Category: Urban Transit
Peak Factors and Intercity Trains
In contrast with Reason’s fraud, CARRD’s Elizabeth Alexis makes a more serious criticism of the XpressWest plan: there is a prominent peak in travel from Southern California to Las Vegas on Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon, and this means that there will be a lot of ancillary costs associated with peaks, such as extra rolling stock with low utilization rates. More ambitiously, she compares it to commuter trains’ peaks, and uses this to argue that commuter rail-style subsidies may be required. The reality is quite different – intercity trains just cost less to run per seat than local trains, and although the Southern California-Las Vegas travel market may have a stronger peak than most, the difference with high-speed services around the world is (at most) one of degree and not kind.
First, let’s look at how much actual peaking there is between Southern California and Las Vegas. XpressWest’s Environmental Impact Statements include an analysis of current travel patterns (as of 2004) and a ridership projection. This is contained in the ridership forecast in appendix F-D. Table 16, on PDF-page 55, claims that present auto traffic on Friday is 2.03 times as high as on other weekdays and 1.48 times as high as on the average day, including both low-use days and the weekend peak. On Sunday, the numbers are 2.53 and 1.84 respectively. The ridership projections assume that the annual-to-Friday ridership ratio will be 236 (the annual-to-weekday ratio on urban transit systems in the US appears to be about 300). Of course, it is unlikely that traffic is evenly distributed on the peak days – most likely it clusters in the afternoon peak.
However, the same is true, if only slightly less prominently, on existing HSR. For some evidence of this, read SNCF’s proposals for HSR in the US, linked on The Transport Politic, which explain that by rotating trains for maintenance during weekdays SNCF can have near-100% availability for the weekend peak. On PDF-page 195 of the California proposal, it says,
To cater to weekend traffic peaks, train maintenance operations are scheduled to take place between midday on Mondays and Thursday evening and at night.
By timing maintenance in this way, approximately 80% of the fleet can be available in the week (between Monday noon and Friday noon) and as much as 98% at weekends.
This does not mean the peak-to-base traffic ratio on the TGV is 98:80. It is normal on local and regional trains to have both more capacity available for the peak and more crowding. On the TGV all passengers must reserve a seat, but SNCF can instead institute peak pricing. For a random example, I tested Paris-Lyon tickets on October 10th (a Wednesday) and the 12th (a Friday). In both cases, frequency is hourly in the morning and early afternoon and half-hourly in the afternoon peak – but the fare was €25-30 on Wednesday versus €60-89 on Friday beginning at 5 pm. And with only two intermediate stops, both quite far from Paris and in very small towns, the LGV Sud-Est is not a good commuter route. Routes with significant high-speed commuter traffic are different: in the off-peak most Paris-Tours trips require a transfer, and there are only two direct TGVs before the afternoon peak, at 7:34 and 1:40 again on 10/10, and two direct low-speed intercity trains; in the afternoon peak, this rises to half-hourly direct TGVs and additional low-speed trains, and the fare on the two most expensive peak TGVs is €59 versus €15-20 in the off-peak.
In contrast, let us now look at the subsidized local services, both in France (for comparability with the TGV) and in the US and Japan (where schedules are easy to obtain). In Japan, we can use Hyperdia to find the peak-to-base ratio; three heavily used lines in the Tokyo area that I specifically checked – Yamanote, Chuo Rapid (to Tachikawa), and Tokaido Main (to Odawara) – have about twice as much inbound frequency in the peak hour, 8-9 am, than in the afternoon and evening off-peaks. In the US, BART, which is similar in function to European commuter trains, runs 24 trains per hour through the Transbay Tube and the central San Francisco subway at the peak, 16 in the midday off-peak, and 6 in the evenings and on weekends. New York’s subway schedules show a peak-to-midday ratio of about 2, with slightly reduced traffic in the evenings and on weekends. Paris runs 30 tph in the peak on the RER A (in the peak direction) and 20 on the RER B, and 18 and 12 respectively in the midday off-peak; this makes for a lower peak-to-base ratio than on the TGV, but does not lead to profitability.
Elizabeth’s problem with running strongly peaked HSR is that it would have a lot of empty trains, and this by itself would require subsidies. This sounds reasonable, but the actual difference between the profitability of intercity and local trains is not seating utilization. Taiwan HSR had 46% seat occupancy in 2009; it made a profit before interest. The Sanyo Shinkansen averages about 35 actual riders per car (compare car- and passenger-km on PDF-page 19); the 16-car sets that run through from the Tokaido Shinkansen average 83 seats per car, and the 8-car sets that run exclusively on Sanyo average 71. I do not know the seating occupancy on Japanese commuter trains, though it likely averages well over 100%, but in New York, subway cars average 28 passengers, a seat occupancy of about two-thirds. For an alternative measure, taking seating capacity into account, New York subway cars average about 1.5 seats per linear meter, versus 1.4 on the Sanyo Shinkansen.
Nor is the issue a difference of fare – PDF-page 18 of the Sanyo factsheet establishes an average fare of about $0.20 per passenger-km – and unlike on the TGV, fares do not vary based on time of day. Just the operating expenses of the New York City Subway are $0.21 per passenger-km. Those on Sanyo are far lower, judging by JR West’s profitability after depreciation and interest. Something else here is going on: intercity trains can control costs better, perhaps because they have less legacy infrastructure and labor to deal with, or perhaps because faster trips mean that the trains and their operators are more productive.
Of course any operator should strive to reduce the peak-to-base ratio, and doing so can result in meaningful gains in productivity. Vancouver’s busiest bus, the 99-B, benefits strongly from a bidirectional peak; it has not eliminated the peak, but by avoiding unidirectionality, at least the reverse-peak buses don’t run empty.
