Category: Urban Transit
Dispersing Expensive Centers: Edge City Version
This is somewhat of an addendum to my post before about dispersal of urban networks toward cheaper cities. I addressed the question of dispersal from rich, expensive metro areas, especially San Francisco, to cheaper ones, as a way of dealing with high housing prices. But more common is dispersal within metro areas: gentrification spilling from a rebounding neighborhood to adjacent neighborhoods that remain cheaper, and office space spilling from the primary CBD to the edge cities. I am going to address the latter issue in this post.
CBDs are expensive. They have intense demand for office space, as well as high-end retail and hotels. In many cities, there’s demand for office space even at the construction costs of supertall skyscrapers, going up to about $5,000-6,000 per square meter in privately-built New York towers. Zoning regimes resist the height required to accommodate everyone, and this is worse in Europe than in North America and high-income East Asia. Paris proper has many towers just above the 100 meter mark, but only three above 120. On a list of the tallest buildings in Sweden, not a single one above 100 meters is in central Stockholm, and the tallest within the zone are not in the CBD but in Södermalm; compare this with Vancouver, a metro area of similar size. But in the US, too, expanding CBDs is difficult in the face of neighborhood opposition, even in Manhattan.
The solution many cities have adopted is to put the skyscrapers in edge cities. Paris famously built La Defense, which has far more skyscrapers than the city proper does; Stockholm is building skyscrapers in Kista; London built Canary Wharf; Washington, the major US city with the tightest CBD height limits, sprouted skyscraper clusters in several suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. Ryan Avent proposed this as one solution to NIMBYism: in new-build areas, there are few residents who could oppose the new development. In contrast, near zoning-constrained CBDs, not only are there many residents, but also the land is so desirable that they are typically high-income, which means they have the most political power to oppose new development.
The problem with this solution is that those secondary CBDs are not public transit hubs. In Paris, this has created an east-west disparity, in which people from (typically wealthy) western suburbs can easily reach La Defense, whereas people from poorer ones need to take long RER trips and often make multiple transfers. In every transit city, the CBD is unique in that it can be reached from anywhere. To give similar accessibility to a secondary center, massive investment is required; Paris is spending tens of billions of euros on circumferential regional rail lines to improve suburb-to-suburb connectivity, expand access in the eastern suburbs, and ameliorate the east-west imbalance (see for example isochrones on PDF-pp. 20-21 of the links here). Those lines are going to be well-patronized: the estimate is 2 million daily passengers. And yet, the east-west imbalance, if nothing else, would be a lesser problem if instead of building La Defense, Paris had built up Les Halles.
The situation in other cities is similar. Kista is on one branch of one subway line, two stops away from its outer terminus. Living in Central Stockholm, my coworkers and I can get to KTH on foot or by bike, but a coworker who teaches at KTH’s satellite campus in Kista has a long commute involving circumferential buses (taking the subway and changing at T-Central would be even longer because of the detour). While many individual sub-neighborhoods of Central Stockholm are quite dense, the overall density in the center is not particularly high, certainly not by the standards of Paris or New York. A similar problem happens in Washington, where the biggest edge city cluster, Tysons Corner, is traditionally auto-oriented and was only just connected to Metro, on a branch. This always affects poorer people the worst, as they can’t afford to live in the CBD, where there is easy access to all secondary destination, and often are pushed to suburbs with long commutes.
There is a political economy problem here, as is usually the case with zoning. (Although in the largest cities skyscraper heights are pushing beyond the point of constant marginal costs, purchase prices at least in New York are much higher than construction costs.) The people living near CBDs, as noted before, are usually rich. The displacement of office space to the suburbs affects them the least, for three reasons. First, if they desire work within walking distance or short subway distance, they can have it, since their firms typically make enough money to afford CBD office rents. Second, since they live in the transit hub, they can access suburban jobs in any direction. And third, if the transit options are lacking, they can afford cars, although of course traffic and parking remain problematic. Against their lack of incentive to support CBD office space, they have reasons to support the status quo: the high rents keep it exclusive and push poor people away, and often the traditional mid-rise buildings are genuinely more aesthetic than skyscrapers, especially ones built in modernist style.
These concerns are somewhat muted in the US, where rich people decamped for the suburbs throughout the 20th century, and have supported zoning that mandates single-family housing in the suburbs, instead of staying in the city and supporting zoning that keeps the city mid-rise. This may have a lot to do with the formation of high-rise downtowns in American cities of such size that in Europe they’d be essentially skyscraper-free.
However, what’s worse in the US is the possibility of short car-free commutes to the edge cities. Where La Defense is flanked by suburbs with high residential density, and Kista’s office blocks are adjacent to medium-density housing projects for working- and middle-class people, American edge cities are usually surrounded by low-density sprawl, where they are easily accessible by car but not by any other mode of transportation. This is because the American edge cities were usually not planned to be this way, but instead arose from intersections of freeways, and developed only after the residential suburbs did. As those edge cities are usually in rich areas, the residents again successfully resist new development; this is the point made in Edgeless Cities, which notes that, in major US metro areas, growth has been less in recognizable edge cities and more in lower-density edgeless cities.
As with the possibility of dispersing innovation clusters from rich, expensive metro areas to poorer and cheaper ones, the already-occurring dispersal from city centers to edge and subsequently edgeless cities has negative effects. It lengthens transit commutes. Although in Tokyo, long commutes first arose as a problem of a monocentric CBD, and the city developed secondary CBDs as a solution, the situation in European cities an order of magnitude smaller is very different. It worsens housing segregation: the development of an edge city tends to be in the direction of the favored quarter, since that’s where the senior managers live, and conversely, higher-income workers can choose to move nearby for the short commute. Although nearly all metro areas have favored quarters, decentralization of jobs thus tends to lengthen the commutes of poor people more than those of rich people.
This is not quite the same as what happens when entire metro areas are forced to disperse due to housing cost. The agglomerations generally stay intact, since an entire industry can move in the same direction: smaller cities have just one major favored quarter with edge cities, and larger ones still only have a few, so that industries can specialize, for example in New York, biotech and health care cluster in the Edison-Woodbridge-New Brunswick edge city. Moreover, the specialized workers are usually high-income enough that they can stay in the central city or migrate to the favored quarter. San Francisco’s programmers are not forced to move individually to faraway poor neighborhoods; they move in larger numbers to ones near already gentrifying ones, spurring a new wave of gentrification in the process; were they to move alone, they’d lose the access to the tech shuttles. The negative effects are predominantly not on richer people, but on poorer people.
The problem is that even among the poor, there is little short-term benefit from supporting upzoning. If Paris, London, and Stockholm liberalize housing and office construction, the first towers built of both kinds will be luxury, because of the large backlogs of people who would like to move in and are willing to pay far in excess of construction costs. I am going to develop this point further in two posts, on what is best called NITBYism – Not In Their Backyard – but this means that the incentive for poor and peripheral populations is not to care too much about development in rich centers. The marginal additional building in a rich city center is going to go to the upper middle class; sufficient construction would trickle to the middle class; only extensive construction would serve the working class, and then not all of it.
In the US, the marginal additional building may actually displace poor people, if no new construction is allowed, simply by removing low-income apartments. It may even create local demand for high-income housing, for example by signaling that the neighborhood has improved. In San Francisco, this is compounded by the tech shuttles, as a critical mass of Silicon Valley-bound residents can justify running shuttles, creating demand for more high-income housing.
The amount of construction required to benefit the bottom half of the national income distribution is likely to be massive. This is especially true in France and the UK, which have sharp income differences between the capital and the rest of the country; their backlogs of people who would like to move to the capital are likely in the millions, possibly the high millions. Such massive construction is beyond the pale of political reality: the current high-income resident population is simply not going to allow it – when forced to share a building with the working class, it pushes for poor doors, so why would it want zoning that would reduce the market-rate rent to what the working class would afford? The only political possibility in the short run is partial plans, but these are not going to be of partial use to the working class, but of no use to it, benefiting the middle class instead. As a result, there is no push by the working class and its social democratic political organs to liberalize construction, nor by the small-is-beautiful green movement.
Ultimately, the attempt to bypass restrictions on urban CBD formation by building edge cities, like every other kludge, is doomed to failure. The fundamental problem of rich people making it illegal to build housing nearby is not solved, and is often made even worse. The commutes get worse, and the inequality in commutes between the rich and the poor grows. Office space gets built, where otherwise it would spread along a larger share of the medium-rise CBD, but for most workers, this is not an improvement, and the environmental effects of more driving have negative consequences globally. And once city center is abandoned to the rich, there is no significant political force that can rectify the situation. What seems like a workaround and an acceptable compromise only makes the situation worse.
