Category: Urban Transit
What Europe Can Learn From Asia
Most of what I write about is what North America can learn from Europe, but the rich countries of Asia are extremely important as well. But what’s more interesting is knowledge sharing between Western Europe and the rich countries of East Asia. These two centers of passenger rail technology have some reciprocal exchange programs, but still learn less from each other than they should.
The ongoing coronavirus outbreak made the topic of Western learning from East Asia especially important. To be clear, none of the examples I’m going to talk about in this post is about the virus itself or at all about public health. But the sort of reaction in democratic East Asia that’s staved off the infection, compared with the failure of the West to do much in time, is instructive. When the virus was just in China, nobody in the West cared. I went to a comedy night in Berlin a month ago and it was the Asian comic who joked about how all they needed was to cough and the white people gave them space; it was still viewed as an exclusively Asian epidemic. By the same token, Korea’s success in reducing infections has made it to parts of Western media, but implementation still lags, leading to an explosion of deaths in Italy and perhaps soon France and the US. Hong Kong (from the bottom up) and Taiwan (with government assistance) have limited infection through social distancing and mask wearing, and the West refuses to adopt either.
If it’s Asian, Europeans as well as Americans view it as automatically either inferior or irredeemably foreign. Whatever the reasoning is, it’s an excuse not to learn. Unlike the United States, Europe has pretty good public transportation in the main cities, and a lot of domestic innovations that are genuinely better than what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan do; thus, it can keep going on like this without visible signs of stagnation. Nonetheless, what Japan has, and to some extent the other rich Asian countries, remains a valuable lesson, which good public transport advocates and managers must learn to adopt to the European case.
Urban rail and regional rail: network design
Tokyo and Seoul both have stronger S-Bahn networks than any European city. This is not just an artifact of size. Paris and London are both pretty big, even if they’re still only about a third as big as Tokyo. In Tokyo, the infrastructure for urban and regional rail is just far better-integrated, and has been almost from the start. Among the 13 Tokyo subway lines, only three run as pure metro lines, separate from all other traffic: Ginza, Marunouchi, Oedo. The other 10 are essentially S-Bahn tunnels providing through-service between different preexisting commuter lines: the Asakusa Line connects the Keisei and Keikyu systems, the Hibiya Line connects the Tobu Skytree Line with Central Tokyo and used to through-run to the Tokyu Toyoko Line, etc.
This paradigm of cross-regional traffic is so strong that on lines that do not have convenient commuter lines to connect to, there are suburban tails built just to extend them farther out. The Tozai Line hooks into a reverse-branch of the Chuo Line to the west, but to the east has little opportunity for through-service, and therefore most trains continue onto an extension called the Toyo Rapid Railway.
On the JR East network, there are a few subway connections to, but for the most part the network has its own lines to Central Tokyo. This is an early invention of mainline rail through-running, alongside the Berlin S-Bahn; the Yamanote ring was completed in 1925. Further investment in through-service since then has given more lines dedicated tracks through Central Tokyo, for capacity more than anything else.
The issue is not just that there are many through-running lines. Tokyo has 15-16 through-running trunks, depending on how one counts, and Paris, a metro area about one third the size, will soon have 4.5. It’s not such a big difference. Rather, Tokyo’s through-running lines function well as a metro within the city in ways the Berlin S-Bahn, the Paris RER, the Madrid Cercanías, and any future London Crossrail lines simply don’t.
What’s more, future investment plans in Europe do not really attempt to turn the commuter rail network into a useful metro within the city. Berlin has a strong potential northwest-southeast S-Bahn route forming a Soviet triangle with the two existing radial trunks, but it’s not being built, despite proposals by online and offline advocates; instead, current S21 plans call for duplicating north-south infrastructure. In Paris, the RER C doesn’t really work well with the other lines, the RER E extension plans are a mess, and most of the region’s effort for suburban rail expansion is spent on greenfield driverless metro and not on anything with connections to legacy mainlines. In London, the subsurface Underground lines are historically a proto-S-Bahn, with some mainline through-service in the 19th century, but they are not really used this way today even though there is a good proposal by railfans.
While Europe generally does the longer-distance version of regional rail better than Japan, the vast majority of ridership is S-Bahn-type, and there, Japan absolutely crushes. What’s more, Korea has learned from Japan’s example, so that the Seoul Subway Line 1 is an S-Bahn and many other lines are very long-range; Seoul’s per capita rail ridership is much lower than Paris’s, but is increasing fast, as South Korea is a newly-industrialized country still building its infrastructure at low cost to converge to Western incomes.
Rolling stock
Tokyo outdoes the closest things to its peers in the West in S-Bahn network design. Japan is equally superior when it comes to the rolling stock technology itself. It has all of the following features:
- Low cost. Finding information about rolling stock costs in Japan is surprisingly hard, but Wikipedia claims the 10000 Series cost 1.2 billion yen per 10-car, 200-meter train, which is around $60,000/meter, compared with a European range that clusters around $100,000.
- Low weight – see table here. European trains are heavier, courtesy of different buff strength regulations that are not really needed for safety, as Japanese trains have lower death tolls per p-km than European ones thanks to accident avoidance.
- All-MU configuration – Japan has a handful of locomotives for passenger service for the few remaining night trains, and runs all other trains with EMUs and sometimes DMUs. Parts of Europe, like Britain, have made this transition as well, but Zurich still runs locomotives on the S-Bahn.
The one gap is that Europe is superior in the long-range regional rail segment with a top speed of 160-200 km/h. But Japanese trains are better at the more urban end up to 100 km/h thanks to their low cost and weight and at the high-speed end of 300+ km/h thanks to low cost and weight (again) and better performance.
Shinkansen equipment is also more technically advanced than European high-speed trains in a number of ways, in addition to its lower mass and cost. The N700-I has a power-to-weight ratio of 26.74 kW/t, whereas European trains are mostly in the low 20s. Japanese train noses are more aerodynamic due to stringent noise regulations and city-center stations, and the trains are also better-pressurized to avoid ear popping in tunnels. As a result, the Shinkansen network builds single-bore double-track tunnels hardly bigger than each individual bore in a twin-bore European rail tunnel, helping reduce cost relative to Japan’s heavily mountainous geography. The EU should permit such trains on its own tracks to improve service quality.
The Shinkansen
The Shinkansen works better than European high-speed rail networks in a few ways, in addition to rolling stock. Some of it is pure geographic luck: Japanese cities mostly lie on a single line, making it easy to have a single trunk serve all of them. However, a few positive decisions improve service beyond what pure geography dictates, and should be studied carefully in Britain, Germany, and Italy.
- Trains run through city centers with intermediate stops rather than around them. This slightly slows down the trains, because of the stop penalty at a city, and sometimes a slightly slowdown for an express train. This is especially important in Britain, which is proposing an excessively branched system for High Speed 2, severely reducing frequency on key connections like London-Birmingham and London-Manchester.
- Trains run on dedicated tracks, apart from the Mini-Shinkansen. This was enforced by a different track gauge, but a sufficiently strong national network should run on dedicated tracks even with the same gauge. This is of especial importance in Germany, which should be building out its network to the point of having little to no track-sharing between high-speed and legacy trains, which would enable high-speed trains to run more punctually.
- Train stations are through-stations (except Tokyo, which is almost set up to allow through-service and errs in not having any). If the legacy station is a terminal, like Aomori, or is too difficult to serve as a through-station, like Osaka, then the train will serve a near-downtown station a few km away, like Shin-Aomori 4 km from Aomori and Shin-Osaka 4 km from Osaka. Germany does this too at Kassel and has long-term plans to convert key intermediate terminals into through-stations, but France and Italy both neglect this option even when it is available, as in Tours and Turin.
- Rolling stock is designed for high capacity, including fast egress. There is no cafe car – all cars have seats. There are two wide door pairs per car, rather than just one as on the TGV. There is full level boarding with high platforms. Express trains dwell even at major stations for only about a minute, compared with 5 minutes on the TGV and even slower egress at the Paris terminals. Trains turn at the terminals in 12 minutes, reducing operating expenses.
- Pricing is simple and consistent, without the customer-hostile yield management practices of France, Spain, and much of the rest of Europe.
Reliability
Japan is renowned for its train punctuality. As far as I can tell, this comes from the same place as Switzerland: system design is centered around eliminating bottlenecks. Thus it’s normal in both Japan and Switzerland to leave some key commuter lines single-track if the frequency they run allows timed meets; both countries also employ timed overtakes between local and express trains on double track.
Where I think Japan does better than Switzerland is the use of track segregation to reduce delays. Captive trains are easier to control than highly-branched national rail networks. In Switzerland, there is no room for such captive trains – the entire country has fewer people than Tokyo, and the city of Zurich has fewer people than many individual Tokyo wards. But a big country could in effect turn long lines into mostly separated systems to improve punctuality. This goes against how the S-Bahn concept works in the German-speaking world, but the Tokyo and Seoul lines are in effect metros at a larger scale, even more so than the RER A and B or the Berlin S-Bahn. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Britain could all learn from this example.