For XpressWest, it means it is strongly favorable to go after the Las Vegas-to-Los Angeles market, which the Victorville terminus ensures the trains will not serve at all due to passengers’ different responses to transfers at the origin and destination end. So far its plan is to just wait for California HSR to open a Palmdale-Los Angeles link; it has Victorville-Palmdale as a second phase, with plans to either run through-trains to Los Angeles and San Francisco or (worse, and unlikely) make people transfer at Palmdale. This is not enough, and although California is committed to building through Palmdale, it may not have enough money for it; the current budget is $15 billion to complete Bakersfield-Palmdale-Sylmar, which requires $9 billion in outside, presumably federal funding.
At the risk of heresy, let me propose that XpressWest build a medium-speed link, above ground, through Cajon Pass. High speeds are not possible anyway because of the grade, so they might as well compromise on other design standards, build curves of radius 1 km (146 km/h with the currently proposed cant and FRA waiver-free cant deficiency, 160 km/h maximum with unambitious European cant and cant deficiency, 200 km/h with tilting trains and high cant) and not 4 km, and keep everything above ground.
The risk of cost escalation is still higher than for building in the I-15 median north of Victorville, because environmental and geological work may sow that a tunnel is needed in any case. But given that XpressWest can make a profit on Victorville-Las Vegas alone, why not spend a few millions on studying Cajon Pass, and if it proves affordable then build to San Bernardino and if not then not? Independently of what California HSR does northwest of Los Angeles, a route to San Bernardino is already enough to make XpressWest independent of traffic congestion, reduce the need for a large parking lot in Victorville, and raise the number of Las Vegas-to-Los Angeles travelers from zero to small. And beyond that, electrifying and double-tracking Los Angeles-San Bernardino and running through-service cannot be done under present FRA regulations, but is feasible given enough waivers and then the project would provide bidirectional service.
Vancouver’s Busiest Buses
Translink has a list of performance metrics per bus route here. Those include ridership, boardings per revenue-hour, crowding measured as a percentage of available seats, and operating cost per unlinked trip. Since the numbers are only given per route, without a single table or chart as one could find for Providence or New Haven, here are the busiest routes, per weekday:
1. 99 – 54,350
2. 20 – 27,900
3. 9 – 25,300
4. 41 – 24,800
5. 16 – 21,250
6. 8 – 20,150
7. 3 – 19,950
8. 49 – 19,700
9. 135 – 19,600
10. 25 – 19,300
The full sanitized data for daily and annual ridership, excluding minibuses and night buses, can be found here. I’ve verified that excluding minibuses and night buses doesn’t change the rankings in the top 50 routes.
Although Vancouver’s buses more or less run on a grid, the grid isn’t very clean. Some lines, like the 9 (Broadway), 99 (Broadway), 3 (Main), and 41 (41st), run more or less straight north-south or east-west, bending only at the ends, but many others do not. The 16 follows a broad U-shaped route, serving Arbutus on the West Side, feeding into downtown, and then going east on Hastings and then south on Renfrew. Multiple routes use Broadway for just a few blocks, to orient themselves to the correct north-south street. Others are L-shaped.
This makes it hard to figure out what the busiest corridors are (Vancouver has enough ridership that the 15-minute frequent network extends too far down to give us the busiest routes). Broadway is clearly the single busiest – if 99 and 9 are considered express and local versions of the same route, then Broadway has nearly 80,000 weekday bus riders, compared with 55,000 on 1st and 2nd Avenues in Manhattan, without counting buses that serve small segments of Broadway along their trip. Not counting buses that zigzag, the next busiest are 41st Avenue (41), Hastings (135, 160), Main, and 49th (49).
But this partial interlining does exist. So how busy is Hastings, anyway? If we add the buses that go on inner Hastings – 14, 16, 20, 135, and 160 – we get 90,000 weekday riders. But the 14 and 16 have half their route on the West Side, and the 20 turns south on Commercial; those are not just Hastings buses. The same problem happens on Main (the 8 partially runs on it), and 4th (west of Granville it interlines the 4, 7, and 84, and west of Macdonald also the 44, totaling 40,000 riders).
This doesn’t mean Hastings has more people riding the bus on it than there are taking the Millennium Line. I doubt it’s even close – the 16 and 20 have long north-south legs with connections to the Expo and Millennium Lines, so people from Fraserview and most of the Renfrew corridor are probably not traveling anywhere on Hastings. But most likely, whatever fraction of 90,000 Hastings has, it is probably the second busiest corridor, or maybe the third after 4th.
The obvious problem here is for SkyTrain development. Broadway is almost certainly getting rail, and judging by how far lesser-used corridors are getting SkyTrain extensions, Hastings should get one too. 4th is half a kilometer north of Broadway, but Hastings is 2 km north of the Millennium Line. Hastings’ distance to the West Coast Express is shorter, but it is an active freight line, with active port industry to its north, and often parks separating it from the street grid to the south. Frequent, frequent-stop commuter rail is still possible, but half the station radius is wasted on water, and the freight traffic is such that it might require too much multi-tracking to be cost-effective for the potential ridership.
Core Connectors and In-Between Neighborhoods
In some American cities, new or proposed transit lines are either core connectors, i.e. city-center circulator streetcars built for development purposes, or far-flung commuter rail extensions with few urban stops. Both are present in Providence, with the South County extension of the MBTA and the Core Connector, but worse circulators than in Providence are proposed elsewhere (for example, in New Haven), and exurb-focused commuter rail with parking lot stations is the standard in most Sunbelt cities and also in Massachusetts. At first I thought my opposition to both was just a matter of wonky support of a specific stop distance and service pattern that falls in between those two extremes, but recently, after attending Providence urbanist blogger meetings and also rereading old threads about New Haven, I realized there’s a political and social dimension to all this.