Putting Rail Lines in Highway Medians
North Americans are in love with trains that go in highway medians. A large fraction of urban rail construction since World War Two, both light rail and full metro, has used highway medians as cheap at-grade rights-of-way to extend train service, often deep into the suburbs. Some proposed longer-range lines are supposed to go in medians as well: Florida had reserved space in the I-4 median for Orlando-Tampa high-speed rail, and Xpress West planned to go from Las Vegas to the outskirts of the Los Angeles area in the I-15 median. The Texas Central Railway, a private group backed by JR Central planning high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston, is considering several alignments, but markets the route as following I-45 (no mention of median) in some public discussions. In nearly all cases, both urban and intercity, it borders on incompetent to design rail lines in highway medians; intercity lines frequently follow highways on one side, but even that tends to be overrated in American discussions in my experience.
Urban Rail
For urban rail, the reason to use highways is that, in most of North America, they’re everywhere, and they’re usually equipped with generous medians and shoulders, allowing relatively cheap placement of rail tracks. Of note, this is generally not the cheapest option: construction on extant (often disused) rail rights-of-way tends to be cheaper. However, in many cases, a rail right-of-way is unavailable, hosts heavy freight traffic, has been permanently turned into a trail, or has commuter trains without integration into the rest of the urban transit network. Examples include the Dan Ryan half of the Red Line and both halves of the Blue Line in Chicago, the Orange and Silver Lines in Washington, the outer ends of BART, the Spadina line in Toronto, and several light rail lines. Often they run on one side of the road, but more frequently they’re in the median, which was often reserved for it when the road was built (as in Chicago and Calgary).
The problem is that nobody wants to live, work, or hang out next to a busy grade-separated road. Living or working a kilometer or two away, with easy access by car, is great for the driver, but within close walking distance, there is just too much noise, pollution, and blight, and the pedestrian environment is unwelcoming. The transit-oriented development in Metrotown and Arlington could not have happened next to a freeway. Christof Spieler frames this as a decision of spending more money on routing trains near where people live versus staying on the easy rights-of-way. But this isn’t quite right: the Expo Line in Vancouver was assembled out of an interurban right-of-way and a city center tunnel, both out of service; the line’s high ridership comes from subsequent development next to Metrotown and other stations.
Other times, the routing comes from a deliberate decision to integrate the trains with cars, with large park-and-rides at the ends. This is common on newer light rail systems in the US (though not Canada, as Calgary prefers integration with connecting buses) and in the Washington and San Francisco suburbs. This makes things even worse, by extending the radius within which the environment is built for cars rather than for people, and by encouraging the same park-and-ride construction elsewhere, along abandoned railroads and greenfield routes, where the preexisting environment is not car-oriented.
I do not want to categorically say that cities should never build urban rail alongside highways. But I cannot think of a single example in which this was done right. Calgary is a marginal case: it did build light rail along highways, and had some success with transit-oriented development, but those highways are arterials rather than freeways, and this makes the pedestrian environment somewhat better.
The situation is somewhat different for suburban rail, but usually the scale of suburban rail is such that there’s not much new construction, only reappropriation of old lines. These lines are long and the environments low-density, making it hard justify the costs of new lines in most cases. Where new suburban rail is built, for examples the Grand Paris Express, and various airport connectors, it is typically in environments with such expected traffic density that the rules for urban rail apply, and we tend to see more underground construction or usage of extant rights-of-way.
Intercity Rail
The reasons favoring highway alignments intercity rail in the US are somewhat different. Tellingly, HSR in Europe is frequently twinned with motorways. It is not about integration with cars, since those alignments are rarely if ever meant to have major stops in their middle. Instead, it’s about picking a pre-impacted alignment, where there are fewer property takings and fewer NIMBYs. This logic is sound, but I often see Americans take it to extremes when discussing HSR.
The first problem is that roads are almost never as straight as HSR needs to be. The design standards I have seen after briefly Googling give the radius of a motorway capable of about 120 km/h as, at a minimum, 500-700 meters. With these curves, trains, too, are capable of achieving about 120 km/h – less at 500 meters without tilting, more at 700 meters with tilting. The most recent high-speed lines are built with a minimum curve radius of 7 km; about the absolute minimum that can be done, with design compromises and tilting trains, is 4 km. This implies that the trains have to deviate from the motorway alignment whenever it curves. In flat regions the road curves are much gentler than the minimum, but still too sharp for full-speed running. Both Florida HSR and Xpress West noted that the trains would have to slow down whenever the Interstate curved, because the need to run in the median would prevent them from curving gently enough to maintain full speed.
Of note, the European examples of HSR running in motorway alignments have it running alongside the roads, not in the medians. I invite the reader to spend a few minutes following French LGVs on Google Maps and seeing this. This is because there invariably have to be small deviations from the road, which in a rural area are trivial when one runs next to the road but require viaducts when one runs between the road’s two carriages.
There may also be an issue regarding reusing the Interstates. To transit supporters who view HSR as a replacement for freeways, this has an element of poetic justice, or just plain practical reuse of infrastructure they think is obsolete. I chanced upon this while looking up Interstate design standards, but I’ve seen similar proposals elsewhere, as well as dissimilar proposals making use of interstate terminology, as a reminder of past national greatness. It comes from the same place as proposals to reuse auto factories to produce rolling stock: there’s a romantic aspect in addition to or instead of an economic one.
But the most fundamental problem is that the contentious experiences of the freeway revolts and modern-day NIMBYism have soured Americans on any process that involves brazen takings. What I mean by brazen is that carving a new right-of-way, especially through a populated area, looks obvious on a map. In contrast, sticking to a preexisting right-of-way and incrementally widening it or straightening curves is less controversial, even when it involves eminent domain as well, and opposition remains much more local, based on the specific properties being taken, rather than stated in general principles. I am not completely sure why this is so; my suspicion is that widening and straightening are more easily justified as things that must be done, whereas a new right-of-way looks gratuitous.
In either way, Americans have convinced themselves that NIMBYs are a major obstacle to infrastructure construction. While zoning is a notoriously NIMBY-prone process, infrastructure often isn’t. In the English common law world, expropriations are if anything easier than in France, where farmers are especially powerful, or Japan, where rioters threatened to block the construction of Narita Airport. NIMBYs are good at getting their names out in the media, but when it comes to blocking construction, they are relatively powerless; California HSR is facing NIMBYs in the Central Valley, many of whom are conservative and politically opposed to the project regardless of local impact, but so far they have not managed to delay construction.
However, NIMBYs are a convenient bogeyman for public projects, as their motives are openly selfish. They give charismatic, authoritarian leaders the opportunity to portray their infrastructure projects as battles between the common good and backward-looking parochial interests. As I’ve noted multiple times before, New York’s livable streets community (which is similar politically to the set of HSR supporters in the US) tends to overblow the importance of NIMBYs to the point of seeing NIMBYs even when the concerns have nothing to do with NIMBYism: see, for example, the reaction to the opposition of two Harlem politicians to a plan to speed up only the whitest bus route through the neighborhood.
Difficult Transit
Many people have heard that certain regions are well-suited for these projects, for example the Northeast Corridor is unusually good for HSR because it links four major cities and several medium-size ones on a single line. By implication, there has to be a flip side, i.e. regions that are poorly-suited for HSR and cities that are poorly-suited for new rapid transit. If there weren’t – if every region were like the Northeast Corridor – then the ridership models would just have higher first-order estimates. Several proposals I’ve seen in comments and on my blogroll in the last few days are in areas where the urban geography makes it harder to justify such projects. These and a few others are the examples I will use in this post.
As usual, there’s a caveat that difficult does not equal bad. Some of these ideas are worth pursuing, but have more challenges that their easier counterparts do not, and if those challenges are solved, then they can perform well. One of the biggest success stories of modern rail investment, the TGV, is in an urban geography that’s not particularly conducive to rail: France’s secondary cities surround Paris in all directions (although Lyon and Marseille are collinear with Paris), the stub-end layout of stations in Paris and many other cities forces awkward branching, Lyon needed a business district to be built from scratch around Part-Dieu. France made this work, and it’s possible some of the projects on this list can be made to work in similar vein.
High-Speed Rail in Sweden
Project: greenfield HSR lines connecting Stockholm with Sweden’s major secondary cities, Gothenburg and Malmö.
The problem: Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö do not lie on a straight line. The three cities are quite small by the standards of more populated countries: Stockholm has a bit more than 2 million people, Gothenburg has a bit less than a million, Malmö has 700,000. A line connecting just two of them, or even a Y-shaped line, is unlikely to get enough ridership to justify the construction costs of full HSR. There are no large intermediate cities: the largest, Linköping, has about 100,000 people. As noted above, French urban geography is not great for HSR, either, but at least the LGV Sud-Est could serve both Lyon and Marseille, and France’s greater population ensures that its secondary cities are large enough to generate enough traffic to fill an HSR line.