The heavy emphasis on punctuality in Japanese railroad culture has been blamed for a fatal rail accident. But even with that accident, Japanese rail safety far surpasses Europe’s, approaching 80 billion passenger-km per on-board passenger fatality where Europe appears to be in the low teens.
Is this everything?
Not quite. I will write a companion piece about what Asia can learn from Europe eventually. For one, East Asia appears to optimize its rail operating culture to huge cities, much like France and Britain, and thus its smaller cities have less per capita rail usage than similar-size Central European ones; on this list, compare Fukuoka, Busan, and Sapporo with Stockholm, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart, Rome, Frankfurt, Barcelona, and Hamburg. Europe is also better when it comes to 160-200 km/h regional rail.
However, the bulk of intercity rail traffic even in Europe is on high-speed trains, an area in which Europe has more to learn from Japan than vice versa. Similarly, the bulk of individual boardings on trains are on metro and short-range S-Bahn trains even in the German-speaking world; there there is a lot of learning to be done in both directions, but at the end of the day, Tokyo has higher rail usage than Paris and London.
How to Do Coordinated Public Transport Planning
I’d like to share an example of how to implement coordinated planning for public transportation, using an example of something I’ve been working on with TransitMatters in and around Boston. Right now we’re writing schedules and proposing concrete investments including electrification on each commuter line into Boston; the process is different for each line, but the first line we’ve launched the document for, the Worcester Line, is illustrative in itself. You can find the file here and the broader proposal here; the first link bundles two separate documents, of which the Worcester proposal is the second. I’ve harped a lot on using the Swiss model for better regional rail, and here is one example of how to get a city whose rail technology is stuck in the 1930s to have what Zurich has.
Slogans and principles
I’ve harped on a few Swiss and Swiss-adjacent slogans before:
Organization before electronics before concrete. Investments in more tracks, tunnels, and so on should come last as they are expensive, and beforehand agencies should improve signaling and electrify as it is much cheaper. Moreover, fixing organizational issues, for example writing good schedules and integrating planning between different agencies, should come before anything else, as it requires planners to do more work but is otherwise cost-free.
Takt and symmetry. If a train leaves your station going eastbound at 7:14 am and the schedule is every half hour, then a train leaves your station going eastbound at :14 and :44 all day, every day; this is also called a clockface schedule. If there’s additional service during rush hour, it should fit into the takt, e.g. more trains coming at :29 and :59 for 2 morning hours and 2 afternoon hours. By the same token, trains going westbound should serve your station at :16 and :46, since 60-14 = 46. This means the overtakes, meets on a single-track line, etc. all occur at consistent places.
The magic triangle of infrastructure, rolling stock, and timetable. The plan must account for all three sides of the triangle simultaneously, in order to optimize investment. For example, if additional tracks are required for timed overtakes, then the agency should know what trains it’s going to run and how frequent it’s going to run them in order to know where the overtakes are needed. With a takt, the overtakes will be at consistent location where the region can target investment.
Run trains as fast as necessary. Increases in speed should be designed around making timed connections and limiting train downtime. One refinement on a suburban line is that the stop spacing should depend on the schedule: if the one-way trip time is 52 minutes then a short turnaround makes an hour and additional stops are difficult to fit in, whereas if it is 46 minutes then the turnaround is longer and there is room for more stops.
The knot system: knots (or nodes, same word in German) occur at major stations at regular intervals – at a minimum an interval equal to half the systemwide takt frequency. If trains run half-hourly, then a station with service at :00 and :30 or with service at :15 and :45 will be served in both directions at the same time, so it’s a good place for bus and train connections. This works in both planning directions: if the schedule happens to place a knot at a station then buses should go there, and conversely if a city is a major node then the schedule should be written to a place a knot there.
What we propose for Worcester
The proposal as written calls for two service patterns, one express and one local. At rush hour, both run every 15 minutes. Off-peak, the express pattern drops to 30-minute frequency, but the local pattern stays at 15 minutes, as it serves Boston neighborhoods and Newton, close enough in that high off-peak ridership can be expected. With electrification and high platforms, the following schedule is feasible:
| Station | Km-point | Local | Express |
| Boston South | 0 | 0:04 | 0:11 |
| Back Bay | 2.1 | 0:07 | 0:14 |
| Lansdowne (Fenway Park) | 4 | 0:09 | 0:16 |
| West (Allston) | 6.2 | 0:12 | |
| Boston Landing | 7.5 | 0:14 | |
| Newton Corner | 11.3 | 0:17 | 0:21 |
| Newtonville | 13.3 | 0:19 | |
| West Newton | 15.2 | 0:21 | |
| Auburndale | 16.9 | 0:23 | |
| Wellesley Farms | 20.3 | 0:26 | |
| Wellesley Hills | 21.8 | 0:28 | |
| Wellesley Square | 23.8 | 0:30 | |
| Natick | 28.5 | 0:34 | |
| West Natick | 32.1 | 0:36 | |
| Framingham | 34.3 | 0:39 | 0:32 |
| Ashland | 40.5 | 0:36 | |
| Southborough | 44.2 | 0:40 | |
| Westborough Center | 51.5 | 0:44 | |
| Grafton | 58.7 | 0:49 | |
| Worcester | 71.3 | 0:56 |
Express trains overtake locals at Wellesley Farms; there are plans for triple-tracking Wellesley (and farther west, but it’s not necessary). At Framingham, locals take 12 minutes to turn, which means there needs to be a non-revenue move around 0:41 westbound to a yard just west of Framingham to avoid getting in the way of express trains at :43 and :47 before getting back to Framingham at 0:49 to collect passengers; triple-tracking Framingham is also an option but is more expensive.
How it fits the principles
Let’s go over the Swiss principles one by one and see how this all fits.
Organization before electronics before concrete. As presented the plan includes elements of all three: organization is better-timed schedules and the potential use of the yard as a pocket track to avoid triple-tracking Framingham, electronics is electrification, concrete is the triple track. The electronics-concrete order is important – without the triple track but with electrification, EMUs can still do Boston-Worcester in around 57 minutes with the above stops, or 55 without infill at West Station and Newton Corner, either of which is faster than the fastest express trains today. The ultimate in concrete in the Boston area is the North-South Rail Link, which should come only after full electrification and related modernization steps, such as high platforms.
Takt and symmetry. The timetable is on a takt and symmetric, to ensure the overtake takes place at a manageable spot in Wellesley. It would be easier to change the offset slightly and overtake around West Newton, but there the tracks are in a constrained location where triple-tracking is prohibitively expensive. Note also that with the above timetable, the westbound overtake is at :11, :26, :41, :56, and the eastbound overtake is at :04, :19, :34, :49, which means it requires triple-tracking but not four-tracking.
The magic triangle of infrastructure, rolling stock, and timetable. The timetable is calibrated around the performance specs of the latest EMUs, like Coradias, Mireos, Talent 3s, and FLIRTs. The high acceleration capabilities of these trains let a local train leave Boston just 7 minutes ahead of the next express train, and still keep up through double-track narrows in Newton until Wellesley Farms, the sixth station skipped.
Run trains as fast as necessary. Without onward connections beyond Worcester, transfers between trains are not really a factor. Thus, what matters is tight turnaround times to keep trains moving and earning revenue rather than loitering at the terminal. The local train spends 35 out of 45 minutes running, and the express train 45 out of 60.
The knot system. Knots occur wherever trains stop around :00, :15, :30, and :45. The word around includes a few minutes of wiggle time, especially at a terminal, where transfers are unidirectional. Thus Worcester is a knot at :00, with a few minutes of rail-to-bus and bus-to-rail transfer. Framingham is a knot at :30, as long as the buses get there before :28 to transfer to eastbound express trains and depart after :32 to accommodate transfers from westbound express trains. On local trains, Newton Corner may be a knot, with a connecting bus shuttle to Watertown.
Bus nodes
Framingham and Worcester already exist as bus nodes, and in both cities, the main city bus hub is already the train station. The next step is to integrate the schedules. The rule is generally that bus timetabling should follow rail timetabling, because trains require more infrastructure whereas buses can be moved more easily; there are exceptions, but not many.
The principles for bus design on the Zurich model aren’t as catchy as for rail design, but they are still useful and generally worth learning:
One ticket for all. Fares must be totally integrated. If a train makes two stops in the same zone (for example, Framingham and West Natick), it should charge the same as a bus. A train ticket should be valid within the entire zone traversed, which includes bus transfers. The same fare media should be used on all modes – and they should be paper tickets with no surveillance, not Boston’s ongoing smartcard disaster (“AFC 2.0”). Fare integration requires a mechanism for sharing revenue across agencies, but this is organization, and is doable under the aegis of the Massachusetts state government, with revenue allocated to agencies based on periodic counts to ascertain ridership (Berlin’s are every 3 years).
Timed transfers. Suburban buses should come every half hour, on a takt of course, with timed transfers to the trains at the relevant knot. Worcester’s bus agency, WRTA, does not do this at all – bus #1 runs on an hourly takt, but other routes may run every 50 minutes or every 75. Framingham’s, MWRTA, has 65-minute headways, and a route that runs to a Green Line station rather than much closer to a commuter rail station.
