-4) with a combined 681 trips (none serving just Waltham, but also Newton or Cambridge), but conversely much of the ridership Waltham generates is non-commuter student traffic

Mode share (assuming neutral Waltham effect): 44% of the narrow market, 36% of the wide market

Lowell Line

Commute market (narrower): Middlesex County only, towns of Winchester, Wilmington (half, shared with Haverhill Line), Woburn, Billerica, Lowell, Chelmsford, Tewksbury, and Dracut

Commute market (wider): the above, plus the Middlesex County towns of Dunstable, Westford, and Tyngsboro, and all of New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County

Commuter volume (wider): 15,551

Commuter volume (narrower): 11,912

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,586 excluding West Medford

Extra transit use: none – if anything, this line is missing more of its potential coming from its inability to serve Medford well under current commuter rail paradigms

Mode share: 47% of the narrow market, 36% of the wide market

Haverhill Line

Commute market (narrower): Middlesex County’s towns of Melrose, Stoneham, Wakefield, Reading, North Reading, and Wilmington (half, shared with Lowell Line); and Essex County’s towns of Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, and Haverhill

Commute market (wider): the above, plus Essex County’s towns of Boxford, Middleton, Groveland, and Lynnfield

Commuter volume (wider): 19,196

Commuter volume (narrower): 16,902

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,343 excluding Malden

Extra transit ridership: Malden’s two subway stations get 8,375 riders beyond the commute market, but they could be coming from people from Everett and Medford – let’s just add the number of parking spaces, which is 976, plus one half of the remaining ridership at Oak Grove, representing Melrose and Stoneham’s share, which is 2,603 (total bus ridership in Malden and the cities to its north is 3,394 in each direction, and I’m willing to believe 2,603 of this is from north of Malden)

Mode share: 53% of the narrow market, 46% of the wide market (update: a previous version of this post gave slightly lower numbers coming from forgetting to add the 976 subway parking spaces to the imputed ridership)

Newburyport and Rockport Lines

Commute market (wider): all of Essex County except the towns of Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, Haverhill, Boxford, Middleton, Groveland, and Lynnfield

Commute market (narrower): Essex County omitting, in addition to the above, the towns of Amesbury, Georgetown, Essex, West Newbury, Topsfield, and if one wants to be very narrow then also Saugus

Commuter volume (wider): 26,926

Commuter volume (narrower): 25,534 with Saugus, 22,999 without

Inbound commuter rail ridership: 8,821 excluding Chelsea

Extra transit use: no rail, but likely high bus ridership coming out of Lynn – total North Shore ridership is 4,409 in each direction excluding the 430, which is assigned to the Haverhill Line, and some lines that do not serve subway stations (429, 431, 435, 436, 451, 455, 465, 468)

Mode share: counting commuter rail only, 38% of the narrowest market and 33% of the wide market; counting also buses, 52% of the narrow market including Saugus and 49% of the wide market

Conclusion

The best-performing sectors capture about half the ridership of their general area of service and two-thirds of the ridership coming from the towns served by transit. Except for the Providence Line, this requires heavy use of subways and buses; the high contribution of commuter buses north of Boston suggests that better regional rail service, with more useful frequencies and integration between the CharlieCard and Charlie Ticket, really would make a difference, effectively railstituting the trip to Boston and allowing redirecting the buses to feeder service. The worst-performing lines only capture a third of the market, and for those there’s less that can be done; regional rail improvements would help, especially with regards to speed and reliability, but often those areas are too sprawled out.

Another conclusion is that for the purposes of constructing timetables for an electrified, FRA-free MBTA, we should ignore current ridership patterns, and instead look at the volume of commuting. The southwesterly slice serving Providence is not special; it just gets higher mode share on commuter rail since the service levels are higher than elsewhere. A 15/30 timetable on each line or branch (counting Kingston and Plymouth as one, but not any other split) would more or less approximate market demand; it would still underserve the South Shore, but the South Shore has ferry use and subway use, and therefore there’s no lower-level service to replace with good commuter rail.

A third conclusion is that it matters whether commuter rail can serve shorter trips or not, such as trips from Waltham, Medford, Malden, Lynn, and the Fairmount Line area. Those towns and neighborhoods have much larger volumes of commuters heading toward Boston than farther-out towns. This observation favors the regional rather than intercity interpretation of commuter rail, sacrificing speed in order to improve coverage in the innermost suburbs and in outer-urban neighborhoods.

On no line is express service a good proposition except when it’s downright intercity service, such as high-speed rail to New York via Providence, or even intercity trains to Maine or deep into New Hampshire. The problems coming from runtimes that aren’t a short turnaround time less than an even multiple of 15 minutes should not be fixed with express trains, but with closing some stations that aren’t necessary (such as River Works and Mishawum), and building more infill together with the North-South Rail Link, redistributing lines in such a manner as to maximize efficiency. For example, if the branch from Lynn to Marblehead is reactivated, then even with several additional infill stops, trip time from North Station to Marblehead would be about 22 minutes, which together with time gains from the tunnel (travel time through the rail link should be a hair lower than a turnaround time) would allow mixing with the Worcester Line. Currently it’d be difficult to do Worcester-Boston in 55 minutes even under best operating assumptions, and impossible with infill stations, but with the rail link and through-service to Marblehead, the limit would be closer to 1:01, and this allows a few infill stops in Brighton.

