Category: Urban Transit
24/7 Rapid Transit
It’s a commonplace in New York that the New York City Subway is almost the only one that runs 24/7, and that the rest – PATH, PATCO, and two lines of the Chicago L – are small operations. The reason for this operating plan is that the main Manhattan trunklines have four tracks, making it feasible to shut down tracks for weekend and late-night maintenance and skip a few stations in one direction. Occasionally, even midday midweek service is disrupted. This leads to complaints from passengers who actually ride transit in the off-peak, as well as various politicians, and exhortations from political defenders of the MTA that it’s a necessary byproduct of 24/7 operation.
In fact, there’s one additional system not mentioned above: the Copenhagen Metro, which began 24/7 operation in 2009. Although around-the-clock operation on weekends is common in some European cities, such as Berlin, Copenhagen took the extra step to run 24/7 reliably. It has only two tracks, like some lines in New York, but made sure it would be possible to single-track at night for maintenance. Late-night headways in Copenhagen are 20 minutes, like in New York, and this gives enough time to reduce long segments to a single track and run wrong-way service. Copenhagen’s trains are automated and this helps with wrong-way signaling, but it’s not a prerequisite and wrong-way operation is already done late at night on the subway in New York.
What this means is that there’s a technical solution to the problem of late-night and weekend service disruptions: make sure that there are crossovers placed at regular intervals to allow 20-minute service on single track. Installing switches requires extra capital construction money, but is orders of magnitude cheaper than building extra tunnels, and would make late-night maintenance much easier. Headways are such that a switch would be required every 7 or 8 minutes, which means every 2.5-5 km. At some places, crossovers already exist at that density, for example at all four tunnels from Queens to Manhattan, and all that’s required is schedule modification.
The result would still not be as satisfactory as in Copenhagen, ironically because of the multi-track trunklines. Under the slow-fast-fast-slow system used in New York, as well as most other four-track lines, it’s impossible for a local train to cross over to the opposite track without fouling the express tracks. This would create serious problems even on the three-track lines in Queens and the Bronx, since extra switching moves would be required, shortening the acceptable crossover spacing. It would still be possible, say with crossovers 6-7 minutes apart, but the maintenance requirements would be higher.
On the four-track mainlines, I don’t see any solution that unequivocally improves on the status quo. It’s possible to have the same crossovers, but at even tighter spacing, and without any express traffic. Weekend express traffic could possibly still be retained, but not late-night express trains, and late-night frequency would be reduced to 20 minutes even on combined lines, for example the local 1/2 in Manhattan.
What this means for future trunklines is that, if four-tracking is required for capacity or for express service, it should not run as was built in New York a hundred years ago. Instead, the slow tracks should be in the middle, and the fast tracks on the outside; this allows more operational flexibility as well as short-turning local trains, at the cost of making it harder to build infill stations. While the subway short-turns some local trains, for example the C at 168th and at Euclid, this requires flying junctions, which contributed to the IND’s excessive cost.
Maximum flexibility could be obtained by building every station with two island platforms, as if it were an express station, and having express trains skip low-traffic stations. This way, two tracks could be shut down for maintenance along the entire line with no ill effect on reliability, except that retaining express service would required timed overtakes. The problem is of course the much higher cost of such a line, especially if it is underground.
For underground lines, there’s very rarely a reason to four-track. Washington may complain about lack of flexibility and express service, but modern subway lines with good rolling stock and wide curves can achieve acceptable average speed even with medium stop spacing. The Copenhagen Metro averages 40 km/h, a speed previously reserved for systems with very long (~1.6 km) interstations such as the Moscow Metro, even though its stop spacing is just 1 km. Capacity is the only serious drawback of two-track lines, but if it is so pressing then the city should built two separate two-track lines, which with tunnel boring machines cost about the same as one four-track line.
Why Transit Should be in the Fast Lane
Local buses tend to use the slow lane, which in North America means the rightmost lane; this is how they access the curb to pick up passengers. New York’s painted bus lanes on First and Second Avenues are to the right, with the buses slower than the cars both in perception and in actual practice.
Occasionally, transit uses the fast lane, especially if it’s BRT or a streetcar; for some of the access challenges of boarding not from the curb, see an old Human Transit thread on the subject. The issue of whether there should be sidewalk- or median-adjacent transit lanes came up in comments on Cap’n Transit’s blog. So let me explain why higher-grade transit than local buses, which means rail or BRT, should run in the median, with boarding from raised curbs either on the sides or in the center.
1. Service identity. This is probably the overarching concern, especially on the question of whether to have raised curbs or instead stop traffic in the slow lanes and have people cross to the bus from the sidewalk. ITDP’s magnum opus standards for full-fat BRT virtually take median running for granted, and only consider alternatives when the right-of-way is constrained. This is also mentioned as the highest grade of BRT in a conference paper examining BRT on city streets.
2. Fewer conflicts. Using pedestrian-friendly two-phase stoplights, it is impossible to eliminate turn conflicts, though in Delhi they found that median running (right lane in India) had fewer turn conflicts. In addition, it’s possible to eliminate conflicts with cars entering or exiting the parking lanes, as well as stopped cars left near the curbside lanes.