High vehicle utilization. If the bus takes around 25 minutes to reach its outlying destination, then two vehicles serve one route, and if it takes 40 minutes, then three vehicles do. Buses should run as fast as necessary as well, deleting meanders, installing queue jump lanes, and shortening the route in order to squeeze inside a timetable with short turnaround times.
Connections between different train stations. A bus can connect two different train stations, either on the same line or on different lines. It should be timed at both ends, though it if runs parallel to the train, then it’s fine to time only right-way connections (e.g. eastbound bus to eastbound train, westbound bus to westbound train), which do not require knots.
Transfers from Infrequent to Frequent Vehicles
Imagine yourself taking a train somewhere, and imagine the train is big and infrequent. Let’s say it’s the commuter train from New York down the Northeast Corridor to Newark Airport, or perhaps a low-cost OuiGo TGV from Lyon to Paris. Now imagine that you change trains to a small, frequent train, like the AirTrain to Newark Airport, or the RER from the OuiGo stop in the suburbs to Paris itself. What do you think happens?
If your guess is “the train I’m connecting to will be overcrowded,” you are correct. Only a minority of a 200 meter long New Jersey Transit train’s ridership unloads at the Newark Airport station, but this minority is substantial enough to overwhelm the connection to the short AirTrain to the terminals. Normally, the AirTrain operates well below capacity. It uses driverless technology to run small vehicles every 3 minutes, which is more than enough for how many people connect between terminals or go to New York by train. But when a big train that runs every 20-30 minutes arrives, a quantity of passengers who would be easily accommodated if they arrived over 20 minutes all make their way to the monorail at once.
In Paris, the situation is similar, but the details differ. Until recently, OuiGo did not serve Paris at the usual terminal of Gare de Lyon but rather at an outlying station near Eurodisney, Marne-la-Vallée-Chessy, ostensibly to save money by avoiding the Gare de Lyon throat, in reality to immiserate passengers who don’t pay full TGV fare. There, passengers would connect from a 400-meter bilevel TGV on which the entire train ridership would get off to a 220-meter bilevel RER train running every 10 minutes. The worst congestion wasn’t even on the RER itself, but at the ticket machines: enough of the thousand passengers did not have Navigo monthly cards for the RER that long lines formed at the ticket machines, adding 20 minutes to the trip. With the RER connection and the line, the trips would be nearly 3.5 hours, 2 spent on the high-speed train and 1.5 at the Paris end.
I even saw something similar in Shanghai in 2009. I visited Jiaxing, an hour away at the time by train, and when I came back, a mass of people without the Shanghai Public Transportation Card overwhelmed the one working Shanghai Metro ticketing machine. There were three machines at the entrance, but two were out of service. With the 20 minutes of standing in line, I would have gotten back to my hotel faster if I’d walked.
This is a serious problem – the ticketing machine lines alone can add 20 minutes to an otherwise 2.5-hour door-to-door trip. To avoid this problem, railroads and transit agencies need a kit with a number of distinct tools, appropriate for different circumstances.
Run trains more frequently
Commuter trains have to run frequently enough to be useful for short-distance trips. If the RER A consistently fills a train every 10 minutes off-peak between Paris and Marne-la-Vallée, New Jersey Transit can consistently fill a local train every 10 minutes off-peak between Manhattan and New Brunswick. Extra frequency induces extra ridership, but fewer people are going to get off at the Newark Airport stop per train if trains run more often. There are some places where adding frequency induces extra ridership proportionately to the extra service, or even more, but they tend to be shorter-range traffic, for example between Newark and Elizabeth or between Newark and New York.
This tool is useful for urban, suburban, and regional service. A train over a 20 kilometer distance can run frequently enough that transfers to more frequent shuttles are not a problem. Even today, this is mostly a problem with airport connectors, because it’s otherwise uncommon for outlying services to run very frequently. The one non-airport example I am familiar with is in Boston on the Mattapan High-Speed Line, a light rail line that runs every 5 minutes, connecting Mattapan with Ashmont, the terminus of the Red Line subway, on a branch that runs every 8-9 minutes at rush hour and every 12-15 off-peak.
In contrast, this tool is less useful for intercity trains. France should be running TGVs more frequently off-peak, but this means every half hour, not every 10 minutes. The only long-distance European corridors that have any business running an intercity train every 10 minutes are Berlin-Hanover(-Dortmund) and Frankfurt-Cologne, and in both cases it comes from interlining many different branches connecting huge metropolitan areas onto a single trunk.
Eliminate unnecessary transfers
The problem only occurs if there is a transfer to begin with. In some cases, it is feasible to eliminate the transfer and offer a direct trip. SNCF has gradually shifted OuiGo traffic from suburban stations like Marne-la-Vallée and Massy to the regular urban terminals; nowadays, five daily OuiGo trains go from Lyon to Gare de Lyon and only two go to Marne-la-Vallée.
Gare de Lyon is few people’s final destination, but at a major urban station with multiple Métro and RER connections, the infrastructure can handle large crowds better. In that case, the transfer isn’t really from an infrequent vehicle, because a TGV, TER, or Transilien train unloads at Gare de Lyon every few minutes at rush hour. The Métro is still more frequent, but at the resolution of a mainline train every 5 minutes versus a Métro Line 1 or 14 train every 1.5 minutes, this is a non-issue: for one, passengers can easily take 5 minutes just to walk from the far end of the train to the concourse, so effectively they arrive at the Métro at a uniform rate rather than in a short burst.
Of note, Shanghai did this before the high-speed trains opened: the trains served Shanghai Railway Station. The capacity problems occurred mostly because two out of three ticketing machines were broken, a problem that plagued the Shanghai Metro in 2009. Perhaps things are better now, a decade of fast economic growth later; they certainly are better in all first-world cities I’ve taken trains in.
Eliminating unnecessary transfers is also relevant to two urban cases mentioned above: airport people movers, and the Mattapan High-Speed Line. Airport connectors are better when people do not need to take a landside people mover but rather can walk directly from the train station to the terminal. Direct service is more convenient in general, but this is especially true of airport connectors. Tourists are less familiar with the city and may be less willing to transfer; all passengers, tourists and locals, are likely to be traveling with luggage. The upshot is that if an airport connector can be done as an extension of a subway, light rail, or regional rail line, it should; positive examples include the Piccadilly line and soon to be Crossrail in London, the RER B in Paris, and the S-Bahn in Zurich.
The Mattapan High-Speed Line’s peculiar situation as an isolated tramway has likewise led to calls for eliminating the forced transfer. Forces at the MBTA that don’t like providing train service have proposed downgrading it to a bus; forces within the region that do have instead proposed making the necessary investments to turn it into an extension of the Red Line.
Simplify transfer interfaces
The capacity problem at the transfer from an infrequent service to a frequent one is not just inside the frequent but small vehicle, but also at the transfer interface. Permitting a gentler interface can go a long way toward solving the problem.
First, tear down the faregates. There should not be fare barriers between different public transport services, especially not ones where congestion at the transfer point can be expected. Even when everything else is done right, people can overwhelm the gates, as at the Newark Airport train station. The lines aren’t long, but they are stressful. Every mistake (say, if my ticket is invalid, or if someone else tries to ask the stressed station agent a question) slows down a large crowd of people.
And second, sell combined tickets. Intercity train tickets in Germany offer the option of bundling a single-ride city ticket at the destination for the usual price; for the benefit of visitors, this should be expanded to include a bundled multi-ride ticket or short-term pass. New Jersey Transit sells through-tickets to the airport that include the AirTrain transfer, and so there is no congestion at the ticketing machines, only at the faregates and on the train itself.
Both of these options require better integration between different service providers. That said, such integration is clearly possible – New Jersey Transit and Port Authority manage it despite having poor fare and schedule integration elsewhere. In France in particular, there exist sociétés de transport functioning like German Verkehrsverbünde in coordinating regional fares; SNCF and RATP have a long history of managing somehow to work together in and around Paris, so combined TGV + RER tickets, ideally with some kind of mechanism to avoid forcing visitors to deal with the cumbersome process of getting a Navigo pass, should not be a problem.
Cops on Public Transportation
I wrote a post about American moral panics about fare evasion two months ago, which was mirrored on Streetsblog. I made a mistake in that post that I’d like to correct – and yet the correction itself showcases something interesting about why there are armed police on trains. In talking about BART’s unique belts-and-suspenders system combining faregates with proof-of-payment fare inspections, I complained that BART uses armed police to conduct inspections, where the German-speaking world happily uses unarmed civilians. BART wrote me back to correct me – the inspections are done by unarmed civilians, called ambassadors. The armed cops on the trains are unrelated.
I’d have talked about my error earlier, but I got the correction at the end of November. The American Christmas season begins around Thanksgiving and ends after Sylvester, and in this period both labor productivity and news readership plummet; leave it to Americans to have five weeks a year of low productivity without giving workers those five weeks in vacation time. With that error out of the way – again, BART conducts inspections with unarmed ambassadors, not armed cops – it’s worth talking about why, then, there are armed cops on trains at all, and what it means for fare enforcement.