Recall that old American cities have a donut-shaped income distribution: gentrified in the center, poor in most other urban neighborhoods and inner suburbs, and middle-class to rich in most suburbs. Those two forms of bad transit are specifically built to cater to the rich parts of the metro area, and ignore the poor parts. The problem, of course, is that the poor parts are precisely where transit ridership is concentrated. People in the gentrified cores of smaller cities can walk; people in the suburbs own cars, and those cities have too many roads and too much parking for buses to be an even semi-reasonable alternative.
In Providence, as I recently brought up, the busiest buses follow Broad and North Main, and serve working-class and poor populations. The same is true in New Haven: the busiest line by far runs on Dixwell, connecting the Yale student ghetto, the in-between poor neighborhoods, and the strip malls in middle-class Hamden. So what service addition does a study by the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCORAG) propose? Naturally, a circulator connecting Union Station with the New Haven Green. You could chalk this up to a belief in systemwide upgrades over building a few high-performance lines, but many outlying bus stops have no shelter, and the study says nothing about that.
When Peter Brassard first pitched the idea of a local rail shuttle service in Providence and its inner suburbs to us privately, the observation one of us made (I think it was Jef Nickerson, but I’m not sure) is that it would invert the usual relationship between infrastructure investment and income. This is mostly accidental – the mainline serves Olneyville and Pawtucket but not the East Side. But something like this is more likely than not when the focus is on serving reasonably dense neighborhoods and perhaps inner-suburban malls outside walking range.
The same is true of what I believe to be the most promising rail shuttle service in New Haven – namely, a service using the Farmington Canal Trail, which runs about 200 meters east of Dixwell, and could be reused by light rail reaching downtown New Haven on city streets or rapid transit connecting to the mainline with a very short tunnel or trench. With a stop spacing of a little less than a kilometer, modern rolling stock could average 35-40 km/h in service, double the speed of the current bus.
I suspect part of the bias against such service comes from the belief that building ten kilometers of light rail is expensive. Because there’s an implicit hierarchy in planners’ mind between services, they think a downgrade is an automatic cost saver, even when it’s not – for instance, when a bus on an abandoned railroad costs far more than most rail reactivation projects do. One of these mantras is that commuter rail infill is less expensive (and then they build infill stations at $100 million apiece, strategically located away from the intersection with the main bus corridor). As a rule of thumb, each of these downgrades just raises unit costs because of various overbuilding schemes until total cost is the same as if they’d built regular urban rail, but the benefits are much lower.
But it’s more than a technical bias; it’s also political bias. The Core Connector is explicitly a development project. It may even be a successful one, if it convinces local power broker Colin Kane to drop plans for building 7,000 parking spaces in the Jewelry District, as described in a recent paywalled article in Next American City. Development projects like this never go to extant low-income neighborhoods, unless there’s an explicit effort at gentrification, and usually locals protest against the displacement; neglect is much easier and less controversial than redevelopment.
The technical and political biases merge in one of the less challenged cost-effectiveness metrics, the cost per new rider. Although it’s presented in neutral terms – the cost is compared to the predicted total transit ridership if the project is built minus the predicted total if it is not – the results privilege adding choice riders (that is, those who already own a car and drive to work) over retaining existing riders. Although transit revivals happen, most of the world’s transit cities built out their systems before most people got cars, and people simply kept using transit instead of buying cars even as they moved into the middle class. Portland may have about the same metro area transit mode share as before it built light rail, but other cities of similar age lost ground and have even lower transit use.
It’s tricks like ignoring retention that lead Boston to downrate replacing the southern half of the Silver Line with light rail on its list of possible projects even though it would be very cheap by US standards per rider, and rate new commuter rail branches well beyond the continuous built-up area as more cost-effective. The rail bias factor implied by the computation for new riders is less than 0.5%: 130 new riders against 34,000 existing ones. A Transportation Research Board analysis finds the rail bias is in the 34-43% range. I suspect that if the Silver Line served richer areas than Roxbury, Boston would use a more reasonable rail bias than 130/34,000, bringing down costs per new rider by two orders of magnitude. New York went ahead with Second Avenue Subway; it is undoubtedly the most important subway project in the region, but the next best corridors, e.g. Utica, serving less chic neighborhoods than the Upper East Side, are ignored.
The technical reason to build urban rail a certain way – own-right-of-way, stops roughly every kilometer within the city, etc. – is of course separate. Technical characteristics do not tell you which neighborhoods to serve, not without first looking into existing demand patterns. It is just fortunate that New Haven has a right-of-way closely paralleling Dixwell, and unfortunate that Providence has none paralleling Broad. But the income donuts, and more generally the connection between density and old industrial development that is usually working-class (since gentrification in such cities is within walking distance of the core rather than within transit distance), have certain social implications. The most annoying to the planner and the government official is that they must invest in poor neighborhoods as they are, and do not have a special reason to try to foist change upon them.
Or they can just build core connectors for the cities and park-and-ride extensions for the suburbs. The FTA will fund these no matter what; its cost-effectiveness metrics are biased that way to avoid having to send every penny it has available to a few expensive but high-ridership lines such as Second Avenue Subway. The developers will like them, because of real or imagined property value benefits. The state will like them – state governments are dominated by suburbanites and urban developers and view transit as pork rather than as useful spending based on ridership metrics; Rhode Island is much likelier to find support for development in the Jewelry District than for boring rail lines in already-developed Providence neighborhoods. It’s a win-win for everyone except the riders, and they don’t count.