As a silver lining, Malmö is adjacent to Copenhagen, and the difficult part, bridging the Øresund, has already been done. While international lines tend to underperform, the tight cultural and economic connections between the Scandinavian countries make it likely that international projects within Scandinavia would be exceptions to the rule. Copenhagen would add another 2 million people at the end of the line. However, even that is unlikely to generate enough ridership to pay for 500-odd kilometers of greenfield HSR (plus a connection to Gothenburg).
Because of its poor urban geography for conventional HSR, Sweden has investigated cheaper solutions, allowing higher speeds on legacy track or on greenfield tracks built to lower standards. As a result, there is research into the possibility of high-speed tilting trains, running faster than the 250 km/h Pendolino. This research is likely to be useful in the UK and US, where the urban geography is better-suited for HSR but fully greenfield construction is obstructed by suburban development near the rights-of-way and by high construction costs, but the original context was faster speeds within Sweden.
High-Speed Rail in the Pacific Northwest
Project: greenfield HSR connecting Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. This is not officially proposed anywhere that I know; current plans focus on incremental improvements to the Amtrak Cascades. However, every American HSR fantasy map I’ve seen (including the ones I’ve drawn) includes this link, since at least superficially based on city populations it would succeed.
The problem: getting out of the major cities involves a slog on curvy legacy track in areas where it’s hard to straighten the right-of-way. Heading north of Seattle, the route goes along the water, in terrain that is too hilly for an easy inland cutoff all the way to Everett, 50 km north. Getting out of Vancouver is also hard, because of suburban development in Surrey, and becomes even harder if one wants the Vancouver station to be Waterfront rather than Amtrak’s current stop, the less centrally located Pacific Central. The Northeast Corridor is said to have slowdowns near the major stations, leading to proposals to bypass them with new tunnels, but at no point are there 50 nearly-continuous km of low curve radii; the New Haven Line does not look as curvy, while the Shore Line farther east is easy to bypass on I-95.
The Seattle-Portland segment is much easier: the route heading south of Seattle is not constrained, and north of Portland it is possible to run alongside I-5. However, the most important intermediate cities, Tacoma and Olympia, can only be served with exurban stations, since getting into their centers would require the mainline to detour on curvy alignments.
Through-Run Commuter Rail in Chicago
Project: there are many proposals by transit activists to construct new infrastructure to enable through-running on Metra, analogous to Crossrail, SEPTA Regional Rail, the Paris RER, and multiple S-Bahns. Details differ, but other than the lines through Union Station, through-running generally means connecting Metra Electric to some of the lines feeding into Union Station from the north or the Union Pacific lines; UP-North is especially notable for serving dense neighborhoods and not having any freight traffic.
The problem: the layout of the lines entering the Chicago central business district makes it hard to build a coherent network. What I mean by coherent is that commuter lines can make multiple CBD stops to serve different CBDs, or different parts of the same CBD: in New York, a Penn Station-Grand Central connection would let trains serve both the West Side and the East Side. Look at the map proposed by Sandy Johnston, in the second link above: there is no station on the Near North Side, there is no connection from the West Loop stations to the Loop, and effectively lines are still going to be split between lines bound for the West Loop and lines bound for the Loop in the through-run system.
None of this is the fault of any of the people drawing these maps. To serve both the West Loop and the Loop, a line would have to go east-west in the vicinity of Union Station, where there is no legacy line pointing in the right direction. The options boil down to a long greenfield east-west subway, and an awkward transition to the preexisting east-west lines, BNSF (which is too far south) and UP-West (which is too far north), which to add another complication carry heavy freight traffic.
A system prioritizing north-south connections runs into different dilemmas, concerning the tradeoff between service to the Near North Side and easier connections to the rest of the North Side Metra lines. A north-south line connecting UP-North to Metra Electric through the Near North Side would be beautiful, and miss all other Metra lines and most L lines. Sandy’s proposal has Metra Electric swerving west to meet UP-North just north of its terminus at Ogilvie Transportation Center, meeting all L lines and potentially the North Side Metra lines but missing the job centers in the West Loop and Near North Side.
Rail to LaGuardia
Project: construct some rail extension to LaGuardia Airport. Which rail extension varies based on the proposal. The most mainstream proposal, in the sense that it was supported by Giuliani until it was torpedoed by neighborhood opposition, would have extended the Astoria Line east to airport grounds. More recent proposals from various activists have included not just the Astoria Line extension, but also a Northeast Corridor spur, an AirTrain from the Astoria Line, an AirTrain from Jamaica with JFK connections, a subway shuttle under Junction, and a subway running from the airport to 125th Street along the route of the M60 bus.
The problem: all of the above ideas face the same pair of problems. At the airport end, the airport competes with other urban destinations, rather than complementing them by lying on the same straight line with them. An extension from the west, such as the Astoria Line extension, needs to choose between serving the airport and serving the Astoria Boulevard corridor, which has high residential density and no nearby subway service; Astoria Boulevard itself is so wide that as with Queens Boulevard, an elevated line in its middle would be an improvement. Farther east, there is nothing that a LaGuardia extension could be continued to, because of Flushing Bay. An extension across the bay going to Flushing or College Point could be useful, but an extension of the 7 to College Point would be even more useful and avoid underwater tunneling. The bay, and more generally the Long Island Sound, dooms any proposal for a loop returning to the mainline, in the manner of Zurich Airport, while a spur would again compete for capacity with more important lines. Compare this with LAX, which, going along the Harbor Subdivision, is collinear with Inglewood, the Slauson corridor, and Union Station, and would have an easy connection to El Segundo.
At the other end, the question with every airport extension is, what does it connect the airport to? The answer for LaGuardia has to be the Upper East Side, where as I remember most riders originate; but there is no good way of connecting to the Upper East Side, which has no east-west subway line, and shouldn’t, as there are perhaps a hundred kilometers of higher-priority tunnels in the region. A connection to 125th Street is ruled out by the fact that Second Avenue Subway has an even better connection to 125th. The Astoria Line serves the Midtown hotel cluster well, and has a connection to the Lexington trains to the Upper East Side, but I doubt that it can beat a taxi across the bridge in non-rush-hour traffic.
Providence East Side Tunnel
Project: restore rail service through the East Side Rail Tunnel, with a new connection to Downcity at the western end and connections to new or restored rail lines in and beyond East Providence. In Jef Nickerson’s version, the trains are light rail and drop to the surface at the Downcity end. In mine, they continue elevated through Downcity, with a new station replacing Providence Station for both commuter and intercity rail. All versions include a stop at Thayer Street for Brown University service, should one be constructable at reasonable cost.
The problem: there’s no real need for local or regional service from the east along the tunnel (intercity service could be sped up by about half a minute to a minute by avoiding curves in Pawtucket). Light rail service would run into the problem of incredibly spread-out suburbanization east of Providence. Commuter rail would run into separate problems: the legacy lines go along the water in East Providence and don’t serve the town itself well; beyond East Providence, the line going north serves the same suburbs as the existing Providence Line minus Pawtucket, while the line going south would need extensive and costly restoration work to get to Fall River, and only passes through small and low-density intermediate points.
Cutting off Providence Station to move the city’s main station to the south is useful, but the only rail from Providence to Pawtucket and Woonsocket goes due north of Downcity and would be left out of this system. Shoehorning it to the same station that leads to the East Side Tunnel would produce every adverse impact of viaducts on cities: heavy visual impact coming from elevated-over-elevated grade separation, squeal coming from low curve radii, takings of condo buildings near the existing Providence Station.
Airport Connectors
The most interesting transit planner in the world:
This principle is true primarily for large international airports. As I will explain, this is less true of smaller airports. But before going on, I would like to clarify a distinction between bad and overrated. Airport connectors, as I have argued many times, are overrated: city elites tend to like them disproportionately to their transit usage, as do many urban boosters, who think a comfortable airport connector is a necessary feature of a great global city. The result of this thinking (and also the main evidence we have that this thinking exists) is that airport connectors are built at much higher costs per rider than other transit projects: the JFK and Newark AirTrains cost more than $100,000 per weekday rider, much more than other recent rail projects in New York; even the far over-budget East Side Access, at current estimates, is about $60,000.
However, overrated does not mean bad. There exist airport connector projects with reasonable cost per rider. They’re still overrated, which means they’ll be built concurrently with even more cost-effective non-airport projects, but they’re good enough by themselves. As an example, take the Canada Line. The total cost was about $2 billion, and the latest ridership figure I have, from 2011, is 136,000 per weekday, ahead of projections. At $15,000 per rider, this is reasonable by European standards and very good by North American ones. Let us now look at the two branches of the line, to Richmond and the airport. Lacking separate cost data for them, I am going to estimate them at about $300 million each, as they are entirely above-ground; the airport branch is 4 km and the Richmond branch is 3 km, but the Richmond branch has an urban el and the airport branch doesn’t. For ridership data, we have this set of figures per station (which results in a Canada Line total of only 113,000). Boardings and alightings sum to 19,000 on the airport branch and 34,000 on the Richmond branch; we’re double counting intra-branch trips, but there presumably are very few of these. As we see, the Richmond branch is more cost-effective, but the airport branch holds its own – since the per-station data has a lower overall Canada Line ridership, the airport branch’s presumed cost per extra rider generated is less than that of the entire line! (This sometimes happens, even with branches that generate less ridership than the trunk.) Clearly, despite the fact that airport connectors are overrated, this is an example of a good project.