The answer to the “why armed cops on the train?” question is that among the broad American public, the police is popular. There are hefty differences by party identification, and in the Bay Area, the opinions of Republicans are mostly irrelevant, but even among Democrats; there are also hefty differences by race, but blacks are at their most anti-police divided on the issue. A Pew poll about trust in institutions asks a variety of questions about the police, none of which is “would you like to see more cops patrol the subway?”, but the crosstabs really don’t scream “no.” Vox cites a poll by Civis Analytics that directly asks about hiring more police officers, and even among black people the results are 60-18 in favor. In New York, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill had positive net approval among all racial groups shortly before leaving office, the lowest rate being 43-28 among Hispanics.
The crosstabs only go so far, and it’s likely that among certain subgroups the police is much less popular, for example black millennials. It’s normal for a popular institution to still generate intense opposition from specific demographic, class-based, or ideological groups, and it’s even normal for a popular institution to be bad; I should know, Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker is one of America’s most popular governors and yet his do-nothing approach to infrastructure planning makes him unpopular at TransitMatters. But this doesn’t change the fact that, as a positive rather than normative statement, the police enjoys consensus support from the urban American public.
What this means is that there are cops on the subway in New York and on BART not because of an inherent necessity of the fare collection system, but because in the eyes of the people who run these systems, crime is a serious concern and having more cops around is the solution. Evidently, BART layers cops on top of two distinct fare enforcement mechanisms – fare barriers and the ambassadors. In New York, too, NYPD’s justification for arresting people for jumping the turnstiles is that a significant fraction of them have outstanding warrants (many of which are about low-level offenses like being behind on court payments).
I bring this up because there’s a growing argument on the American left that public transportation should be free because that way people won’t be arrested for fare-dodging. This argument slides in an assumption, all too common to socialists who are to the left of the mainline liberal or social democratic party, that there is a leftist majority among the public that is just waiting to be activated by a charismatic leader rejecting neoliberal or otherwise moderate political assumptions.
But in the real world, there is no such leftist majority. The median voter even in a very left-wing area like New York or San Francisco may not support the more violent aspects of tough-on-crime politics, but is mostly okay with more police presence. The average self-identified leftist may be more worried that having police patrols will lead to more brutality than that not having them will lead to more crime, but the average self-identified leftist is not the average voter even in the Bay Area.
In this reality, there are cops on the subway because a lot of people worry about crime on the subway and want to see more police presence. The cops themselves, who are well to the right of the average voter pretty much anywhere, may justify this in terms of fare beating, but what matters is what voters near the median think, and they worry about ordinary property and violent crime. Those worries may well be unfounded – for one, New York is very safe nowadays and has been getting steadily safer, so the recent binge of hiring more cops to patrol the subway is a waste of money – but so long as voters have them, there will be police patrols.
The upshot is twofold. First, fare enforcement and the politics of criminal justice have very little to do with each other. Cops patrol crowded public spaces that require payment to enter, like the subway, as they do crowded public spaces that do not, like city squares. If public transportation fares are abolished, cops will likely keep patrolling subway stations, just as they patrol pieces of transportation infrastructure that are fare-free, like the concourses of major train stations.
If the left succeeds in persuading more people that the police is hostile to their interests and the city is better off with less public police presence, then cops will not patrol either the subway or most city squares. In the future, this is not outside the realm of possibility – in fifteen years the popularity of same-sex marriage in the US went from about 2-to-1 against to 2-to-1 in favor, and the trend in other democracies is broadly similar. But in New York and San Francisco in 2020, this is not the situation.
And second, fare enforcement can be conducted with unarmed inspectors regardless of the political environment. Multiple Americans who express fear of crime have told me that inspections have to be done with armed police, because fare beaters are so dangerous they would never submit to an unarmed inspector. And yet, even in San Francisco, where a large fraction of the middle class is worried about being robbed, inspections are done without weapons.
I’ve recurrently told American cities to tear down the faregates. BART’s belts-and-suspenders fare enforcement is unnecessary, borne of a panic rather than of any calculation of costs and benefits to the system. But what BART should get rid of is not the ambassadors, but the faregates. The most successful transit city the rough size of San Francisco – Berlin – has no faregates and leaves most stations unstaffed to reduce costs. Berlin encourages compliance by making it easier to follow the law, for example by offering cheap monthly passes, rather than by hitting passengers in the face with head-level fare barriers.
If cops patrol the subway because most voters and most riders would prefer it this way, then there is no need to connect the politics of policing with the technical question of what the most efficient way to collect fares is. There is a clear best practice for the latter, and it does not involve faregates in a rapid transit system with fewer than multiple billions of annual riders. What the police does is a separate question, one that there is no reason to connect with how to raise money for good public transportation.
Why Do Public Transportation Commuters Outearn Car Commuters in Some American Cities?
More than a year ago, I compared Los Angeles with a number of other large American cities. I brought up issues of public transportation ridership, city center job concentration, and income differences, as in the Los Angeles region people who commute by public transit average barely half the earnings of people who drive alone. One of the things noted in that post is that in the secondary transit cities of the United States – Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, Boston – people who commute by transit outearn people who do not. I didn’t delve deeply into that issue in that post, but in this post I will, because it showcases a serious problem in all four cities. New York lacks this pattern as of 2017 – solo drivers outearn transit commuters, though by a small and declining margin, so by 2020 it may join the secondary cities.
The reason this is a problem is that in none of these cities is public transportation so good as to be a luxury good. Rather, the issue is that public transportation is mostly an option for people traveling to city center, where incomes are higher. Crosstown public transportation options are weak – there is rarely direct rapid transit, and transfer trips are inconvenient. There may also be a peak vs. off-peak artifact, but I have no data confirming that richer Americans are likely to commute at rush hour, when transit frequencies are higher and congestion is worse.
Income by mode of transportation to work
From the 2017 American Community Survey, we can grab data about median earnings for workers by their main mode of travel to work:
| Metro area | Workers | PT mode share | PT income | Solo driver income | Median income |
| New York | 9,821,147 | 31% | $44,978 | $48,812 | $45,150 |
| Chicago | 4,653,591 | 12.2% | $46,796 | $41,817 | $41,232 |
| Philadelphia | 3,320,895 | 9% | $37,213 | $46,638 | $43,472 |
| Washington | 2,915,178 | 12.8% | $60,420 | $53,390 | $52,350 |
| Boston | 2,572,454 | 13.4% | $50,593 | $51,295 | $50,201 |
| San Francisco | 2,371,803 | 17.4% | $62,500 | $54,923 | $54,105 |
| Seattle | 1,997,545 | 10.1% | $51,635 | $50,183 | $41,190 |
Other modes exist too, most notably carpooling, which has lower median incomes than both solo driving and public transport in all of the cities in the table. Also of note, public transportation user income is more polarized – even though the median is comparable to and usually even higher than the overall median, the poverty rate for transit commuters is higher than the general rate everywhere except in San Francisco, where the poverty rates are within the margin of error.
Why?
Car ownership increases with income. In Singapore, the highest-transit use city for which I have this data, the overall mode share is 58.7%, which splits as low 60s for roughly the bottom half of the income distribution and then less in higher categories, bottoming at 43% in the highest income category, covering the top 15%. It’s really weird that in American cities with public transportation we see the opposite pattern – transit usage is higher in higher income brackets.
The explanation has to be about where people work. OnTheMap doesn’t have great income data, but we can still compare the proportion of workers in the highest income category, which is $3,333/month. I’ve used different definitions of city center in different blog posts: the one about Los Angeles used a restricted one, just a few blocks by a few blocks, covering a single-digit percent of the region, whereas more recently I’ve made 100 km^2 blobs, covering one third of workers in some cities, to maintain comparability with Paris. For this post’s purposes, I’m going to use a definition around the center of a radial transit network (as in the LA post), as well as a looser definition corresponding to something like city limits; in Washington and New York the restricted definitions are somewhat looser to take into account the spread of the subway network just outside city center, but in Chicago and San Francisco the LA post’s definition is apt.
| Metro area | Workers | $40,000+ | City | Workers | $40,000+ | CBD | Workers | $40,000+ |
| New York | 9,408,498 | 52.1% | City proper | 4,367,781 | 55.4% | South of 60th | 2,098,740 | 65.7% |
| Chicago | 4,604,044 | 47.9% | City proper | 1,373,969 | 53.2% | LA post | 401,169 | 71.7% |
| Washington | 2,830,896 | 55% | DC, Arl. | 714,075 | 63% | Mass., 395, water | 270,299 | 72.2% |
| Philadelphia | 2,853,154 | 49.5% | City proper | 684,869 | 50.9% | Center City | 240,665 | 61.9% |
| Boston | 2,682,278 | 56.3% | Boston, Cam. | 787,287 | 66% | Arl., Stuart, water | 228,300 | 72.1% |
| San Francisco | 2,400,290 | 59.2% | City proper | 723,907 | 65.5% | LA post | 231,042 | 76.8% |
| Seattle | 1,919,635 | 57.8% | City proper | 585,480 | 64.1% | Jackson, I-5, Denny | 180,482 | 71.2% |
In all cities, the proportion of workers earning $40,000 a year or more is higher in the city than in the rest of the region, and higher yet in the CBD. Moreover, this effect is weakest in Philadelphia, which may explain why there, unlike in the other secondary transit cities, drivers still significantly outearn transit commuters.