Providence: Busy Versus Frequent Buses
While trying to come up with a good proposal for upgraded buses or streetcars in Providence, I tried to base route decisions on RIPTA’s most frequent buses. But as it turns out, there’s a substantial difference between the most frequent and the busiest routes, and existing policies toward investment do not reward high ridership at all.
By far the two busiest lines in the state are routes 11 (Broad Street), with 6,500 weekday riders, and 99 (North Main to Pawtucket), with 5,200. Those are also the two most frequent, with 10-minute peak and midday service, and are usually interlined. This is the only case in which frequency matches traffic: of the next batch of busiest routes – 20, 22, 56, and 60, each with about 3,000 weekday riders – only the 56 has 15-minute off-peak service, the rest ranging from 22 to 35, with the 20 and 22 having 22-23-minute frequency even at the peak. Several less busy lines have 20-minute all-day service, and the frequent network, which uses a 20-minute weekday off-peak standard, looks different from the highest-traffic network.
However, previous and proposed development-oriented transit, including the fake trolleys and now the streetcar, avoid even the 11 and 99. The fake trolleys are distinguished in branding, 20-minute frequency even on weekends and in the evenings, and consistent interlining across Kennedy Plaza. The 92 fake trolley runs from the East Side to Federal Hill without changing its number, but regular buses, including the 11 and 99, change their route number at Kennedy Plaza, and that’s if there’s a consistent route they interline with at all. (When Jef Nickerson pressed RIPTA on this issue, RIPTA said it wants to preserve flexibility.) Likewise, the streetcar is a city-center circulator, and ideas for where to extend it afterward avoid Broad Street and North Main; local transit activists I have talked to believe the preference is for Broadway, a wide street hosting two routes (27, 28) that have 4,500 weekday riders between them, still less than Broad. (The alternative route in the same direction, Westminster, has 3,500 on its two buses, but the difference comes from the routes’ respective tails west of Olneyville Square, and the segments along Westminster and Broadway look about even.)
This is not to say that the state spurns the busiest routes. After the previous Governor vetoed it six times, Governor Chafee recently signed a bill to provide bus signal priority on the busiest lines. The brand for this is called rapid bus. At best, this shows the state thinks that rich people on the East Side and the Federal Hill gentrifiers, and soon the Jewelry District gentrifiers, prefer to ride a service that’s not called a bus, even if it is one. At worst, it points to skewed priorities: the streetcar is explicitly a development tool, and much more expensive than clearly posting schedules at the top end of the bus tunnel and rearranging schedules to provide constant headways within it.
A related issue is the ability to railstitute bus routes. Among all the busy routes, route 11 is among the hardest to replace with commuter rail. Peter Brassard’s urban shuttle proposal and my Woonsocket regional rail proposal use existing railroad lines. Arguably, this could take over the longer-distance functions of the 99, whose demand primarily comes from Pawtucket rather than North Main in Providence. However, the 11 is not paralleled by any rail line. This makes it the most important corridor for any upgrade. Alternative routes, such as continuing the existing streetcar proposal farther south, do not capture the local demand on Broad, which is of moderate intensity everywhere along the corridor. The distribution of demand on Broad is linear, which is less the case for other routes, which connect various anchors spaced farther apart.
It’s not normal for the relationship between traffic and frequency to be so weak. (In New York, busy routes that aren’t frequent by a 10-minute standard are the exception, and are very close to making the cut, e.g. the B8 and Bx39 run sometimes every 10 minutes midday and sometimes every 12). RIPTA needs to be asking itself why some routes are overserved and others are underserved.
But more importantly, the city and the state need to ask themselves why they’re building special branding as not-a-regular-bus around routes that aren’t even the ones that most need it. The fake trolleys get emphasized and specially colored on the map. It’s RIPTA’s fault that the interlined buses aren’t consistently signed, but all of the investment decisions are on the city and the state. Even if it’s necessary to build a streetcar to the Jewelry District and the hospital, why not say that pending additional funds the city will extend it toward and then along Broad? The alignment wouldn’t be any more awkward than that already proposed, and it would only miss a relatively short segment of Broad.
Netroots Nation and How the 99% Talk Hurts Consensus
For the first time since 2006, I went to Netroots Nation, as it’s held in Providence. There was one panel about public transportation, entitled “Saving Public Transportation,” whose speakers included Larry Hanley, who dominated the discussion; a moderator; and three political activists: including a local union leader, a Sierra Club representative, and a state legislative candidate who Greater City is supporting. The discussion focused on preserving bus operations rather than on expansion – in fact Hanley made the point that agencies expand capital while cutting back service because the federal government only pays for capital rather than operating funds.
Since the panel was entirely political, and dealt mostly with funding issues, when it was time for questions I asked about the saddling of transit agencies with highway debt; I specifically mentioned Massachusetts’ putting Big Dig mitigation debt on the MBTA. I wanted to see if the panelists would say anything about mode shifting or about the relative power of highways and transit.
Instead, Hanley, who took the question, ignored what I said about highway debt, and instead answered about refinancing debt at lower interest rates, as issue his union is harping about. In reality, according to his union’s own figures, the MBTA could save $26 million a year by refinancing debt; for comparison, its deficit this year, which it plugged with service cuts and a large fare hike, was $163 million, and its total debt payments in 2006 were $351 million, of which $117 million came from the Big Dig. Although the parts of this debt that are not from the Big Dig come from true transit projects, those were voted on by the state legislature, rather than by the MBTA; transit’s low position in the transportation funding food chain is thus responsible for 13.5 times as much money as could be extracted from the banks.