The importance of the overrated vs. bad distinction is then that good transit advocates need to be wary, since airport connectors that don’t work well might get funded anyway, ahead of more deserving projects. But there remain good airport connectors, and therefore we should discuss what features they might have. The answer given by city elites is typically “nonstop connection to the CBD,” often with a premium fare. But the good transit answer is more complicated, and the graphic at the top of the post is only a partial answer.
There is a difference between short- and long-distance air travel. In many cities it doesn’t matter much because there’s a single dominant airport – Beijing, Frankfurt, Zurich, Atlanta, Toronto – but in others there are multiple airports, with different roles. Often there will be a smaller, closer-in, older airport, serving mostly domestic flights, and a larger, farther away, newer international airport. Paris has Orly and Charles-de-Gaulle, Chicago has Midway and O’Hare, New York has LaGuardia and JFK (Newark is intermediate in its role, even if it’s the oldest), Los Angeles has Burbank and LAX (the other airports are somewhat outside this division), Dallas has Love Field and DFW, Tokyo has Haneda and Narita, Seoul has Gimpo and Incheon. Because those airports have different functions, they require different kinds of transportation links.
First, let us consider departing passengers. If they travel to another continent, their options are quite restricted: for example, if they live within driving distance of Atlanta, they’re flying out of Atlanta. Even if there are closer secondary airports (such as Greenville-Spartanburg and Chattanooga), they don’t offer such service – at most, they offer a connecting puddle jumper flight to the primary airport. In contrast, if they travel shorter distances, and live far from the primary airport, they could fly out of a secondary airport, or might just drive instead of flying: a 2-hour drive to the airport is comparatively more tolerable for an 8-hour intercontinental flight than for a 1.5-hour short-hop flight. For example, when I lived in Providence, my air trips were all to the West Coast or Europe, so I flew out of Boston or even New York; but when my sister visited, she chained trips and also visited her boyfriend, who at the time lived in North Carolina, and for the domestic leg of the trip she flew out of T. F. Green.
The result is that primary international airports draw their departing passengers from a much wider shed than mainly domestic airports. In metro areas with such separation of airports, the international airports – Charles de Gaulle, JFK, DFW, Incheon, etc. – draw riders from faraway suburbs and even from adjacent small metro areas, whereas the domestic airports draw riders primarily from the city and its nearby suburbs.
Now, let us consider arriving passengers. Destinations are more centralized than origins, but this is especially true for international trips than for domestic ones. Tourism trips are heavily centralized around a few attractions, which in most cities are in the CBD, or in specific locations: if you’re flying to the Paris region for tourism, your destination is either Paris proper or Eurodisney, rather than an average suburb. Business trips are also heavily centralized around the CBD and a few edge cities. Personal visits have no such concentration, and these are much more common for short-distance domestic flights than for long-distance international flights. I am unusual in that I live on a different continent from my parents; usually, people live within ground transportation or short-distance flying distance from family and friends, depending on the country they live in (short-distance flying distance is more common in the US). The result here is that arriving passengers at domestic airports are typically interested in visiting the CBD but often also the rest of the metro area, whereas arriving passengers at international airports are much more CBD- or tourist attraction-centric.
Some evidence for this difference can be found in looking at the Consumer Airfare Report, which has domestic O&D traffic counts between airport pairs. The primary international airport usually has a smaller percentage of its domestic O&D traffic going to shorter-distance cities. For example, at LAX, 13% of traffic is within California, and another 6% is to Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson, within a 3-hour high-speed rail range. At Burbank, the corresponding figures are 42% and 21% respectively. The same pattern can be observed for O’Hare (8.6% of traffic is internal to the Midwest) and Midway (14.6%), and DFW (3% of traffic is internal to the Texas Triangle) and Love Field (27%).
The mode of transportation that best suits the needs of international airports is then mainline rail. On the one hand, it tends to be better than urban transit at serving trips that are dedicated to CBD service, since commuter rail is more radial than urban transit, and the stop spacing is typically also longer (although dedicated premium connectors are still often wastes of money). On the other hand, it can extend deep into the suburbs and to adjacent metro areas, and expand the airport’s draw. People can ride intercity (often high-speed) trains direct to the terminal at Frankfurt, Zurich, and Charles-de-Gaulle, and this allows those airports to be the primary international airports for metro areas in a wide radius: SNCF code-shares with airlines to connect people from Charles-de-Gaulle to Lyon, 400 km and 2 hours away by TGV.
This is not true of small domestic airports. A TGV connection to Orly would’ve been much less beneficial than the current connection to Charles-de-Gaulle: most of Orly’s traffic is short-distance, often competing with the TGV rather than complementing it.
With this distinction in mind, we should look at the situation at the major American airports. In California, the current plan is to have California High-Speed Rail serve both SFO (at Millbrae) and Burbank Airport; the original plan served Downtown Burbank instead of the airport, but the HSR Authority seems to have shifted its focus, and wants Burbank to be the southern terminus of the line, pending construction to LA Union Station. This is bad planning. Nearly two-thirds of Burbank’s traffic competes either with California HSR or with future tie-ins. People from Bakersfield and Fresno are unlikely to take a train to the airport to connect to a flight, since they can take a train the whole way, or drive directly to Las Vegas or Phoenix. People in Bakersfield and Fresno would be more interested in a connection to LAX, whose traffic complements rather than competes with intercity rail.
Los Angeles could build a connection to LAX, running both frequent electric commuter trains and high-speed trains on it. The Harbor Subdivision has existing tracks from Union Station almost the entire way to the airport, although the route is at-grade, with a large portion of it running next to Slauson Avenue, and most likely a major project like this would require viaducts. Only a short greenfield segment, elevated over Century, is required to reach the proposed Terminal 0 location, and that is only necessary if, as in Zurich and Frankfurt, LAX wishes to avoid a landside people mover. It is both bad transit and bad politics to build this only for nonstop trains: the route passes through reasonably dense urban neighborhoods, and should have 10-12 stops along the way, with some trains running local and others making only 1-3 stops, at major nodes such as Inglewood or the intersection with the Blue Line. There is room for passing sidings at the line’s midpoint, but the low top speed and the short length of the line is such that overtakes are only necessary if there are nonstop and local trains every 10 minutes. Such an airport connector would serve many different trips at once: HSR trips from Central Valley cities to LAX, arriving trips from LAX to Downtown LA (and, via transfers at intermediate stops, to the Westside), and local trips on the Slauson corridor. It’s a flexibility that modernized regional rail has, and that other modes of transportation, which can’t mix local and intercity traffic as well, lack.
Leaving California, let us look at New York. There are perennial proposals for a new connection to LaGuardia (via an extension of the N) and an additional connection to JFK (usually using the Rockaway Cutoff). There is also a new proposal for a Newark connection via PATH. With the distinction between short-distance domestic and long-distance international airports (Newark is intermediate between the two), we can analyze these proposals. Newark is the easiest to dispose of: the cost is extreme, $1.5 billion for 4 km above ground. It also has several design flaws: unlike the LAX connector I outlined above, this proposal is nonstop from Newark Penn, skipping the former South Street railroad station; the lack of intercity service improvement and the poor service to the Midtown hotel clusters doom it as a CBD connector.
The JFK proposals are problematic as well. The AirTrain connection to Jamaica is quite useful, since it lets people from all over Long Island connect to the airport. Improving JFK access hinges on improving service to Jamaica, then: through-service from New Jersey, higher off-peak LIRR frequencies, reelectrification with catenary to permit Amtrak send Northeast Corridor trains that aren’t needed for Boston service to Jamaica. East Side Access improves JFK access as well, since it allows LIRR trains to serve Grand Central, which is closer to the Midtown hotel clusters than Penn Station. Ideally there wouldn’t be an AirTrain connection, but it’s the best that can be done given existing infrastructure and given Jamaica’s importance. A Rockaway Cutoff connection, which branches from the LIRR Main Line west of Jamaica, would not help Long Islanders go to JFK; it would also not be able to carry intercity trains, since Amtrak trains to Jamaica can serve both airport riders and Long Island riders, each of which groups alone is too small to justify intercity trains on its own.