Crosstown public transportation
In all the cities studied in this post, public transportation carries a high share of trips into city center, especially at rush hour. This props up its usage numbers among the middle class, especially the upper middle class – professional jobs cluster in city center.
The problem is that not everyone works in city center. Midtown and Downtown Manhattan are 22% of metro New York employment going by OnTheMap’s LEHD numbers, and even that is a pretty hefty area. In smaller cities, there are necessarily fewer rapid transit lines and a smaller zone of intersection in which service is good from all directions. Improving transit service to destinations outside city center, and thus for working- and lower middle-class jobs, requires more than just disjointed center-to-bedroom-communities rail lines.
One way to have vigorous crosstown public transportation is with buses. However, buses are slow, almost by definition slower than cars. Chicago has a pretty good bus grid, but it still has the pattern of transit commuters outearning solo drivers. And that’s in the city proper – in the suburbs it’s not really possible to have a bus grid, because distances are too great and street networks are usually too broken.
Instead, a better solution has to involve diagonal trips on rapid transit, with a transfer in or near city center, and trips that stay outside city center. A good recipe includes all of the following:
- Easy downtown and near-downtown transfers, with no missed connections and a minimum of walking. San Francisco deserves especial demerits for forcing people to transfer between Muni and BART via the street, crossing two sets of faregates.
- High frequency on commuter rail in both directions, with timed bus shuttle connections from stations to office parks too far to walk. In some cases, such buses can do double duty ferrying suburban commuters to those stations for trains to city center.
- Complete fare integration, with free transfers and mode-neutral fares, to avoid forcing low-income commuters onto slow buses while richer ones get faster trains.
- Through-running when feasible, since a worker in one neighborhood may end up finding a job at a suburban job site on another line, even the opposite side of the city, e.g. between Brooklyn or Queens and Newark.
Income differences and universal design
The principles for good crosstown service are largely class-neutral. They have to be: the differences between where rich and poor people work in a deindustrialized country are real but not enormous, enough to be noticeable but not enough to play to populist clichés of two Americas. Nonetheless, better public transportation service to non-CBD destinations is especially useful for the working class, because the working class is less likely to work in the CBD than the middle class.
The relevance of class here is twofold. First, every demographic pattern in transportation mode choice has a reason, and provides hints as to how different people travel. This is the case regardless of whether the socially more dominant group commutes by public transport more (the rich, the educated) or less (the native-born, men, whites in Western countries). It remains the case even when there’s no obvious social dominance hierarchy between the groups we compare, for examples professionals versus small business owners.
And second, the people who manage public transportation agencies are drawn from one social class. They are middle-class managers working in city center at traditional peak hours. They may not be aware of how other people commute, regardless of whether those other people are retail workers working two part-time jobs in two different neighborhoods or tech workers who work 12-8. They provide the service that people who are like them can use, and neglect other use cases.
Queens Bus Redesign
New York City Transit has just released its draft redesign for the Queens bus network. It’s a further-reaching reform than what was planned for the Bronx. I’m still seriously skeptical about a number of aspects, but this redesign is genuinely a step forward. The required changes are for the most part tweaks, with just one big change in concept.
What’s in the redesign?
The redesign goes over the local and express bus routes in Queens. I am not going to look at the changes to the express buses, which are not an important part of the network anyway; Queens has a total of 674,000 local bus passengers per weekday and only 15,000 express passengers.
The changes to the local buses include a from-scratch redesign of the network; four new color-coded brands for the local buses; stop consolidation depending on color coding, of which the tightest spacing proposed is 400 meters; and a list of priority corridors where buses are to get dedicated lanes. The scope is only the Queens buses, but there are some new Brooklyn connections: the Metropolitan and Flushing Avenue routes (the new QT3, QT4) keep running through, as they do today, but the Myrtle Avenue route, the current Q55 and new QT55, stops at Ridgewood with a forced transfer to the Brooklyn Myrtle Avenue route.
The four color-coded brands are an unusual, though not unheard of, system. There are four distinct brands among the redesigned Queens buses: blue, red, purple, green. Blue is essentially select bus service, retaining the long stop spacing (“over a mile”), potentially intersecting some bus routes without a transfer; the point is to connect high-demand areas like Flushing with Jamaica. The other three are for various regular local routes. Red routes are distinguished exclusively in having slightly wider stop spacing, 660 meters versus 450 for purple and 400 for green, but otherwise look similar on the network map. Purple and green routes are distinguished in that purple routes are branded for neighborhoods far from the subway and intended to get people from outlying points to subway stations.
What’s good about it?
Stop consolidation is important and I’m glad to see it get play in New York. The choice of interstation across the non-blue routes is solid and close enough to the theoretical optimum that the exact value should depend on ensuring every intersection has an interchange rather than on squeezing a few extra seconds of door-to-door trip time for non-transfer passengers.
The same goes for the decision to designate 21 corridors as top priorities for dedicated bus lanes. The plan does not promise bus lanes on all of them, since the ultimate decision is in the hands of NYCDOT and not the state-owned MTA/NYCT. But it does the best it can, by putting the proposal front and center and announcing that these corridors should be studied as candidates for bus priority. Most of the important streets in Queens are on the list; the only glaring omissions are Union Turnpike, Myrtle, and Metropolitan.
The above two points are not strictly about the redesign. This is fine. When Eric Goldwyn and I tried estimating the benefits of our Brooklyn bus redesign plan, we found that, taking speed, access time, and frequency into account, the redesign itself only contributed 30% of the overall improvement. Stop consolidation and bus lanes contributed 30% each, and off-board fare collection 10%. The Queens plan at the very least has stop consolidation, off-board fare collection as planned when the OMNY smartcard is fully rolled out, and partial use of bus lanes.
But the bus network as redesigned has notable positive features as well. There’s greater reliance on the full network, for one. The JFK AirTrain is free for passengers boarding at Lefferts Avenue or Federal Circle rather than at the subway connection points at Jamaica and Howard Beach, and so the Lefferts Avenue route to JFK, the current Q10 and future QT14, stops at the AirTrain station instead of going all the way to the terminals.
Elsewhere, the bus network is more regular, with fewer bends. The network does not assume away the borough’s important nodes: you can still figure out where Flushing and Jamaica are purely from looking at the map. But it does offer some routes that bypass these nodes for crosstown traffic, for example the redesigned QT65, straightening the current Q65.
What’s bad about it?
The four-color system is just bad. The blue routes are understandable but still bad: they split frequency, so that passengers living next to the local stations on shared routes like Main Street get poor service. The red-purple-green distinction is superfluous – the map really does not make it clear how a red route differs from the others, and the purple and green routes are really the same kind of local bus, just one with a distinguished node at a subway stop and one where there may be multiple distinguished nodes.
The frequencies offered are also weak. Some routes are proposed to run every 8 minutes all day, namely QT route numbers 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 32, 52, 55, 58, 66, 69, 70. Exactly one is proposed to run more frequently, the QT44 every 5 minutes. The rest run every 10-12 minutes or worse. On weekends, even the 8-minute routes drop to 10-15 minutes. Many routes are quite peaky and there’s no easy distinction between routes for which the report proposes an all-day headway (including all the 8-minute ones above) and ones for which the report proposes separate peak and base headways; the purple routes in general look somewhat peakier than the others, but it’s not a consistent distinction.
If the frequencies are weak, then it means that either the buses are too slow, or there are too many route-km to split a fixed service-hours budget across. NYCT mistakenly thinks that bus costs scale with service-km rather than service-hours, so the planned speedups can in fact be spent on more frequency, but it’s not enough to create a vigorous frequent network. Some pruning is needed; overall the network seems very dense to me, even in areas with decent subway coverage.
A few individual routes are weak too – I don’t think the QT1 idea, paralleling the Astoria Line on 21st Street and then the G train to Downtown Brooklyn, is a good idea. There are two more north-south routes running through to Williamsburg, where the relevant buses are pretty weak and pruning is advisable in order to redeploy service-hours to areas with more demand. If there’s somehow money that can only be spent on north-south service through Williamsburg, it’s better to increase frequency on the G train, which is faster than any bus could ever be.
Is this redesign valuable, then?
Yes! Between the stop consolidation, partial installation of bus lanes, and some of the aspects of the new network, the proposal looks like a two-thirds measure, at worst. It can’t be a full measure because there are serious drawbacks to the plan, not just on the level of details (i.e. too much service to Williamsburg) but also on the conceptual level of the four distinct brands. But it is a noticeable improvement over the current system, and I expect that if it is implemented, even with its many current flaws, then Queens will see a serious increase in bus patronage.