So at first pass, Hanley was pivoting to an issue he was more comfortable talking about, which happens to involve a fraction of the amount of money in question. But at second pass, something more insidious happened. Instead of answering a question about transportation priorities and getting state governments to assume debt they’d unfairly loaded onto transit agencies, which would require clashing with other departments with their own agendas, Hanley preferred to shift blame onto banks. He did not include figures during the panel and so I could not know he was talking about such a small amount of money; his explanation for focusing on the banks is that the MTA renegotiated deals with contractors to get lower prices, so it should do the same with the banks.
And after thinking about this, I realized how it shows exactly how despite appearances, the “We are the 99%” slogan is the exact opposite of any sort of democratic consensus. It silences any notion that there are different interests among the 99%. The auto workers and Providence’s carless residents are both members of the 99%; they have diametrically different interests when it comes to transportation. But in the Grand Struggle, the 99% must be united, and thus the leaders shift any discussion to the common enemy, no matter the relative proportions of the amounts of money in question.
After Scott Walker’s win, Matt Yglesias wrote that different industries have clashing interests just as much as labor and business do. But even within the framework of fighting big business’s influence, two of the most influential opposing interest groups, the union movement and small business, have different interests and are hostile to each other. Dean Baker wrote in The Conservative Nanny State that small businesses are being coddled because they pay lower wages and benefits on average; in general, the American union movement has not organized small businesses and supports the businesses it has already organized, and is hostile toward new companies, which are usually non-union. Small business in turn is hostile toward regulations on wages, starting a business, and so on.
The 99% framing papers over all of that. The voices that dominate the protests believe themselves to be the true representatives of 99% of the population, and by implication their own issues to be the most important. Other issues are subsidiary, or outright distractions from the primary needs. Any movement that claims to represent everyone is not consensual but nationalistic, and just as nationalism requires the elites to declare a certain archetype to be Real Americans (or Britons, or French) and everyone else to be one of many negative stereotypes, so does this 99% framing require movement leaders to coopt or downplay other groups’ issues.
Consensus comes from clashing points of view. The Swiss Socialists are farther left than what is considered serious liberal opinion in the US, and the Swiss People’s Party is about as far right as the Tea Party; they and the centrist parties are more or less in a grand coalition. The consensus comes from the realization that no single faction will ever dominate, and thus the best it can do is distill how it can advance its stated goals (poverty reduction, smaller government, greater national cohesion, etc., depending on the party). The Occupy protesters have very high supermajority requirements at their general assemblies, but they do not have this clash, this diversity in either viewpoints or demographics. They have procedural near-unanimity but not actual consensus governance, leading to a system that excludes most interest groups that comprise the 99%; unsurprisingly, the movement has severe problems with race, since its center is white and thinks it speaks for everyone.
Of course, within the union movement something similar is happening, with the dominant group being the older members. This is what New York-area transit commenter Larry Littlefield calls Generation Greed, spanning people of all political classes.
The end result is that no matter how much rhetoric is thrown around about new politics, forward-looking progressives, and so on, what ends up is a repetition of an old hierarchy, one with Real Working People and with fake ones. It has to; when it has no capability of dealing with tensions between transit users and other groups, or between whites and blacks, or between labor and small business, it cannot project any unity of the 99% otherwise. And without unity, it’s a movement without any clear policy agenda.
Bus and Rail Mantras
Bus is cheaper than rail. Paint is cheap. Rail only made sense a hundred years ago when construction costs were lower. Trains have no inherent advantage over buses. It doesn’t cost more to operate a bus than to operate a train. All of those are true in specific sets of circumstances, and Curitiba and Bogota deserve a lot of credit for recognizing that in their case they were true and opting for a good BRT system. Unfortunately, the notion that buses are always cheaper than trains has turned into a mantra that’s applied even far from the original circumstance of BRT.
The advantage of buses is that dedicating lanes to them and installing signal priority are financially cheap, if politically difficult in the face of opposition from drivers. Even physically separating those lanes is essentially cost-free. This advantage disappears completely when it comes to installing new lanes, or paving an existing right-of-way. Hartford is paving over an abandoned railroad at a cost of $37 million per km.
Not to be outdone, New York’s own MTA just proposed to pave about 8.5 km of the Staten Island Railway’s North Shore Branch for $371 million. A light rail alternative was jettisoned because the MTA insisted on continuing the line to the West Shore Plaza, along what is possibly the least developed road in the city.
Another, related mantra is that light rail is cheaper than heavy rail. This contributed to the MTA’s decision not to pursue a Staten Island Railway-compatible solution, which would allow lower capital costs and cheaper maintenance since trains could be maintained together with the existing fleet without modifying the existing yard. As with all mantras, this one has a kernel of truth: it’s much cheaper to build on-street light rail than elevated rail or a subway. As with the BRT mantra, this is not true when the discussion is about what to do in an existing right-of-way.
Worse, because the MTA believed its own hype, it completely missed the point of surface transit. People who believe these mantras about bus, light rail, and heavy rail can easily miss the advantage of on-street running wherever the streets are more central than the railroad rights-of-way. The North Shore Branch hugs the shore for much of the way, halving station radius. The most developed corridor is Forest Avenue, hosting the S48, the third busiest bus in the borough and the busiest in the same area and orientation as the line in question. (The busiest in the borough, the S53, crosses the bridge to connect the North Shore to the subway in Brooklyn.) Of the three other east-west routes in the North Shore, the one that the North Shore Branch parallels the most closely, the S40, has the lowest ridership. It would be both vastly cheaper and better for bus riders to have dedicated bus lanes on Forest, or possibly Castleton, which hosts the S46.