In contrast, LaGuardia proposals are better, since for a close-in, domestic airport, service to the entire city is more important. I remain somewhat skeptical – airport connectors are still overrated – but less dismissive than of Newark and JFK proposals. LaGuardia travelers from the Upper East Side, which as far as I remember supplies a majority of its departing traffic, would have to transfer at 59th Street; but they have to detour through 59th or 125th via taxi already, and the subway would not get stuck in Manhattan traffic. Conversely, there is much less need to connect the airport with the suburbs and with neighboring metro areas than there is with JFK, which means that there is no point in constructing people movers to the LIRR.
Finally, let us look at Chicago. O’Hare has the airport connection of a domestic airport rather than that of an international airport. There are plans for an express link to the Loop, but these do nothing for departing passengers from neighboring areas. While airport connectors tend to be overrated, express premium-fare links are especially overrated, since they give business travelers dedicated trains, on which they always find seats, without needing to commingle with lower-income riders.
However, some of the Midwestern high-speed rail proposals include a connection to O’Hare from the outlying metro areas, and this is good planning, assuming the cost is not excessive. SNCF’s proposal includes a bypass of Chicago that serves O’Hare, similar to the Interconnexion Est. A second step, if such a connection is built, is to attempt to connect regional lines to it, if they are electrified. This includes both inward connections, i.e. a frequent commuter rail connection to the Loop or West Loop with good connections (ideally, through-service) to other commuter lines, and outward connections, i.e. low-speed short-distance intercity lines, such as to Rockford.
In all of these cases, the common thread is that the connection to the airport does not need to be a premium service, marketed only to the business traveler. These services are never the majority of airport transit ridership: see Hong Kong, Tokyo, and London numbers on PDF-p. 28 here. However, it does need to provide service to both departing and arriving passengers, and for a major international airport, this requires good service to the suburbs and to adjoining metro areas. The optimal technologies are often bundled together with premium fares – high-speed rail is in many countries, mainline rail is in North America – but the benefits come from features of the technology and service pattern, rather than of the branding. Good transit projects connecting to airports will make sure to have the correct service reach, while at the same time not excluding local riders.
Suburban Geography and Transit Modes
A post on Let’s Go LA from last year, about different suburban development patterns in different regions of the US, praises Los Angeles’s suburbs for having an arterial grid that allows some density and permits frequent bus service. The Northeast, in contrast, has a hierarchical system, of town centers surrounded by fractured streets and cul-de-sacs, at much lower density. This is how Los Angeles’s urban area has the highest standard density in the US, and one of the highest weighted densities, nearly tying San Francisco for second place after New York. It sounds like a point in favor of Los Angeles, but missing from the post is an analysis of how Rust Belt suburban development patterns reinforce prewar transit. Briefly, Western US grids are ideal for arterial buses, Northeastern town centers are ideal for commuter rail, which used to serve every town.
For a Northeastern example, the post brings up Attleboro as a historic town center. Look at the image and notice the walkable grid and development near the train station, although one quadrant of the station radius is taken up by parking. Attleboro is in fact the town with the oldest development on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and the Providence conurbation, and the only one that, when taking the train between Boston and Providence, I’d be able to see development in from the train. Sharon and Mansfield, both developed decades later, do not have as strong town centers. But conversely, many town centers similar to Attleboro’s exist in the Northeast: Framingham, Norwalk, Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, Huntington, Morristown, Paoli.
Now, a careful look at the specific examples of Norwalk and Huntington will show that the most walkable development is not necessarily at the train station. In both suburbs, the old town center is where the original road goes – Northern Boulevard and its eastern extensions in Long Island, the Boston Post Road in Connecticut. Huntington has a second center around the LIRR station; Norwalk has a much smaller second center around the South Norwalk Metro-North station. For the most part, the railroads went close enough to the older roads that the town center is the same, as is the case especially in Attleboro, Tarrytown, and Paoli, and in those cases, commuter rail can at least in principle serve jobs at the suburban town center.
This boils down to the difference between optimal bus and rail networks. Buses love grids: they typically serve the scale of a single city and its inner suburbs, and there it’s feasible to provide everywhere-to-everywhere service, which grids are optimal for. For the suburbs, this breaks down. Buses on uncongested arterial roads are still surface transit; an average speed of 30 km/h is aspirational, and that is for suburbs, not dense urban neighborhoods. On a road where the bus can average 30, cars can average 50, and cars can also use expressways without splitting frequency between different suburban destinations, speeding their journeys up greatly. Meanwhile, commuter rail can, depending on stop spacing, average 50-60 km/h easily, and an aggressive timetable can cross 80 if the stop spacing is relatively express.
There is no such thing as a rapid transit grid. Subway networks almost invariably look like a central mesh, often containing a circumferential line, with spokes radiating out of it in all directions. Mexico City has a larger mesh, approximating a subway grid, but its outer ends again look hub-and-spoke. Counting commuter rail, the hub-and-spoke system is as far as I can tell universal, with the exception of highly polycentric metro areas like the Ruhr. The spokes are rarely clean: they often cross each other (see for example the London Underground to scale). But looking at a city’s rail transit map, you’ll almost always be able to tell where the CBD is, where the inner-urban neighborhoods are, and where the outer-urban and suburban areas are.
At this distance, then, having a bus-friendly grid doesn’t matter much. What matters is having a good network of historical rights-of-way that can be used for regional rail, and a preexisting pattern of development following these lines and their junctions. In the US, the older cities have this, whereas the newer ones do not. In a suburb like Attleboro, good transit means good regional rail, with high all-day frequency, and a network of feeder buses timed to meet the trains. Grids aren’t especially useful for that.
And this is why, despite being so dense, Los Angeles has so little transit usage. Its street network is set up for bare-bones public transit, usable by people who can commute two hours in each direction and will never get cars. Because it was a medium-size city when its car ownership exploded, it doesn’t have as many town centers; its density is uniform. It has a higher weighted density than the Rust Belt outside New York, but its weighted-to-standard density ratio is much lower than those of Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. (It barely trails Washington, which has fewer town-center suburbs than the Rust Belt, but made an effort to actually build them around Metro; its Tarrytowns have Metro service rather than infrequent commuter rail.)
The optimal urban geography for urban transit is not the same as that for suburban transit, and the optimal street network for surface transit is not the same as that for rapid transit. Los Angeles could potentially excel at surface urban transit, but there’s only so much surface transit can provide the backbone of public transportation in a city. It has a handful of strong lines for rapid transit, and that’s a serious problem, which a grid won’t really solve.
Underrated Transit Projects
In between the airport connectors and mixed-traffic streetcars are some public transit proposals that would be potentially high-performing. This is a list of potential lines in the US that don’t get nearly the exposure that they deserve.
The basic rule of this post is that if it’s being built, or is on an official urban wishlist pending finding the budget for it, then it’s not underrated. Some of the most important transit projects in North America are in this category: Second Avenue Subway’s current and future phases, the Regional Connector, the UBC SkyTrain extension. What I’m interested in is lines that are only vaguely on any official wishlist, if at all, but could still get very high ridership compared to their length. It is possible that these underrated lines would turn out to be worse-performing if a study were undertaken and the costs turned out to be very high, but in no case was there an honest study. Sometimes there has been no recent study; other times there is one but it sandbags the project.
Finally, I am not including commuter rail projects on this list. Under current regulations and operating practices, nearly all North American commuter rail projects are wastes of money. Conversely, nearly all projects that assume modernization of practices are underrated. This swing, based almost entirely on organizational question, is why I’m excluding these projects from this list. The subway and light rail projects below are less sensitive to organizational questions.
Utica Avenue Subway
Location: New York
Concept: an extension of the 4 from Crown Heights along Utica Avenue to Kings Plaza, about 7 km. If Second Avenue Subway’s Phases 3 and 4 are built, then a branch can be built from Second Avenue to Williamsburg and thence under Bushwick, Malcolm X, and Utica, taking over the entirety of the line, with the 4 cut back to its current terminus; this is an additional 9 km to Second and Houston.
Why it’s underrated: the second busiest bus route in New York, the B46, follows Utica: see here for New York bus route rankings. The busiest follows First and Second, which are getting a subway. Two additional routes in the top ten, the B44 and the B41, follow Nostrand and Flatbush respectively, fairly close to Utica. The B46 has 48,000 weekday riders and the B41 and B44 have another 70,000 between them. Since subways are much faster than city buses, the expected ridership is much higher than 120,000, measured in multiples rather than in a percentage increase. In addition, the 2, 3, 4, and 5 are all busier coming to the Manhattan core from Uptown than from Brooklyn, so adding to their ridership from the Brooklyn end balances the loads better, and avoids the required increase in operating costs for the new riders.
What is being done right now: nothing.
Geary Subway
Location: San Francisco
Concept: a full subway from Market Street to the Outer Richmond District, about 9 km. This can connect to the BART subway, the Muni Metro tunnel, or a second Transbay Tube if one is built.