Moreover, the flaws in the plan are not inherent to it. If someone showed me the bus map without the color coding, just with stops and frequencies, I would not even notice the red-green-purple distinction. The blue routes I would notice, and suggest be reduced to the usual stop spacing of everything else; but the others, I wouldn’t. So even the most fundamentally bad part of the plan can be jettisoned while retaining all the good. Everything else is a tweak, and I expect that tweaks will happen one way or another.
Right now comes the community meetings stage, in which existing riders who have too much time will yell, and potential riders who don’t currently take the bus because it’s too slow don’t show up at all. The plan will be tweaked, and the tweaks may well make it worse rather than better. But what good transit activists in New York say matters, and so far the reaction should be positive, demanding certain changes but keeping the gist of the redesign.
Off-Peak Public Transport Usage
Earlier this year, I slowly stumbled across something that I don’t think is well-known in comparative public transportation: European cities have much higher public transport ridership than someone experienced with American patterns would guess from their modal splits. From another direction, Europe has much lower mode share than one would guess from ridership. The key here is that the mode share I’m comparing is for work trips, and overall ridership includes all trip purposes. This strongly suggests that non-work public transportation usage is much higher in European than in American cities even when the usage level for work trips is comparable. Moreover, the reason ought to be better off-peak service in Europe, rather than other factors like land use or culture, since the comparison holds for New York and not only for truly auto-oriented American cities.
Modal shares and ridership levels
My previous post brings up statistics for work trip mode share in England and France. For the purposes of this post, I am going to ignore England and focus on France and wherever I can find data out of Germany and Austria; the reason is that in the secondary cities of England, public transport is dominated by buses, which are hard to find any ridership data for, let alone data that doesn’t have severe double-counting artifacts for transfer passengers. For the same reason, I am not going to look at Canada – too many transfer artifacts.
In contrast, French and German-speaking metro areas with rail-dominated public transport make it relatively convenient to count rail trips per capita, as do the more rail-oriented American metro areas, namely Boston, New York, and Washington. A secondary check involving both bus and rail can be obtained from The Transport Politic, comparing the US with France.
| City | Population | Definition | Trips/year | Trips/person | Mode share |
| Boston | 4,900,000 | Subway, commuter rail | 204,000,000 | 42 | 12% |
| New York | 20,000,000 | Subway, PATH, LIRR, MN, NJT Rail | 2,050,000,000 | 103 | 31% |
| Washington | 6,200,000 | Metro, MARC (daily*280), VRE (daily*250) | 245,000,000 | 40 | 12% |
| Vienna | 3,700,000 | U-Bahn, trams, S-Bahn (PDF-p. 44) | 822,000,000 | 222 | 40% |
| Berlin | 5,000,000 | U-Bahn, trams, S-Bahn | 1,238,000,000 | 248 | 35% |
| Hamburg | 3,100,000 | U-Bahn, S-Bahn | 531,000,000 | 171 | 26% |
| Stuttgart | 2,400,000 | Stadtbahn, S-Bahn, Regionalbahn | 223,000,000 | 93 | 26% |
| Lyon | 2,300,000 | Métro, trams, funiculars, 0.5*TER | 325,000,000 | 141 | 20% |
| Marseille | 1,800,000 | Métro, trams (daily*280), 0.5*TER | 139,000,000 | 77 | 16% |
| Toulouse | 1,300,000 | Métro, trams | 125,700,000 | 97 | 13% |
| Bordeaux | 1,200,000 | Light rail | 105,500,000 | 88 | 13% |
| Lille | 1,200,000 | Métro, trams | 108,500,000 | 90 | 17% |
Note that New York, with a 31% mode share, has not much more rail ridership per capita than French metro areas with mode shares in the teens, and is a quarter below Lyon, whose mode share is only 20%. This is not an artifact of transfers: just as the subway dominates ridership in New York, so does the metro dominate Lyon, Toulouse, and Lille, and so does the tram dominate Bordeaux. If anything, it’s Stuttgart, the only European city on this list with comparable ridership per unit of mode share to the US, that should have the most overcounting due to transfers.
Also note that French rail ridership nosedives in the summer, when people go on their 5-week vacations, and I presume that this equally happens in Germany and Austria. The ratio of annual to weekday ridership in France where it is available is fairly low, not because weekend ridership is weak, but because the weekday chosen to represent daily ridership is never in the summer vacation season.
Why?
Off-peak public transportation in the United States is quite bad. In New York, 10-minute frequency on most lettered routes is the norm. In Washington, the off-peak frequency is 12 minutes. In Boston, it varies by line; on the Red Line each branch is supposed to come every 12-13 minutes off-peak, but in practice trains don’t run reliably and often leave the terminal bunched, alternating between 3- and 10-minute gaps.
Moreover, commuter trains are so useless except for peak-hour commutes to city center that they might as well not exist. Hourly gaps and even worse are routine, and even the busiest New York commuter lines have at best half-hourly off-peak frequency. These lines are only about 15% of rail ridership in New York and Boston and 6% of rail ridership in Washington, but they contribute a decent volume of commuters who drive for all non-work purposes.
In Berlin, the off-peak frequency on the U-Bahn is a train every 5 minutes most of the day on weekdays. On Sundays it drops to a train every 8 minutes, and in the evening it drops to a train every 10 minutes far too early, leading to overcrowding on the first train after the cut in frequency around 9 pm. The S-Bahn trunks run frequently all day, but the branches in the suburbs only get 10-minute frequency, and the Ring has a 2-hour midday period with 10-minute gaps. The suburban areas with only S-Bahn service get comparable service to neighborhoods on New York subway branches, while closer-in areas get better service. No wonder people use it for more than just work – the train is useful for shopping and socializing at all hours of the day.
Why?
The people who manage public transportation in the United States do not have the same profile as most riders. They work traditional hours, that is 9 to 5 on weekdays only, at an office located in city center. Many senior managers do not use their own system. That NYCT President Andy Byford does not own a car or know how to drive and takes the subway and buses to events is unusual for such a senior person, and early media reports noted that some managers looked askance at his not driving.
Growing segments of the American middle class commute by public transportation. In Boston and Washington, transit commuters slightly outearn solo drivers, and in New York they do not but it is close. But those segments have different travel behavior from public-sector planners. For example, lawyers work long hours and depend on the subway at 8 or 9 pm, and programmers work shifted hours and both show up to and leave work hours after the traditional times. But public transportation agencies still work 9 to 5, and thus the middle-class transit-using behavior they are most familiar with is that of the denizen of the segregated suburb, who drives to all destinations but city center.
In such an environment, off-peak service is treated as a luxury. When there is a deficit, agencies cut there first, leading to frequency-ridership spirals in which lower frequency deters riders, justifying further cuts in service until little is left. In New York, there are guidelines for frequency that explicitly state it is to be adjusted based on ridership at the most crowded point of the route, without regard for whether cuts depress ridership further. There is a minimum acceptable frequency in New York, but it is set at 10 minutes on weekdays and 12 on weekends. For a similar reason, the planners tend to split buses between local and limited routes if each can support 10-12 minute headways, at which point the buses are not useful for short trips.
In contrast, in Germany and France, there is a mixture of drivers and public transportation users among managers. German planning stresses consistent schedules throughout the day, so the midday off-peak often gets the same frequency as the peak. French planning does vary frequency, but maintains a higher base frequency even late into the night. The Paris Métro runs every 5 to 7 minutes at 11 pm. The idea of running a big city metro line every 12 minutes is unthinkable.
On Envying Canada
In England and Wales, 15.9% of workers get to work on public transport, and in France, 14.9% do. In Canada, the figure is close: 12.4%, and this is without a London or Paris to run up the score in. Vancouver is a metro region of 2.5 million people and 1.2 million workers, comparable in size to the metropolitan counties in England and to the metro area of Lyon; at 20.4%, it has a higher public transport modal share than all of them, though it is barely higher than Lyon with its 19.9% share. Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, and Winnipeg are likewise collectively respectable by the standards of similar-size French regions, such as the departments of Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille), Alpes-Maritimes (Nice), Gironde (Bordeaux), Haute-Garonne (Toulouse), and Bas-Rhin (Strasbourg).
As a result, Jarrett Walker likes telling American cities and transit agencies to stop envying Europe and start envying Canada instead. Canada is nearby, speaks the same language, and has similar street layout, all of which contribute to its familiarity to Americans. If Europe has the exotic mystique of the foreign, let alone East Asia, Canada is familiar enough to Americans that the noticeable differences are a cultural uncanny valley.
And yet, I am of two minds on this. The most consistent transit revival in Canada has been in Vancouver, whose modal share went from 14.3% in 1996 to 20.4% in 2016 – and the 2016 census was taken before the Evergreen extension of the Millennium Line opened. TransLink has certainly been doing a lot of good things to get to this point. And yet, there’s a serious risk to Canadian public transport in the future: construction costs have exploded, going from Continental European 15 years ago to American today.
The five legs of good transit
I was asked earlier today what a good political agenda for public transportation would be. I gave four answers, like the four legs of a chair, and later realized that I missed a fifth point.
- Fuel taxes and other traffic suppression measures (such as Singapore and Israel’s car taxes). Petrol costs about €1.40/liter in Germany and France; diesel is cheaper but being phased out because of its outsize impact on pollution.