In cities that did not develop around mainline rail corridors but rather around major streets, the only reason to use mainline rail corridors for urban transit is that reactivating them for rail can be done at much lower cost than building on-street light rail. New York is for historical reasons such a city: Staten Island development follows Forest and Castleton rather than the North Shore Branch, and for similar reasons Park Avenue in Manhattan and the Bronx is a relatively unimportant commercial corridor.
Now, these mainline corridors have great use for regional transit. Queens Boulevard can’t be easily used for train service to Long Island, and Lexington Avenue can’t be easily used for train service to Westchester. Staten Island has great potential for regional transit – but only if it’s electrified rail going through a tunnel to Manhattan. It’s expensive, but it’s what it takes to be time-competitive with the ferry and with buses to the subway. A more competent agency than the MTA would keep planning and designing such high-cost, high-benefit projects, to be built in the future if funding materializes; such plans could also be used to concretely argue for more funding from the state and from Congress.
Instead, the MTA is spending more money than most light rail lines cost, to make such a mainline connection from the North Shore to Manhattan impossible in the future. The best scenario in such a situation is that the busway would have to be railstituted, for a few hundred million dollars – an embarrassing reminder of the busway folly, but still a much smaller sum than the cost of the tunnel. The worst scenario is that like on Los Angeles’s Orange Line, the need to keep buses operating during construction would make it impossible to replace them with trains.
There aren’t a lot of lose-lose (or win-win) situations with transportation, even if we ignore driver convenience, but this is one of them. It’s a fiscal disaster relative to predicted ridership and the operating costs of buses, it makes future transit expansion in the borough more difficult, and it follows a marginal route. All this is so that the MTA can say it’s finally making use of an abandoned right-of-way.
Where Should Streetcar Corridors Be?
At a meeting of some of the Greater City people about the Providence streetcar proposal, many of us had severe criticism of the current plan. The line is too short; it is S-shaped; it detours to serve a hospital that’s close to but not on a straighter route; the frequency is mediocre; RIPTA does not have a clear plan of where subsequent lines would go. The discussion quickly turned to alternatives, involving frequent-stop commuter lines to the inner suburbs on existing trackage and perhaps a new connection to the rail tunnel, and streetcars along major corridors to fill in the gaps. It is the streetcar corridors that I want to discuss.
In brief, the existing streetcar proposal only links downtown with near-downtown job centers in College Hill and at the Rhode Island hospitals; secondary centers and neighborhoods would be served in the future, along undetermined routes. People at the meeting who know more than me believe that the western leg, serving Olneyville, is likely to be on Broadway by default, as it is a wide street, and likewise a future westward expansion would follow Manton, a similarly wide street. Instead, they propose, the streetcar should follow Westminster Street.
The issue at hand is, partially, development. Broadway looks a little more developed than Westminster (excluding the portion within downtown proper, where Westminster is a major commercial street), but this development is not dense. Westminster has developed parts and undeveloped parts that could be used for TOD. This is more than just development-oriented transit – Westminster is on the way to Olneyville – but it’s a partial reason.
But the main issue is location. The proposals that we developed at the meeting hinge on using major streets that are centrally located within neighborhoods. We prefer Hope Street to Main Street on the East Side, even though Main Street supports a higher frequency on the 99 bus than Hope Street does on the 42, because Hope Street is accessible from the entire East Side. (Both have auto-oriented commercial development that could potentially be densified.) Likewise, Westminster is closer to parts of the West End; the idea is to run down Westminster and Broad in that direction to serve the western and southern parts of the city.
This is not how I’m used to thinking about where to put favored routes, whether they are light rail or BRT. Usually I think in terms of how developed the immediate area around the street is, what destinations there are, and so on – in other words, spiky density near the route rather than general density within half a kilometer in each direction. That said, this thinking is informed by rapid transit, which is at much larger scale, and bus-oriented density is more diffuse.
The question is whether the rough sketch that came out of the meeting makes sense, or whether it’s just lines on a map. At several places, there’s tension between serving the immediate street and serving a broader neighborhood. At others, some routes are good for only part of the way: for example, in Pawtucket the streets feeding into Main are actually more central and more densely populated than that feeding into Hope, a reversal of the situation in Providence. For another example, Atwells is highly developed but not centrally located in Federal Hill, and is the opposite in Olneyville.
I’m interested to hear what existing successful practices are. Do good streetcar (or rapid bus, etc.) corridors just follow the most successful bus lines and the most developed individual streets, or do they instead serve a broader swath along the routes?
What’s a Subway/El?
The rapid transit built in New York beginning with the first els codified two characteristics that spread to the rest of the US, and are often seen in other countries’ rapid transit networks as well. First, it is separate from surface transit – even when it did still have grade crossings, they were controlled railroad crossings, rather than street-running segments as is common on light rail. And second, it is separate from mainline rail.
Not much later than New York started building els, Berlin built the Stadtbahn, also an urban elevated railroad. However, it was meant to be used for mainline rail from the start, with two local passenger tracks and two long-distance passenger and freight tracks. Part of the impetus was to connect different railroad terminals within the city, which American cities did by building union stations disconnected from local traffic. Shortly later, Tokyo built its own mainline rapid transit system – the Yamanote Line bypass in 1885 and Tokyo Station connecting the Chuo and Tokaido lines in 1914. Both cities ran frequent local commuter service early, Berlin doing so even before electrification.