3. Median lanes are politically easier to physically separate, since separating them does not deprive cars of curbside access. If cars can physically violate transit lanes, they will, either accidentally or intentionally (my mother’s car’s GPS guidance routinely sends her along the tram-only lanes). As APTA mentions in its own standards for BRT,
One major advantage of a median busway is that there is typically no demand for other vehicles to stop in the center of the street for purposes such as parking or as a breakdown lane. As a result, there is a lot less reason for vehicles to want to occupy the center of the road and less resistance to creating a physical barrier separation between the busway and the adjacent general traffic lanes.
Point #3 is what killed the proposal for the 34th Street Transitway, which would have run two-way on one side of the street with one direction running contraflow. The NIMBYs on East 34th Street complained specifically about curbside access, using such language as “Delivery and service trucks… no longer have direct access to buildings and stores along stretches of 34th Street.” Most issues they raised involved curbside access or else bus noise adjacent to the street, both of which would have been solved by median lanes.
To add to what Steve Stofka is writing about grids, if I had to design a street from scratch, it would look a lot like a two-way version of a Manhattan avenue, with bus lanes in the middle. It would be 30 meters building to building, and about 20 curb to curb; this is enough space for two parking/loading lanes (2.5 meters) buffering pedestrians from moving traffic, two car travel lanes (3 meters), and two median bus lanes (3-3.5 meters), with room left for physical separation (measured in centimeters). Raised curbs for stations should add 3-4 meters, at the expense of either parking or sidewalk space once every few hundred meters; one advantage of trams, or buses with doors on both sides, is that they can use less space-consuming island stations.
Good Industry Practices Thread
In contrast to the mismanagement highlighted in the last few posts, there’s a set of best industry practices for good transit. Here is a list of what I believe are the most salient. As far as possible I’ve avoided contentious issues that well-run agencies disagree on. By its nature, the list is open, and you should feel free to comment with your own ideas of what’s more important.
1. Regions should organize regionwide transport associations (the German Verkehrsverbund) with integrated fares and schedules, even across political boundaries. One ticket should be valid on all trips, and transfers should be free even across different operators. Bus and rail schedules should coordinate to minimize transfer time; rail-rail transfers should be cross-platform when possible and timed when possible, even if frequency is high.
2. Schedules should be organized on simple clockface intervals (Takt): instead of complex timetables, the same pattern should repeat every half hour or hour, and should be compressible to a system map. Supplemental peak services should be integrated into the same takt, for example arriving at the half-points or maybe third-points if the peak is very prominent. Minimum off-peak frequency for regional branch lines is hourly; for commuter rail and anything else intended to serve as suburban transit, it’s half-hourly; for urban services, it’s 15 or at worst 20 minutes.
3. If express service is desired, it should be limited-stop and make stops at all major stations, rather than running very long nonstop segments. For a good example, go here and click on the interval timetable links. In addition, the express buses and trains should run on their own clockface schedule, and express trains should have timed transfers to maximize utility and overtakes to minimize the amount of four-tracking required. The practice on Metro-North and other legacy US railroads of having peak commuter trains make a small number of suburban stops and then run nonstop to the CBD should end; not everyone works in the CBD.
4. Boarding should be level. For regional rail, this means at least moderately high platforms are non-negotiable. For surface transit, this means low-floor equipment; high-floor BRT is a feature in Latin America, where it’s a lower-cost replacement for a subway, but in developed countries, the cost of paying so many bus drivers is such that BRT is a replacement for local buses and should be open with many curb stops in outlying areas.
5. All payment should be done on a proof-of-payment basis. Any vehicle, no matter how long, should have at most one employee on board, operating it. The fare should be enforced with random inspections; it pains me to have to say it, but the inspectors should never hold a bus during inspections. This should be done systemwide, even on local buses, as is normal in Paris, Singapore, and every German-speaking city; turnstiles are only worth it on extremely busy trains (nothing in the US outside New York) and maybe also legacy subways that already have them. To discourage fare dodging, there should be a large unlimited monthly discount, as well as unlimited 6-month or annual tickets, so that most riders will be prepaid; the unlimited monthly pass should cost about 30 times as much as a single ride even with multi-ride discounts.
6. Intermediate-grade surface transit – i.e. the BRT and light rail lines providing service quality higher than a local bus and lower than rapid transit – should run in dedicated lanes, except perhaps on outer branches. Bus lanes should be physically separated, and tram lanes could even be put in a grassy median. Except for special cases where one side of the street is much more important than the other, in which case one-way pairs may be defensible, those dedicated lanes should be in the median of a two-way street, when street width permits it, which it does everywhere in the US except the North End of Boston and Lower Manhattan.
7. Intermodal transfers should be painless. Commuter trains should run through from one side of the region to the other, to allow for efficient suburb-to-suburb travel, and the infrastructure should be upgraded to allow for such operations. It should be unthinkable to terminate transit short of its natural destination. Though transfers at the originating end are unavoidable, planners should still endeavor to place rapid transit stops at every walkable place the line intersects, and achieve adequate speed by running better rolling stock. (In contrast, bus stop spacing should be 400-500 meters, rather than 200-250 as is common in North America). Parking lot commuter stations should be rare; they impede reverse-peak traffic, are expensive to provide, and help ensure transit will be used only when there’s no alternative.