Why it’s underrated: the 38-Geary is the busiest bus route in San Francisco, with 57,000 weekday riders between the local, the limited, and the express buses: see here for San Francisco bus ridership. Parallel corridors are also busy: the 1-California has 29,000, the 31-Balboa has 10,000, and the 5-Fulton has 17,000. Some of the census tracts along the middle of the route, in Little Osaka Japantown, rank together with Los Angeles’s Koreatown as the densest in the US outside New York. BART’s current limiting factor is not the Transbay Tube, but the grades farther south in San Francisco, which lengthen the braking distance and make it impossible to run a full 30 trains per hour through the core segments; a Geary branch leaving south of Montgomery Street would reduce service to points farther south, but improve capacity for riders heading from Oakland to the San Francisco CBD.
What is being done right now: there were never subway plans, but there were light rail plans, which due to local merchants’ opposition to loss of space for cars were downgraded to a rapid bus. The city’s FAQ on the subject even has the cheek to portray the Boston Silver Line and the Los Angeles Orange Line as successes.
Downtown Relief Line
Location: Toronto
Concept: there are several different alignments, but all feature an east-west line somewhere between Queen Street and Union Station, with one or two bends to the north to intersect the Bloor-Danforth Line. The latter two alignments (using option 4B for the second one) feature about 12 km of tunnel; I do not know how much the first one has.
Why it’s underrated: only one subway line serves Downtown Toronto, the Yonge-University-Spadina Line. Bloor-Danforth is too far from the CBD, and requires a transfer. The transfer points are very crowded: as far as I can tell from this list, the central one, Bloor-Yonge, has 200,000 weekday boardings, apparently including transfers. Without figures that include transfers in other cities I can’t make comparisons, but I doubt any two-line, four-track station in New York has this many riders. Union Station is quite crowded as well, and DRL proposals include transfers to outlying commuter rail stations. Ridership on parallel streetcars is very high: there are 53,000 on King Street, 44,000 on Queen, and, if a more northern alignment for the DRL is chosen, 32,000 on Dundas.
What is being done right now: more studies; construction will almost certainly begin any decade now. Neither David Miller’s Transit City light rail proposal nor Rob Ford’s replacement of Transit City with subways included the DRL.
125th Street Subway
Location: New York
Concept: either Phase 5 or Phase 2.5 of Second Avenue Subway, going west along 125th to Broadway, with a station at each intersection with an existing north-south subway.
Why it’s underrated: east-west transportation in Manhattan is slow, even by the standards of Manhattan buses. The 125th Street buses in my experience are slower than walking; despite this, the various routes have about 90,000 weekday boardings between them, of which about 30,000 come from 125th Street itself. Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 is going to substantially improve east-west transportation, by serving Times Square and offering a two-seat ride from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side and Central and West Harlem; however, passengers from East Harlem will still have to take a major detour to avoid the crosstown buses. While SAS offers a relief to the 4/5 and 6 lines, the 2/3 and A/D express lines are overcrowded as well, and a connection at 125th Street would divert some East Side-bound commuters.
What is being done right now: nothing, although (some) railfans who work at the MTA privately want to see such a line built.
Silver Line Light Rail
Location: Boston
Concept: replacement of the Silver Line buses along Washington Street with light rail, feeding into an existing Green Line portal, about 4 km of light rail.
Why it’s underrated: the Silver Line buses are the busiest in Boston, with 15,000 weekday riders on the buses to Dudley Square: see PDF-pp. 47-48 of the MBTA Blue Book. The ridership doesn’t justify a subway, but does justify dedicated lanes and rail. The Green Line tunnel has some spare capacity, has a portal pointing in the correct direction, and could take an additional train every 6 or 7 minutes, which would give riders in Roxbury faster trips through Downtown Boston.
What is being done right now: nothing – a study sandbagged the rail bias factor and assumed only 130 new transit riders on a Silver Line light rail service, making the project appear cost-ineffective.
Triboro RX
Location: New York
Concept: a circumferential subway line, with about 1 km of new tunnel and 35 km of route on preexisting rights-of-way, abandoned or lightly used by freight trains today.
Why it’s underrated: the biggest cost driver, right-of-way formation, is already present. The right-of-way in question has a few daily freight trains, but the most critical link, the Hell Gate Bridge, is four-tracked, and freight trains can be kicked out from their segment of the bridge and moved to the Amtrak tracks. The work done by Michael Frumin and Jeff Zupan in the late 1990s estimated about 150,000 commute trips per weekday (76,000 commuters each making a roundtrip per day), which is low for a greenfield line of this length but reasonable for a line on existing rights-of-way.
What is being done right now: nothing, although ever since Lee Sander mentioned the line in 2008, politicians have paid lip service to the concept, without committing funding.
Boston Circumferential Line
Location: Boston
Concept: a circumferential subway, from Harvard Square to Dudley Square or the JFK-UMass subway stop, roughly following the 66 bus route where it runs and intersecting the busiest stops of the Green Line branches and some commuter rail stops. This is about 12 km.
Why it’s underrated: although the busiest Boston bus is the Silver Line to Dudley Square, the next few are circumferential, particularly the 1 and 66, and secondarily the 23 and 28; together this is about 50,000 riders. Boston’s street network is hostile to surface transit except on a few major streets such as Washington, which is why there is no hope of making such a line light rail, which would fit the projected ridership better. A route that parallels the 66, at least until it hits the E branch of the Green Line, would intersect the B, C, and D branches at their busiest respective surface stops, and improve connectivity to Cambridge, which is increasingly a major business district of the Boston region in its own right.
What is being done right now: BRT, on convoluted alignments that don’t exactly follow either the 66 or the 1 where they are parallel but instead make detours.
Nostrand Avenue Subway
Location: New York
Concept: an extension of the 2/5 from Flatbush to the southern end of Nostrand Avenue, about 5 km.
Why it’s underrated: all the reasons that make Utica so strong apply to Nostrand secondarily; the present bus ridership may be high enough to support two subway lines rather than one. The present terminus was built as a temporary one, which is why it has side platforms rather than an island platform.
What is being done right now: nothing.
New York Finds Massive Savings in Transit Construction
MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast announced that an internal review of MTA Capital Construction reveals that there are large wastes in the capital budget that could be eliminated with relatively simple steps. City comptroller Scott Stringer noted that Second Avenue Subway’s first phase, a two-mile stub, costs nearly $5 billion, whereas comparable lines in Paris, London, Tokyo, and other rich, global cities are a fraction of that amount. “Few lines cost more than half a billion dollars per mile,” his office added.
Prendergast’s office directed questions to MTA Capital Construction President Michael Horodniceanu. Horodniceanu outlined a list of items raising New York’s subway construction costs, including labor rules, legal issues, lack of training in new technologies, and insufficient public oversight of contractors. He added that there is little hope of seeing large reductions in the costs of ongoing projects, which are too far advanced, with most of the money already spent, but future subway construction could be done for much cheaper. He did not give a concrete estimate, but a senior official at MTA Capital Construction believed that with the requisite reforms, future subway lines would cost about half a billion dollars per mile in Manhattan and a quarter billion dollars in the Outer Borough.
When asked about the possibility of building Amtrak’s Gateway Project at lower cost, the source qualified those estimates, explaining that Gateway can probably be done for $3 billion, closer to a billion dollars per mile, as much of the project involves underwater tunneling. Officials from Amtrak did not comment on the record by the time this story went to press; however, a senior Amtrak manager speaking on condition of anonymity said, “we don’t really believe this is possible – there are lots of low estimates, and those always lead to budget overruns,” and said that the cost figures from the rest of the world are “irrelevant to America and American labor costs.”
Labor reactions to the announcement were mixed. James Ryan, the president of the Sandhogs Local 147 union, expressed skepticism that costs could be brought down without cutting wages or unionized jobs, and warned of a “race to the bottom” and a “low-wage Wal-Mart economy.” However, he added that he would accept changes as long as there was a guarantee of no job losses, wage cuts, or work rule reforms that would reduce union autonomy. TWU Local 100 President John Samuelsen, whose union represents subway workers rather than construction workers, proposed that the city and the state use the reduced costs to expand subway construction, specifically mentioning future phases of Second Avenue Subway. Currently only Phase 1 is funded, serving the Upper East Side.
Reactions within the state legislature were more positive. The greatest supporter is Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), whose Lower East Side district is slated to be served by the fourth and last phase of Second Avenue Subway. Silver noted that he was in support of the project even when it was just Phase 1, and said that he would work with the State Senate to pass all the legal reforms requested by Prendergast and Horodniceanu. In the State Senate, co-temporary presidents Dean Skelos (R-Long Island) and Jeffrey Klein (Ind. D-Bronx) had a cooler response. They both praised the revelations and said that they would consider passing the reforms requested, but did not mention any timeline for doing so. Several state legislators, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed sentiments that the MTA is keeping two sets of books, and if the MTA just admitted to being able to save more money, then its budget requests for operations are also likely suspect. Skelos himself was cool to the proposals for a legislative audit of the MTA, but added, “I understand why people are upset and want to take a closer look.”