Of course, nowadays US regulations locked in the separation of rapid transit from commuter rail, but at the time, there was no such separation. New York could have built its subway to mainline specifications and run trains through to the LIRR. It didn’t because of historical accidents – it preferred compatibility with the els and even when the BRT chose a wider loading gauge for its own subway network, it still opted for narrower trains than on mainline track. At the time it seemed like no big deal, although some of the subway lines built were redundant with existing commuter lines (for example, the Flushing Line with the Port Washington Line). Again due to historical practice, commuter rail did not try to operate to rapid transit standards, keeping frequency low, and so nearly all urban stations closed. In both New York and Chicago, it’s often easy to figure out where the city ends or where the subway/L network ends because that’s the point beyond which commuter train stop spacing narrows, providing makeshift local service.
In subsequent decades, the German and Japanese approach proved itself much more capable of providing good transit to growing suburbs. In Tokyo, subways are legally railroads, and most lines are compatible with at least one commuter line in order to permit through-service. German cities have mainline rapid transit (S-Bahn) and also separate subways or subway-light rail combinations (both called U-Bahn). Many other cities and countries had to adopt the same system to increase transit ridership, at much higher cost since the necessary viaducts and tunnels connecting stub-end terminals were done much later. This is what led to the Paris RER, and what’s led to Thameslink and now Crossrail in London. Any other approach would require spending even more money on extending urban lines to the suburbs, exactly what’s done now in the two big suburban-focused US rapid transit systems, the Washington Metro and BART.
The kink is that despite the above problems of subways that are separate from both mainline and street rail, there’s now a different reason to build such lines after all: they can be made driverless. Most first-world cities already have legacy rapid transit or else have so much sprawl rapid transit is inappropriate, and third-world cities aren’t saving much money by eliminating drivers, but in the few cases of new builds (Vancouver, Dubai, Copenhagen, the newer lines in Singapore), driverless trains are common, and this allows trains to run more frequently, or even 24/7 in Copenhagen’s case.
This kink aside, there’s really no reason for a city to build a new New York-style subway, i.e. disconnected from light and commuter rail and running with a driver. Extending a legacy system is fine, but for new systems, there’s no point. This could be especially bad in growing third-world cities, which could find themselves paying too much for a subway they don’t need or unable to connect a subway they do need to the suburbs once they start suburbanizing. Third-world construction costs aren’t much if at all lower than first-world costs, but wages are much lower.
Some of the world’s largest cities have made or are making this mistake. Mumbai is building a new subway, on a different track gauge from the Indian mainline network, preventing through-service to the overburdened commuter trains. Shanghai and Beijing have vast subway networks, without express tracks or any ability for trains to run fast through city center; they have widely spaced stops so that they are faster than most other subway systems, but they have nothing on the rapid commuter trains in Tokyo. (Beijing is also developing a parallel commuter rail network, running diesel trains from the exurbs to the traditional city terminals at low frequency.) It works fine now, but when Shanghai grows and suburbanizes to the degree Tokyo has, it may find itself having to spend many billions on digging new tunnels.
Since a New York-style subway is inappropriate for new builds, some cities need to ask themselves which of the three kinds is the most appropriate. A subway-surface solution is mainly an option when one underground line can naturally split into multiple surface lines, as is the case in Boston, San Francisco, Cologne, and Frankfurt; this is because there’s a big difference between on-street and grade-separated capacity.
Tel Aviv, which is building a subway-surface line without any branching, is doing it wrong. For the other choice, I believe it’s a matter of how well-developed the suburban rail network is, and how much future suburbanization the city can realistically expect. In Tel Aviv specifically there’s also a separate element, which is that for religious reasons public transit does not run on weekend. If driverless technology makes the difference between trains that run 24/7 and trains that run 16/6, then it should be used even at the cost of otherwise worse service to some suburbs and destinations easily reached by legacy rail branches.
Finally, in North America, one of the reasons to engage in strong regulatory reform is to allow the mainline option to work. Some lines, for example the Harbor Subdivision between LAX and Union Station, should ideally host a mixture of local and rapid trains on the same tracks, and also allow intercity trains; if the Harbor Sub becomes an electrified commuter line then high-speed trains could serve the airport, providing a connection from the Central Valley to a major airport in addition to SFO, which would only get a station at Millbrae.
More in general, the only real disadvantage of legacy commuter networks is that they tend to not be very dense in the center of the city, requiring new builds; most of the Tokyo subway is just lines offering the commuter lines more capacity into the CBD, overlaying itself to also provide a tight in-city network. There’s no technical reason not to just build an electrified local mainline network as its transportation backbone, and if more capacity is required then build additional lines in the mold of Tokyo.
One-Way Pairs: the Bad and the Ugly
One of Jane Jacobs’ prescient observations about bus service in The Death and Life is that one-way pairs, as practiced on the avenues in Manhattan, are bad for riders. Her argument was that one-way pairs require people to walk too long to the bus line, and this cancels out any gains in speed. (This is truer today, when signal priority is an option, than it was fifty years ago.) Jarrett Walker has formalized this in two posts using station radius as an argument; the issue is that passengers need to be within a short walking distance of both halves of the line, and this reduces coverage.
However, not all one-way pairs are created equal. An underrated reason to keep bus services on one line is simplicity: it’s easier to remember that a route follows one street than that it follows two, and also service to specific destinations can become easier. Taking a cue from proper rapid transit, ITDP’s magnum opus BRT standard treats it as a given that buses should run in the median of a street and only even lists one-way pairs as an option on very narrow streets, and even then as an inferior one. The argument revolves around service identity.
In particular, one-way pairs that preserve a semblance of service identity and simplicity are not as bad as one-way pairs that do not. For the original walk-distance reason, it’s also better to have the one-way pair closer together. Jarrett specifically praises Portland’s light rail one-way pair, located a short block apart, as an example of a good couplet. Manhattan’s one-way pairs are located a long block apart, so the walking distance is worse.