What’s driving all of this is the fact that there isn’t all that much demand mismatch. The South Side lines have a larger (wide) market than the North Side lines, but the difference is much smaller than the difference in ridership, and decreases even further if one lets the subway take care of certain parts of the South Shore. This means that, in terms of planning, all lines should be upgraded and should receive ample attention toward service levels, and in terms of operations, through-service should be based on infrastructure capabilities and scheduling constraints rather than on service demand matching.

The Limits of Clockface Scheduling

This is morally the last post in my series on improving the MBTA: see here, here, and here for the three previous posts. However, it’s a more general principle concerning interlined regional rail services.

Good practice for running transit service that isn’t at show-up-and-go frequency – say, anything that comes every 10 minutes or more, certainly anything that comes every 15 minutes or more – is to have regular clockface intervals. This is memorable for passengers, and works as a baseline with which to work on providing extra connections. In addition, if there is interlining, then it makes it easy to schedule trains to come at a uniform frequency on the share segment. If service is uniform throughout the day, then this is very easy. The problems start when it is not.

Normally, if extra peak service is required, then rigid clockface systems, such as those found in the German-speaking world, will usually interpolate in the middle of the period. In other words, if a station gets inbound trains at :00 and :30 every hour, then in the peak it will also get them at :15 and :45. This is what’s done in Stuttgart on two of the S-Bahn lines, interpreting peak very liberally, and less rigidly on the TER in Nice. Many systems instead use similar peak and midday service, dropping service only in the evening, such as the Berlin S-Bahn, and BART.

To see where problems could occur, let us look at Berlin again. There are three services on the Stadtbahn: the S5, the S7, and the S75. At the peak, all three run every ten minutes, with westbound trains departing Ostkreuz at :02, :00, and :05 respectively. Off-peak, the S75 drops to 20-minute frequencies, introducing 8-minute gaps into a schedule whose average headway is 4 minutes.

For a cleaner, contrived example, let’s say we interline two services, each with a 15/30 frequency; a factor-of-2 difference in frequency is more or less the norm on commuter lines in Tokyo and Paris, which do not have rigid clockface schedules – more local lines have a slightly smaller gradient than more long-distance lines. There is an inherent tradeoff between uniform frequency at the peak and uniform frequency off-peak. It’d be much easier to do if both services were bound to have the same frequency but the frequency varied continuously, as it does on most subways; however, what works on a dedicated line when passengers show up and go fails when passengers consult schedules and when timed connections or overtakes are involved.

More concretely, if Line 1 leaves a station at :00 and Line 2 leaves at :08, providing uniform peak frequency of 7-8 minutes, then off-peak we will have a 22-minute gap when we reduce to half-hourly frequency on each line; and if Line 2 instead leaves nearly at :15 to provide uniform off-peak frequency, then there will be a gap of nearly 15 minutes at the peak. The sum of the largest peak and off-peak gaps is necessarily 30 minutes, whereas the ideal would be for the sum to be 22.5 minutes.

Extra constraints can force one choice of gaps. For example, the Providence and Stoughton Lines are (or should be) constrained by the need to fit faster intercity trains on the line, at least in the future; for details of those constraints, see my posts on MBTA-HSR compatibility. In short, if we choose the symmetry axis to be :00, then Providence Line trains are compelled to leave South Station at :02 to meet up with trains to Woonsocket, and high-speed trains leave South Station at :10-11 and begin to overtake Providence trains at Readville at :15. Stoughton trains should then leave immediately after the high-speed trains so that they can leave the line toward Stoughton just before they’d get overtaken (at Sharon, if they continued), which means at :12-13. Thus we obtain about a 10-minute gap at the peak and a 20-minute gap off-peak, which is an acceptable compromise.

In contrast, one thing that clockface scheduling does not limit is short-turns. Indeed the Berlin S-Bahn often short-turns every other train, without trouble. Moreover, it is not difficult to drop to half the peak frequency with short-turns. If a train that leaves at :00 runs all the way to the end and a train that leaves at :08 short-turns (both repeating every 15 minutes), then it is not difficult to change things so that in the off-peak, a train that leaves at :00 or :30 runs to the end and a train that leaves at :15 and :45 short-turns. People beyond the short-turn point would still only need to memorize at what minute between :00 and :29 the trains serve their stations, and it would be regular all day; people before the short-turn point would again only need to memorize one number, from :00 to :14. In the case of the MBTA, this means that the Fairmount Line (which should get a train that turns at Readville for every train that continues toward the Franklin Line) can get a perfectly regular timetable.