In contrast, within City Hall, reactions were overwhelmingly positive. The office of Mayor Bill de Blasio praised Horodniceanu and sent a press release calling MTA Capital Construction’s announcement “a courageous admitting of past mistakes, and an ambitious look forward.” De Blasio himself added that “Now is the time to see where we can build new lines that we thought were unaffordable,” and expressed confidence that all necessary changes can be achieved without running afoul of labor demands.
It is unclear whether the city or the MTA will propose any subway extensions, other than the completion of Second Avenue Subway. In 2008, the MTA’s then-chairman, Elliot Sander, proposed a 22-mile circumferential line running on lightly-used freight rights-of-way, connecting the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn without going through Manhattan. Regional Plan Association President Robert Yaro noted that his organization initially proposed this line in 1996 and proposed that the MTA build this line as well as express links to all three airports. He added that this line, which he calls Triboro, requires only about a mile of tunnel and is therefore much cheaper than fully underground lines. “The MTA has found a way to make everything cheaper, both subways and construction on existing infrastructure, so Triboro will be especially cheap now,” he said.
The community groups who could be reached by the article’s deadline were split. Transit activists within Harlem proposed that Second Avenue Subway be modified to add a fifth phase, going crosstown under 125th Street. The members of Harlem’s three community boards agreed that it would be useful, but most of them expressed concerns that it would lead to gentrification and displacement of existing residents, and said they would support the line if the city made an effort to build or preserve affordable housing. MTA planners who spoke on condition of anonymity proposed to extend the 2 and 5 down Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn and the 4 down Utica Avenue, as per proposals from the 1970s. The response of the community boards in southeastern Brooklyn was more negative, saying that it would change the character of the neighborhoods relatively. One community board member warned that this would lead to “Manhattanization of our neighborhood.”
No member of the New Jersey state government responded to repeated requests for quotes by the article’s deadline.
Transit Observations from Philadelphia
I was in Philadelphia last summer for about five days. I have few observations as a pedestrian: I stayed in West Philadelphia, in the gentrifying zone radiating out of University City, and traveled to Center City, and both neighborhoods seemed intimately familiar to me as a (former) New Yorker. The street widths and setbacks looked very much like those of New York; West Philadelphia could easily be an area of Brooklyn. The difference to me was in the public transit rather than the pedestrian experience.
In New York, the subway is for everyone. The same is true of Singapore and Vancouver. In Philadelphia, it is not the case. The city is about 40% white and 40% black. On the trains I took, the Market Street subway and the Subway-Surface Trolleys, nearly everyone was black. A friend who lived in Philadelphia for ten years has observed the same on the buses, and adds that white people on buses tend to be college students.
But there’s more to the story. I think it’s a commonplace that in American cities other than New York, blacks ride public transit more than whites. What I think is more important is that whites tend to ride transit at rush hour. When I rode the trains in Philadelphia at rush hour, there was still a clear black majority on the streetcar or the subway car, but there were a fair number of whites. In the off-peak, I was at times the only white person on a streetcar that was filled to its seated capacity. The aforementioned friend says she thinks she saw the same, but as she rarely rode at rush hour, she is not sure.
It is not hard to come up with explanations for the difference. In Philadelphia, as in the typical Rust Belt city, the white population is quite suburbanized, much more so than the black population. It is also substantially richer. Both contribute to car ownership, and to driving in whenever traffic allows; since traffic is worst at rush hour, that’s when we see the most white people on public transit. The people who ride the trains and the buses outside rush hour tend to be urban residents who do not own a car, and in a city with the income distribution and racial dynamics of Philadelphia, they are predominantly black.
This injects a racial element into a lot of transit planning, especially for commuter rail. North American commuter rail is designed exclusively for suburban residents, who in Philadelphia and similar cities are usually white and at least middle-class. This is why it gets away with such poor off-peak service: hourly on most SEPTA Regional Rail lines, hourly or even every two hours on the MBTA, hourly on most branches of the New York commuter rail network. Although New York itself doesn’t have the typical Rust Belt city demographics, its suburbs have typical Rust Belt suburb demographics, so the situation is the same. The same is true of Boston, when one remembers that a huge fraction of its urban white population is in Cambridge and Somerville. Philadelphia is only where this racial division is the most obvious even on the subway.
Everything about North American commuter rail screams “you’re better than the hoi polloi who ride the subway”: the seating arrangement maximizing seating rather than standing space, the park-and-rides, the fares, the lack of fare integration with local transit, the schedules. Since peak-only suburban transit serves precisely the niche that the traditional white suburban middle class is comfortable riding transit in, it is necessarily segregated. Its riders even fight to keep it that way: witness for example the opposition in Stamford to developing the Metro-North station and moving the parking 400 meters away. This article complaining about parking lot waits is typical of the species; these complaints persist despite very high spending on commuter rail parking lots, for example in Hicksville.
The same transit agencies that fudge or make up numbers to avoid serving minority neighborhoods also ignore the possibility of improving off-peak service. Although off-peak service is cheaper to provide than peak service – it requires no new vehicles or infrastructure and fewer split-shift crews – the plans for service expansion typically focus on more peak capacity, despite often high crowding levels on off-peak trains. This is worst on commuter rail, but also affects subway and bus systems. In New York, the MTA’s crowding guidelines call for setting off-peak frequency such that the average train on each line will have 25% more riders than seats at the most crowded point of its journey. As anyone who’s ridden trains in Manhattan in the evening knows, trains are quite often much more crowded than this average. The MTA needs to keep its losses to a reasonable minimum, and on the core lines the off-peak frequency is not bad; but why keep claiming that trains only have 25% more riders than cars? The MTA is by comparison more honest about its capacity problems on the Lexington express trains, for example in the Second Avenue Subway environmental impact statement.
Many of the problems of American transit systems are directly traceable to the fact that the managers don’t often ride the trains, and their peer group is not the same as the average transit user. This is why we see little concern for off-peak service, and practically none with off-peak service on the whitest and more suburban form of transit, commuter rail. None of these managers of course intends to be racist or classist, but they unwittingly are.
The Difference Between Bus and Subway Alignments
Reading design guidelines for bus routes reminds me of how different surface transit is from rapid transit. Buses need to follow straight, wide, two-way roads. Subway trains do not: those roads make construction easier, but it’s normal for train lines to detour and turn, even in rigidly gridded cities like New York. The upshot is that sometimes the optimal route for a bus is different from that of a subway, and this limits the usefulness of preexisting bus routes for subway planning.
For a relatively simple example of this, consider the plans for a subway under Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The buses follow Wilshire all the way from Downtown to Santa Monica. The trains were never intended to: there’s a short stretch where Wilshire isn’t as important while somewhat off the street lies Century City, and all alignments studied for the Wilshire subway have involved some deviation. The chosen alignment is the one that deviates more than the other, to serve Century City more centrally.
This is relevant specifically to the example of Tel Aviv. When I criticized the Tel Aviv subway route choice for being politically motivated to avoid certain neighborhoods, Alan of Tel Aviv Bus Mappa said,
To minimise cost, the planners looked at what works today (the existing high-demand bus routes) and decided that connecting Petah Tikva and Bat Yam to Tel Aviv was the highest demand corridor. They also looked at what was wide (boulevards and arterials), as their aim was to maximise segregated on-street running. This is also the reason that the plan makes use of the ‘Turkish line’ alignment connecting Jaffa and Allenby rather than the more direct, but narrow, Derech Yafo and Eilat Street.
Central Bus Station would have been a huge diversion for the route and is not a particularly in-demand destination. However, the planned Green line will serve that location.
The problem with this line of thought is that subways are not buses. Subways can use the more direct but narrower alignments if they need to: it may be somewhat more expensive to construct, but there’s no disutility to passengers. A bus running on a narrow street is slowed down, especially if the street is twisty. A subway that can go under private property is not.
Even in New York there are some twists – for examples, the route of the L through Brooklyn, and the route of the 2/3 from the Upper West Side to Harlem. But those twists are not critical, and the city doesn’t really need them. The Wilshire deviation in Los Angeles is also in this category.
It’s ungridded cities where the ability of trains to cut under the street network becomes critical to providing service to major destinations, which may not be anywhere near the wide streets. A look at the inner network of the London Underground will confirm that the lines bear little relationship to the street network, which was built incrementally over the centuries and would not be good at serving the major destinations in the desired directions. In Paris the older lines were built subsurface and do follow streets (which at any case are more rationalized than in London due to heavyhanded central planning), but the newer ones were built deeper and do not.