- Investment in new urban and intercity lines, such as the Madrid Metro expansion program since the 1990s or Grand Paris Express. This is measured in kilometers and not euros, so lower construction costs generally translate to more investment, hence Madrid’s huge metro network.
- Interagency cooperation within metropolitan regions and on intercity rail lines where appropriate. This includes fare integration, schedule integration, and timetable-infrastructure integration.
- Urban upzoning, including both residential densification in urban neighborhoods and commercialization in and around city center.
- Street space reallocation from cars toward pedestrians, bikes, and buses.
We can rate how Canada (by which I really mean Vancouver) does on this rubric:
- The fuel tax in Canada is much lower than in Europe, contributing to high driving rates. In Toronto, gasoline currently costs $1.19/liter, which is about €0.85/l. But Vancouver fuel taxes are higher, raising the price to about $1.53/l, around €1.06/l.
- Canadian construction costs are so high that investment in new lines is limited. Vancouver has been procrastinating building the Broadway subway to UBC until costs rose to the point that the budget is only enough to build the line halfway there.
- Vancouver and Toronto both have good bus-rapid transit integration, but there is no integration with commuter rail; Montreal even severed a key commuter line to build a private driverless rapid transit line. In Vancouver, bus and SkyTrain fares have decoupled due to political fallout from the botched smartcard implementation.
- Vancouver is arguably the YIMBYest Western city, building around 10 housing units per 1,000 people every year in the last few years. Toronto’s housing construction rate is lower but still respectable by European standards, let alone American ones.
- There are bike lanes but not on the major streets. If there are bus lanes, I didn’t see any of them when I lived in Vancouver, and I traveled a lot in the city as well as the suburbs.
Vancouver’s transit past and future
Looking at the above legs of what makes for good public transport, there is only one thing about Canada that truly shines: urban redevelopment. Toronto, a metro area of 6 million people, has two subway mainlines, and Montreal, with 4 million people, has 2.5. Vancouver has 1.5 lines – its three SkyTrain mainlines are one-tailed. By the same calculation, Berlin has 6.5 U- and 3 S-Bahn mainlines, and Madrid has 2 Cercanías lines and 7 metro lines. Moreover, high construction costs and political resistance from various GO Transit interests make it difficult for Canadian cities to add more rapid transit.
To the extent Vancouver has a sizable SkyTrain network, it’s that it was able to build elevated and cut-and-cover lines in the past. This is no longer possible for future expansion, except possibly toward Langley. The merchant lawsuits over the Canada Line’s construction impacts have ensured that the Broadway subway will be bored. Furthermore, the region’s politics make it impossible to just build Broadway all the way to the end: Surrey has insisted on some construction within its municipal area, so the region has had to pair half the Broadway subway with a SkyTrain extension to the Langley sprawl.
Put in other words, the growth in Vancouver transit ridership is not so much about building more of a network, but about adding housing and jobs around the network that has been around since the 1980s. The ridership on the Millennium and Canada Lines is growing but remains far below that on the Expo Line. There is potential for further increase in ridership as the neighborhoods along the Canada Line have finally been rezoned, but even that will hit a limit pretty quickly – the Canada Line was built with low capacity, and the Millennium Line doesn’t enter Downtown and will only serve near-Downtown job centers.
Potemkin bus networks
When Jarrett tells American cities to envy Canada, he generally talks about the urban bus networks. Toronto and Vancouver have strong bus grids, with buses coming at worst every 8 minutes during the daytime off-peak. Both cities have grids of major streets, as is normal for so many North American cities, and copying the apparent features of these grids is attractive to American transit managers.
And yet, trying to just set up a bus grid in your average American city yields Potemkin buses. Vancouver and Toronto have bus grids that rely on connections to rapid transit lines. In both cities, transit usage is disproportionately about commutes either to or from a city core defined by a 5 kilometer radius from city hall. Moreover, the growth in public transport commuting in both cities since 1996 has been almost exclusively about such commutes, and not about everywhere-to-everywhere commutes from outside this radius. Within this radius, public transportation is dominated by rail, not buses.
The buses in Toronto and Vancouver have several key roles to play. First, as noted above, they connect to rapid transit nodes or to SeaBus in North Vancouver. Second, they connect to job centers that exist because of rapid transit, for example Metrotown at the eastern end of Vancouver’s 49. And third, there is the sui generis case of UBC. All of these roles create strong ridership, supporting high enough frequency that people make untimed transfers.
But even then, there are problems common to all North American buses. The stop spacing is too tight – 200 meters rather than 400-500, with frequency-splitting rapid buses on a handful of very strong routes like 4th Avenue and Broadway. There is no all-door boarding except on a handful of specially-branded B-line buses. There are no bus lanes.
One American city has similar characteristics to Toronto and Vancouver when it comes to buses: Chicago. Elsewhere, just copying the bus grid of Vancouver will yield nothing, because ultimately nobody is going to connect between two mixed-traffic buses that run every 15 minutes, untimed, if they can afford any better. In Chicago, the situation is different, but what the city most needs is integration between Metra and CTA services, which requires looking at European rather than Canadian models.
Is Canada hopeless?
I don’t know. The meteoric rise in Canadian subway construction costs in the last 15 years has ensured expansion will soon grind to a halt. Much of this rise comes from reforms that the Anglosphere has convinced itself improve outcomes, like design-build and reliance on outside consultants; in that sense, the US hasn’t been copying Canada, but instead Canada has been copying the US and getting American results.
That said, two positive aspects are notable. The first is very high housing and commercial growth in the most desirable cities, if not in their most exclusive neighborhoods. Vancouver probably has another 10-20 years before its developable housing reserves near existing SkyTrain run out and it is forced to figure out how to affordably expand the network. Nowhere in Europe is housing growth as fast as in Metro Vancouver; among the cities for which I have data, only Stockholm comes close, growing at 7-8 net units per 1,000 people annually.
Moreover, with Downtown Vancouver increasingly built out, Vancouver seems to be successfully expanding the CBD outward: Central Broadway already has many jobs and will most likely have further commercial growth as the Millennium Line is extended there. Thus, employers that don’t fit into the Downtown Vancouver peninsula should find a home close enough for SkyTrain, rather than hopping to suburban office parks as in the US. Right now, the central blob of 100 km^2 – a metric I use purely because of limitations on French and Canadian data granularity – has a little more than 30% of area jobs in Vancouver, comparable to Paris, Lyon, New York, Boston, and San Francisco, and ahead of other American cities.
The second aspect is that Canadians are collectively a somewhat more internationally curious nation than Americans. They are more American than European, but the experience of living in a different country from the United States makes it easier for them to absorb foreign knowledge. The reaction to my and Jonathan English’s August article about Canadian costs has been sympathetic, with serious people with some power in Toronto contacting Jonathan to figure out how Canada can improve. The reaction I have received within the United States runs the gamut – some agencies are genuinely helpful and realize that they’ll be better off if we can come up with a recipe for reducing costs, others prefer to obstruct and stonewall.
My perception of Canadian politics is that even right-populists like Doug Ford are more serious about this than most American electeds. In that sense, Ford is much like Boris Johnson, who could move to Massachusetts to be viceroy and far improve governance in both Britain and Massachusetts. My suspicion is that this is linked to Canada’s relatively transit-oriented past and present: broad swaths of the Ontarian middle class ride trains, as is the case in Outer London and the suburbs of Paris. A large bloc of present-day swing voters who use public transport is a good political guarantee of positive attention to public transport in the future. American cities don’t have that – there are no competitive partisan elections anywhere with some semblance of public transportation.
These two points of hope are solid but still run against powerful currents. Toronto really is botching the RER project because of insider obstruction and timidity, and without a strong RER project there is no way to extend public transportation to the suburbs. Vancouver is incapable of concentrating resources where they do the most good. And all Canadian cities have seen an explosion in costs. Canadians increasingly understand the cost problem, but it remains to be seen whether they can fix it.
The Brooklyn Bus Redesign is Out!
Marron just published my and Eric Goldwyn’s Brooklyn bus redesign proposal (with many thanks to Juliet Eldred for doing the graphics and design). The substance isn’t really changed from what we discussed last year. The delay in publication has had a few causes, of which I believe the biggest is that I completely missed that the links to many of the references in the lit review were dead and thus could not be typeset.
Instead of retyping an old blog post, I want to emphasize a few things that have come up in the last year. Some are specific to New York, others more general within the US. The idea of a bus redesign, introduced to the American discourse by Jarrett at the beginning of this decade, has gotten steadily more popular, and New York is beginning its own process, starting with the Bronx; in that context, it’s worthwhile pointing out specifics that Eric and I have learned from the Brooklyn process.
The redesign is a process, not a one-and-done program
Cities change. The point of a bus redesign is to let the bus network reflect the city of today and not that of when bus routes were set, typically when the streetcars were removed in the postwar era. The upshot is that the city can expect to change in the future, which means further bus redesigns may be necessary.