Improving the MBTA: Electronics and Concrete

Where improvements in New York and other very large cities can easily include multiple new subway lines, the same is not true of Boston. The concrete pouring would be wasted, since Boston’s existing subway lines are not at capacity. The busiest line, the Red Line, has a peak frequency of one train every 4.5 minutes, which could be doubled with appropriate signaling improvements and more rolling stock if necessary. The Green Line has bigger issues coming from branching – its core segment already runs close to 40 trains per hour – but this could be resolved by obtaining fully low-floor vehicles and lengthening trains to allow one or two extra branches.

Another thing that Boston lacks and other US cities do is very busy bus lines to railstitute. Boston’s busiest bus line is the Silver Line to Dudley Square, which used to be the southern part of the Orange Line and should be light rail; unfortunately, the MBTA rejected it as cost-ineffective (see pp. 36-7) by applying a wrong cost-per-rider metric, as I will explain in a later post. But beyond that, the list of bus lines (p. 50 of the Bluebook) doesn’t contain anything nearly as juicy as New York’s bus lines: New York’s 50th busiest bus is roughly even with Boston’s top bus at 15,000 weekday riders, and its top routes have 50,000, making them obvious choices for subway extensions.

Since Boston does not have a capacity problem requiring more concrete pouring on its subway lines, nor high-productivity buses to railstitute, concrete pouring should focus on the other main reason to build rapid transit: to extend service to areas that do not have it. That’s the main reason to build the North-South Rail Link: it’s as much about direct service from suburbs north of Boston to downtown and maybe Back Bay as about rationalizing service and permitting through-running. As in Philadelphia and as should be the case in New York, through-running is primarily not about suburb-to-suburb service, but about access to job centers near the stations of the other half of the commuter network (in New York those would be at Newark, Brooklyn, and Jamaica; in Philadelphia, at Temple and 30th Street Station and in University City).

The list of concrete-pouring, lines-on-a-map extensions of the MBTA in or near Boston should therefore be limited to required Big Dig mitigations, and not much more. This is not just because they are legally mandated. They are also good transit by themselves – the North-South Rail Link for the aforementioned reasons, the Assembly Square stop on the Orange Line because of the TOD potential, the Red-Blue connection because of the East Boston-Cambridge service need, and the Green Line extensions because they provide much-needed transit service in Somerville that would otherwise need to be picked up by commuter rail, at the cost of good intercity service on the Lowell Line. Apart from these, the only major radial extension that should be pursued is the dismembering of the Needham Line outlined in my last post, in which the Orange Line would take over the portion within Boston and the Green Line would take over the portion in Needham.

What should be done instead of more expansive extension plans is very aggressive use of electronics to make regional rail more useful, recalling that its share of the suburbs-to-Boston market is about one third. This necessitates a lot of concrete pouring as well – on high platforms, on track repairs, on double-tracking some single-track segments, and on other things that do not show up easily on maps – but much less than adding tunnels.

The one difficult bit of concrete pouring that has to be done, in conjunction with the North-South Rail Link, is grade-separating the junctions that lead up to North and South Stations. Without the rail link, the South Station throat is such that, run right, it’s operationally at least two stations (one for lines serving Back Bay, one for the rest), and as many as four (Worcester, the lines feeding into Ruggles, Fairmount, and Old Colony and Greenbush); this allows for zero-conflict moves, higher capacity than the MBTA thinks, and a system in which delays on one line do not affect the others. With the rail link, those two to four systems need to feed into one track pair in a way that avoids opposite-direction flat junctions. The need for grade separations right in the station throats would add substantially to the cost of the rail link over a simple two-track tunnel; that’s why I’m not instantly dismissing it as something that at normal-world costs would take a relatively trivial $500 million.

Despite the rail link’s cost, the electronics are themselves substantial.  Signaling improvements are also required, to enable tighter overtakes. Moreover, full electrification should be non-negotiable – the MBTA’s stop spacing may not be as close as that of Metra or the LIRR or Metro-North or SEPTA, but it’s short enough that electrification would make a significant difference in performance. It also interacts interestingly with FRA waivers: on the one hand, without electrification, there are no good FRA-compliant trains – the Colorado Railcar DMUs have mediocre performance and are expensive and vendor-locked, and locomotive-hauled trains have terrible performance. With electrification, there exist decent FRA-compliant trains, but there also exist very good noncompliant trains. According to the Fairmount Line DMU document, current trains have a total acceleration-only penalty of 70 seconds to 60 mph, and Colorado Railcars shave that to 41 (see chart on p. 10); judging by timetable differences and dwell times, the best compliant EMUs lose about 20-25, and judging by YouTube videos FLIRTs lose 13.

The timetable examples I’ve put out – for the Providence Line in past posts, and for the Lowell Line in comments – are very ambitious, and require the signaling, electrification, and rolling stock to be perfect. The costs are not very high by US standards, but are nontrivial. Electrification costs a little more than a million dollars per kilometer (or about $2 million per mile), though it’s unclear whether this is based on route-km or track-km, as one citation I have is for a single-track line and another does not make it clear which one is under consideration. The cost is thus either about $750 million or about $1.5 billion, exclusive of rolling stock. But the benefit is commuter trains that can beat the freeways while also providing adequate regional service and connect to urban rail.