In Tel Aviv, the problem is that many of the neighborhoods that need public transportation service the most do not have wide streets for buses, or have wide streets configured in the wrong directions. The oldest parts of the city, the Old City of Jaffa and Ajami, have very narrow streets since they predate modern boulevard design by a few centuries. The next oldest – the Jewish neighborhoods of Jaffa, South Tel Aviv, the western parts of Central Tel Aviv, and the Old North – do have wide streets, but often pointing in the wrong direction, for examples nothing serves the Port or the Basel Heights compound, and the east-west streets going through the Old North are very narrow. They have no reason to form a coherent rapid transit network, since they were built as interurban streets or as neighborhood main streets, not as subway alignments. They barely even form a coherent bus network, but the hacks made over the decades to create bus trunk lines are different from the optimal route a subway would follow.
In fact, the recently-reelected Huldai administration has plans to upzone around the central parts of the route to build a new CBD. The area in question, around Begin Road, is unwalkable and almost unfixable to be made pedestrian-friendly, the road is so wide and fast. This is not service to an existing destination that follows a linear corridor as in New York and other strongly gridded cities.
In a city like Tel Aviv – or any other city without a strong grid that influences development – subway planning should start from a list of major destinations and dense residential neighborhoods and their locations on a map. The subway routes should form somewhat straight lines connecting them, with the first line chosen in a way that connects to the most and the most important ones. It’s fine to have somewhat kinked routes – nobody likes riding a C-shaped route, but it’s okay to have small deviations such as the ones proposed for Wilshire or even larger ones such as the one Shanghai’s Line 1 takes to reach People’s Square. The junctions should be the most important destinations, or the ones with the most potential for CBD formation; in Tel Aviv those are generally to the west of the planned CBD, because of the potential for waterfront upzoning and the preexisting density in the neighborhoods south of the Yarkon and west of the Ayalon Freeway.
Buses are of course not planned like this. A city that wants a vigorous bus network needs to do what Los Angeles and Vancouver have done: put the buses on a grid as much as possible, and have them go straight along major roads, with as few deviations as possible. Vancouver’s north-south buses deviate a little bit to serve Downtown, and even those deviations are sometimes questionable since people transfer from the buses to SkyTrain before the buses reach Downtown. The grid allows for an efficient network of transfers, with the transfer penalty reduced by high frequency on the trunk lines. It’s nothing like subway lines, which form a tight bus-like mesh in about one city in the world (Mexico City) and everywhere else have a mesh-like core surrounded by what is an essentially hub-and-spoke system.
Even when the busiest bus routes do indicate something about subway demand, there are exceptions. In New York, the busiest bus lines today are the M15, on First and Second Avenues, and the B46, on Utica Avenue: they are almost even in ridership and have traded places for first place citywide recently. But nobody expects a Utica subway to get the ridership of Second Avenue Subway, even people like myself who believe such a subway is underrated and should be considered in medium-term transit planning. The third busiest route in New York is the Bx12, on Fordham, and I do not know a single transit activist who believes it should be railstituted, even ones who believe other routes with somewhat lower ridership should be railstituted (such as Nostrand, whose bus, the B44, ranks fifth). The issue here is that First and Second are in Manhattan, where bus speeds are so low that ridership is suppressed, as people walk longer distances to the parallel subway or don’t take the trip; if both Second and Utica get subways, the lower amount of congestion in outer Brooklyn is irrelevant and the trains will travel at the same speed, whereas today there are factors working against Second that make the rail bias there higher than on Utica.
Something similar is the case in Tel Aviv. The widest boulevards have the largest concentrations of bus trunk lines, but that’s because they are the only streets on which buses are even remotely feasible as modes of transportation. In Jaffa, Jerusalem Boulevard is wide enough for fast surface transit but Yefet Street is not. Based on Jerusalem’s width, the planners chose to keep trains at-grade on Jerusalem, which they could not do on Yefet. But if trains were underground, Jerusalem’s current advantage would evaporate, leaving Yefet with the advantages of proximity to the Old City and the Flea Market and of higher density.
It is wrong to plan buses as if they were subways or early-20th century streetcars, where frequent twists were not a problem since there were few cars on the road, and where the dominance of the traditional downtown favored a hub-and-spoke network. Recent bus successes in North America have involved discarding those ideas and planning buses based on modern travel needs and modern traffic levels. By the same token, it is wrong to plan subways as if they were buses when they are capable of following alignments that buses cannot.
More on Vancouver’s Obsession With Filling Buses (Hoisted from Comments)
Via Human Transit, I learn that Translink has a bus service performance summary with an infographic on PDF-page 16 contrasting high- and low-performing routes. As usual, Translink claims that the high-performing routes have strong anchors at their ends as one of the reasons for their success. Unfortunately, the claim is not completely correct, and on top of that the definition of “high-performing” is stretched to make anchored routes look better. In particular, this implicates Vancouver’s strategy of upzoning the most intensely at its southern rim while ignoring its center.
To paraphrase my second comment on Human Transit, the summary rates routes on three metrics: boardings per hour, capacity utilization, and cost per boarding; a high-performing route is one that is in the metro area’s top 25 on all three, and a low-performing one is one that is in the bottom 25 on all three. However, only the first and the third are actually useful for the passenger. The second is a measure of pain – it’s the product of turnover with crowding, and although it can be raised by raising turnover, it can also be raised by making the bus more crowded.
An updated list of Vancouver buses and their productivity measures is available here. Measured by cost per rider and boardings per hour, the unanchored 8 is more productive than the 49, which has anchors but nothing in between. But the 8 ranks 29th in capacity utilization, so it’s penalized. The 5 and the 6, which are very short routes serving the West End, are also penalized solely because of their low crowding levels and their short length, which makes turnover more difficult. The 8 has high turnover (like the 3 and 20, which did make the infographic), so it achieves more passenger boardings per hour but fewer passenger-km despite its weak outer-end anchor, and the 5 and 6 are so short that even passengers riding all the way through provide many boardings per hour relative to capacity utilization.
Translink unfortunately does not break down capacity utilization into its two components, and only cites the crowding level at the most crowded point of the average trip. But we can still construct a table of some routes with their performance on the three metrics as well as their crowding level:
| Route | Boardings/hr | Capacity use | Peak Crowding | Cost/boarding |
| 3 | 113 | 110% | 49% | $0.89 |
| 5 | 105 | 67% | 53% | $0.95 |
| 6 | 98 | 68% | 48% | $1.02 |
| 8 | 102 | 98% | 41% | $0.98 |
| 9 | 103 | 160% | 64% | $0.97 |
| 20 | 113 | 124% | 50% | $0.89 |
| 25 | 81 | 187% | 74% | $1.23 |
| 41 | 105 | 180% | 78% | $0.95 |
| 49 | 96 | 169% | 82% | $1.04 |
| 99 | 176 | 167% | 86% | $0.57 |
The 3, 9, 20, 41, 49, and 99 are in the infographic on the list of most productive routes; the 25 narrowly misses on cost per passenger and boardings per hour but is second systemwide in capacity utilization, and the 5, 6, and 8 miss only on capacity utilization. The 25 and 49 have strong anchors at their outer ends, a single strong central anchor at the Canada Line, and nothing else; On the metrics relevant to the passenger who’s expected to ride the bus and fund it by paying a fare, they are somewhat lower-performing than the short 5 and 6 and the short-trip-encouraging 3, 8, and 20, but have far more crowding. The 9 and 41, both in the infographic, are about on a par with the 3, 5, 6, 8, and 20, and have more turnover due to additional destinations on Broadway and 9th that don’t exist on King Edward and 49th, but are still much more crowded than the unanchored routes. The 99 beats all others in performance, but the cost in terms of crowding is even higher.
The purpose of anchoring is explicitly to keep buses full all the way; the 25 and 49 are great at that, since people ride them longer distances, not having much to go to between their major destinations. However, it’s not a measure of passenger satisfaction or of transit agency finances, but of passenger-km. The surreptitious focus on passenger-km is dubious as a performance metric for urban transit, since transit-using city dwellers usually prefer shorter commutes and do most non-work trips on foot.
And if it’s dubious as a transit proposition, then as an urbanist proposition it’s destructive. As discussed in my previous post on the subject, Vancouver is upzoning Marine Drive (slightly) more intensely than the area south of Broadway and near the stations on the Canada Line between Broadway and Marine Drive – see PDF-pp. 26-27 of the draft plan. Despite the hysteria about urban planners using social engineering to make people live close to city center and take transit instead of driving, here we have a city with an otherwise well-deserved reputation for greenness using social engineering to make people live farther out.
This focus on anchors is making Vancouver build itself to be on a regional scale like how the 25 and 49 look on the local scale. The famous high-rise Vancouverism is really about looking like the 5 and 6 – i.e. upzoning near Downtown so that people will walk or take short trips – but future development is not intended to occur near Downtown but rather in strategically chosen secondary CBDs farther away. And what is really needed is continuous corridor development, as is practiced on the corridors hosting the 3, the 8, and the 20.
Pedestrian Observations 