Instead of letting bus networks drift away from serving the city as is and doing a big redesign once in a generation, cities should change buses on an ongoing basis. American transit agencies are learning the principles of bus redesign this decade. They can and should use these principles for forward planning, tweaking bus routes as needed. Any of the following changes can trigger small changes in bus service:
- New development
- Shifts in commuting patterns even without new development
- Changes in traffic patterns
- Changes in the urban rail network
- Long-term changes in driver labor, maintenance, etc.
- Changes in bus technology, such as ride quality, dispatching, or pollution levels
In New York, the biggest ongoing change is probably the urban rail network. There are no subway extensions planned for Brooklyn, but there is expansion of subway accessibility, which changes the optimal bus network since some buses, like the B25 and B63, have no reason to exist if the subway lines they parallel are made accessible. There has been extensive activism about priorities here. To its credit, the MTA is accelerating accessibility retrofits, even though construction costs are extremely high.
New York’s current redesign process is flawed
Eric and I have heard negative feedback from various people involved in the process. Some are planners. One is a community activist, enough of a railfan and busfan not to NIMBY changes for the sake of NIMBYism, but nonetheless disaffected with how the Bronx redesign went.
As far as I can tell, the problem with the current process is that it’s too timid. In the Bronx, this timidity is understandable. The borough’s bus network is mostly good enough. The most important change in the Bronx is to speed up the buses through off-board fare collection, stop consolidation, bus lanes on main streets, and conditional signal priority, and plug the extra speed into higher frequency.
The MTA treats it as part of a separate process – select bus service (“SBS”) – and even though planning these two aspects separately is workable, the MTA does not understand that they are related and that speedups provide crucial resources for higher frequency. The problem here is with operating cost estimation. Like the other American agencies where I’ve asked, the MTA assumes bus costs scale with service-km, and thus higher speeds don’t change frequency. In reality, bus costs, dominated by driver wages, scale with service-hours. Higher speeds can be plugged one-to-one into higher frequency. In Brooklyn, only 30% of the benefits we estimate come from changing the network, and the other 70% come from speeding up the buses.
But Brooklyn is not the Bronx. The Bronx is largely good enough, in ways Brooklyn isn’t. Brooklyn is not terrible, but the bus network has too many circuitous or duplicative routes. Eric and I have consolidated about 530 km of bus route down to 350, without any of the coverage vs. ridership tradeoffs common to areas with less isotropic population density than Brooklyn. The MTA needs to be bolder in Brooklyn, and even bolder than that in Queens, if the redesign is to succeed.
The 14th Street bus lane
Eric and I encountered some political resistance to the idea of mass installation of bus lanes. Local interests listen to people with local connections, who are usually drivers. Transit riders are disproportionately riding to city center jobs, and have citywide rather than local political identities. When I went to an Open New York meeting, people began with a round of introductions in which people say their names and where they live, and the about 20 attendees represented maybe 15 different city neighborhoods. The upshot is that like Open New York’s mission of building more housing, the mission of diverting scarce street space from drivers to bus riders is best done on a citywide rather than street-by-street basis.
There is some hope of such a transformation happening. The bus lane on 14th Street survived a nuisance lawsuit, and ridership rose 17% almost immediately after it opened. The success is stark enough that a citywide increase in installation is plausible. City council speaker Corey Johnson promised to install 48 km of bus lane per year were he to be elected mayor, which is too passive but could do some good on the busiest routes.
Fare Regulations
Public transportation companies may have the ability to raise fares arbitrarily based on market demands, for examples British buses outside London and American freight railroads. Or they may be subject to regulations capping the fare, for example Japanese railroads. Mixed systems exist as well, such as British rail fares. In Britain, the privatized, mostly deregulated approach is so commonly accepted that a Conservative recently called Labour dangerous socialists for proposing municipalizing bus systems, as in such socialist states as the US, Japan, Germany, etc. In reality, in the case of rail specifically (and perhaps buses as well), there’s a theoretical case with some empirical backing for why reasonable fare caps as in Japan can lead to more investment and more capacity, whereas wholly unregulated fares lead to hoarding and capacity cuts to create shortages.
The model
I’m stealing the economic model for this post from Paul Krugman, who used it to explain the California blackouts of 2000-1. The demand curve is inelastic: the demand is 1,000 units at $20/unit, decreasing to 900 units at $1,000/unit, at which point the curve goes flat. The supply curve is a constant $20/unit, but the market is oligopolistic (say, there are very high barriers to entry because building your own power plant is hard), and there are 5 producers, each with 200 units. If the price is regulated at $20/unit, each producer will supply 200 units. If the price is unregulated, then each producer alone gets an incentive to hold back production, since 100*1000 > 200*20, and then production will be curtailed to 900 units.
The model is simplified in a number of ways: real supply curves slope up; the part about demand going flat at 900 units is unrealistic and exists purely to avoid dealing with optimizing where at 800-something units each producer has an incentive to go back to producing more; capacity constraints involve escalating production costs rather than a God-given restriction on the number of suppliers and their capacity. But with all these caveats, it fits markets that have the following characteristics:
- There are steep barriers to entry, for example if large amounts of capital are required to enter (to build a power plant, set up a rail operating company, etc.).
- Demand is highly inelastic.
- Adding new capacity is expensive.
The issue of capacity
In rail, we can start plugging real numbers for both demand elasticity and the cost of new capacity.
In the above model the price elasticity is -0.0244 in the 900-1,000 units range, which is ridiculously inelastic, on purpose so as to highlight how the model works. TCRP Report 95 says the elasticity in a number of large cities studied is about -0.18, and a VTPI review in a mixture of cities and circumstances (peak vs. off-peak, bus vs. rail, etc.) asserts a short-term average of about -0.3. Unregulated fares will lead to supply reductions if the elasticity times the number of producers is more than -1 (or less than 1 if you flip signs); if no producer has <18% of the market, there will be supply restrictions under unregulated fares, just as a monopolist will hold back supply and raise fares if demand is inelastic.
The cost of new capacity of course depends on the line and the characteristics of competition between different railroads. It’s higher in Japan, where separate railroads run their own lines and trains, than in Britain, where different companies franchise to run trains on the same tracks. But even in Britain, getting a franchise requires a commitment to running service for many years. The significance of this is that the long-run public transport ridership elasticity with respect to fare is more elastic (VTPI recommends a range of -0.6 to -0.9), with a few estimates even going below -1.
For the purposes of this section, we do not distinguish capital from operating costs. Thus, the cost of new capacity is not given in units of capital costs, but in units of operating costs: if increasing service by 1% raises operating expenses by 2% counting the extra investment required, then we say the supply elasticity is 2. Note that supply curves slope up so the elasticity is always positive, but the elasticity can be below 1, for example if economies of scale are more important than the need to invest in new capacity.
Set the following variables: u is quantity of service, r is total revenue (thus, fare is r/u), c is total costs. The railroad is assumed profitable, so r > c. We are interested in the change in profit based on quantity of service, i.e.
The important thing to note is that price controls keep dr/du higher in an oligopoly (but not in a competitive environment, like housing – a single landlord can’t meaningfully create a housing shortage). With price controls, we get
whereas without price controls, with elasticity 
And likewise, with supply elasticity 
Note, moreover, that price controls as construed in Japan let operating companies recover profits, letting them raise prices if they invest in more capacity, so that dr/du is actually higher than r/u.
The real world
I do not know to what extent the lack of fare regulation on many British trains contributes to capacity shortages. However, there is some evidence that the same situation is holding back investment in the United States, on Amtrak. Amtrak is a monopolist facing some fare regulations, for example congressional rules limiting the spread between the lowest and highest fares on a given train, but within its ability to set its own capacity in the medium run, it has relatively free hand, and in fact a strong incentive to maximize fares, in order to subsidize money-losing trains outside the Northeast Corridor.
Amtrak generally runs the trains it has on the Northeast Corridor, without explicitly holding back on capacity. However, this is in an environment with very low utilization rates. There are 20 Acela trainsets, but only 16 run in service at a given time, giving them the moniker “hangar queens.” There is no real interest within Amtrak at raising speed just enough to be able to run consistent service intervals, for example hourly with two trainsets coupled to form a 16-car train south of New York. Nor is there any interest in making small investments to permit such long trainsets to run – most Acela stops from New York to the south have platforms long or almost long enough for such trains, but the rest need to be lengthened, within right-of-way so that the cost is positive but low.
In the future, capacity cliffs may prove serious enough to stymie American passenger rail development. Right now the main obstacle are Amtrak itself and obstructive commuter railroads such as Metro-North, but assuming competent, profit-maximizing investment plans, it is not so expensive to invest in capacity and speed so as to permit around 4 long high-speed trains per hour north of New York (or even New Haven) and 6 south of it. But then the next few trains per hour require further bypasses, for example four-tracking most of the Providence Line. High supply elasticity – let’s say around 2 – is plausible. Then eventually a dedicated pathway to intercity trains through New York becomes necessary, raising supply elasticity even higher. In an environment with uncapped, profit-maximizing fares, a rational Amtrak management may well just keep what it has and jack up prices rather than build more capacity.
Pedestrian Observations 