But even Manhattan’s one-way pairs are at least coherent. The First/Second Avenue bus follows First and Second Avenues for the entire length of the avenues; south of Houston, it follows Allen, the continuation of First. This is the advantage of the grid. In Providence, things are not as nice, though still somewhat coherent, if one remembers, for example, that Angell and Waterman Streets form a one-way pair (they’re treated as such for car travel, too, so anyone in the neighborhood would know, though people from outside would not).
In contrast, this is how Tel Aviv’s one-way pairs work. They’re getting worse amidst the various bus reform. The post is in Hebrew, but look at the map at the bottom of bus #5, the city’s busiest (and most frequently bombed back in the 1990s and early 2000s). The travesty is that none of those streets on which the line runs in one direction only is even one-way. East of Ibn Gabirol, the street hosting lines 25, 26, and 189 on the map, the streets are wide and two-way. The reason for the complication is lack of left turns. In order to make car traffic flow a little more smoothly, Tel Aviv has completely eviscerated its bus service.
In principle, Tel Aviv has infrastructure for consistent one-way pairs when necessary and regular two-way service elsewhere. For example, Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda, the two north-south streets hosting buses to the west, function as such for cars. They both have contraflow lanes for buses, allowing buses to use them as two-way streets; some do (for example, #5 on Dizengoff), while others still go one-way (for examples, #9 and #55). Likewise, Jabotinsky, the east-west street feeding into the big circuit, is one-way and narrow west of Ibn Gabirol, and could be a one-way pair with Arlozorov to its south; but Arlozorov is kept two-way, and so #66 is two-way, and #22 uses the two as a one-way pair. (By the way, those are fan-made maps; the official maps don’t use color to distinguish routes, and are thus completely unusable.)
The results of the mess coming from ending any service coherence are predictable. Israeli car ownership, low by first-world standards, is rising rapidly, and the social justice and affordable housing protesters are now complaining about high fuel prices. None of them is anti-transit on principle, and all who I confront tell me they’d ride transit if it were usable. I live without a car in a city with worse transit than Tel Aviv, but to me car ownership is not aspirational. When the only transit people know in their country is unusable, people this generation will get cars. The next bus reform will then take into account more left turn restrictions coming from the need to accommodate more vehicles. The next generation of people will grow up with the expectation of even worse bus service and not conceive of any alternative to automobility.
Surreptitious Underfunding
One third of the MBTA’s outstanding debt, about $1.7 billion, comes from transit projects built by the state as part of a court-imposed mitigation for extra Big Dig traffic; interest on this debt is about two-thirds the agency’s total present deficit. Metra was prepared to pay for a project to rebuild rail bridges that would increase clearance below for trucks and cut the right-of-way’s width from three to two tracks. Rhode Island is spending $336 million on extending the Providence Line to Wickford Junction, with most of the money going toward building parking garages at the two new stations; Wickford Junction, in a county whose number of Boston-bound commuters is 170, is getting 1,200 parking spaces.
Supporters of transportation alternatives talk about the inequity between highway and transit funding in the US, but what they’re missing is that the transit funding bucket includes a lot of things that are manifestly not about transit. At their best, they are parking lots and other development schemes adjacent to train stations, which would’ve been cheap by themselves. At their worst, they are straight highway projects, benefiting road users only.
The situation in Boston, while unique in its brazenness, is not unique in concept. In the US, where there are no pollution taxes on fuel, the only way to mitigate air pollution is by regulation and by building alternatives simultaneously. Put another way, combined highway and transit construction is in most cases not really a combined project; it’s a highway project, plus required mitigation. Requiring the transit agency to shoulder the debt and the operating subsidies is exactly requiring transit users to pay for highways. It’s equivalent to charging transit multiple dollars per gallon of gas saved from any mode shift. And it may get even worse: the proposed House transportation bill includes a provision to allow spending national air pollution control funds on regular highway widening, in addition to the current practice of spending them on carpool lanes.
Historically, the diversion of funding from transit to roads took such insidious forms. For an instructive example from Owen Gutfreund’s book, roads advocates fought to get driver’s license fees and even inspection fees for fuel trucks recognized as road user fees, whose proceeds must be diverted toward roads. For another example from the same book, in Denver, the streetcar system was required to cover 25% of the cost of road maintenance on one-way streets and 50% on two-way streets, and as car traffic rose, streetcars both became slower and had to send over more money toward roads.
Another instructive case study is grade separations. It is to my knowledge universal that expressways and high-speed railroads, both of which must be grade-separated, pay for their own grade separations. In all other cases, who pays is determined by which mode is more powerful, and in the US, this is roads. As the national highway system was built in the 1920s, interurban railroads were required to pay for grade-separations, even when the rail came first. The practice continues today: in Kentucky, the railroad has to shoulder the full cost if it’s from 1926 or newer (Statute 177.110), and half the construction cost and the full planning cost if it’s older (177.170). In contrast, in Japan, grade separations are considered primarily a road project, and so the Chuo Line track elevation project was paid 85% by the national and city governments and only 15% by JR East (page 36). The segment in question of the Chuo Line was built in 1889; I believe, but do not know, that new rail construction in Japan is always grade-separated, at the railroad’s expense.
The situation in the US today is a surreptitious underfunding of transit, and at the same time a surreptitious overfunding of roads. It is not subject to democratic debate or even to the usual lobbyist funding formulas, but, like the obscure regulations that impede good passenger rail, hidden in rules nobody thinks to question. To pay for road mitigations and for parking, transit agencies will cut weekend service and reduce frequency. It’s bad enough when done in the open, but it’s done while claiming that transit is too expensive to provide.
Pedestrian Observations 