Any other important principles for transit, dear commenters?
Organization and Electronics vs. Concrete in Washington
There’s a discussion going on at Greater Greater Washington about future expansions of the Washington Metro, adding more coverage and capacity; read both the posts and the comments, because there are great debates about just how much concrete really is needed. The post itself mentions various possibilities Metro has been looking into, a few good and many really awful.
Part of it is that the nature of such discussions favors concrete – it’s much easier to discuss a fantasy map than schedules and organization. Indeed, on my three regional rail posts on The Transport Politic, most comments concerned the proposed through-routing map and infrastructure to be built rather than schedule integration. The reason the comments on the GGW post are so good is that many eschew this and instead talk about other things. Even the idea of separating the Blue Line from the Orange Line in the city, which looks sound to me and is not yet another outbound extension to the exurbs, is suspect and there’s a serious suggestion to build light rail to relieve the capacity problem instead.
Discussed in the comments but not by Metro is the possibility of converting the commuter lines to rapid transit. Only one, the Penn Line running along the Northeast Corridor to and beyond Baltimore, is even electrified, and the rest are owned by CSX and Norfolk Southern. This would be far superior to adding more outbound Metro extensions, which have very high costs: the Dulles extension is $180 million per km despite being predominantly above ground.
The Washington Metro, and even more so BART, is more an S-Bahn or RER system than a subway. The stop spacing is very wide, and the lines branch out and go deep into suburbia. Unlike BART, Metro sometimes gets it right and has good transit-oriented development, though it too has its share of parking lot stations. The main difference is that due to poor organization (FRA regulations, pure agency inertia), the Washington Metro exclusively uses greenfield alignments, whereas S-Bahn and RER systems use predominantly existing commuter lines, with strategic tunnels built to provide service to the urban core.
There are two potential problems with relying on legacy commuter lines, aside from organizational difficulties that should be the first to be tackled. First, those lines may have capacity problems; this is not true for the Penn Line, but may be true for the other, lesser-used lines, because of freight conflicts. Second, the lines may not run to the desired destinations. Both concerns can be mitigated at much lower costs than pouring concrete on new lines.
First, the Penn Line is 64 km long from Baltimore to Washington, has 8 stations, and has no sharp curves except at the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnels, a $750 million replacement for which has already been studied. A 160 km/h train with the acceleration profile of the FLIRT and 30-second dwell times at intermediate stations (easy with level boarding) could do it in 36 minutes. Add Swiss-standard 7% schedule padding and about 30 seconds for slowdown through the B & P replacement and this is a total of 39 minutes end-to-end. A speed boost to 200 km/h would save maybe 2.5 minutes, since regional trains accelerate slowly at high speed. Local trains currently do the trip in an hour.
The Acela, a substandard train, is currently scheduled at 38 minutes, so all trains would travel at about the same speed, eliminating all capacity problems. (Current peak throughput is 7 tph, so the slight unevenness in the travel speed is a non-issue.) A mild Acela speedup, involving trains running at 200 km/h with no slowdowns, would speed the train to 22 minutes, and require just one mid-line overtake if peak traffic is to be 4 tph each for Acela and commuter trains. 6 tph each would require two overtakes and a lot of discipline, but would be doable given the capabilities of ERTMS. Full-fat high-speed rail in the Northeast would do the same trip in about 16.5 minutes, and require the line to be fully four-tracked; this is already part of MARC’s long-term plan. There is in other words no real problem with capacity as far as conflicts with intercity trains go.
Second, one often-overlooked point about S-Bahn/RER networks is that they have a fair amount of greenfield track, often in tunnel, constructed strategically to connect to important destinations off the existing rail network. For example, tunneled alignments bring regional trains to Charles de Gaulle and Zurich Airports. If there’s an important suburban destination not reached by Metro or a rapid transit system based on the five existing commuter lines, it should be fine to construct a spur – for example, the extension of Metro to Tysons Corner is a great idea. However, such spurs should be kept as short as possible, especially airport spurs, since airport connectors tend to underperform.
Look again now at the suburban lines proposed by Metro in the link. The Brown Line is a duplicate of the Red Line, which has no serious capacity issues except at its center. The Beltway Line skips the major centers that a circumferential should hit (for example, Arlington/Alexandria), defeating the entire purpose of a greenfield alignment. The outbound extensions would just create more transit-oriented sprawl, with people driving to stations and taking trains only at the peak. And it would all cost much more than electrifying track, purchasing good rolling stock, and running it with high schedule discipline.
Written in Concrete
This post was originally written in Hebrew by Shalom Boguslavsky, a social and political activist living in Jerusalem who blogs about Israeli politics at Put Down the Scissors and Let’s Talk About It. The views expressed here are those of the author rather than my own; I translated it because it’s important to showcase the politics of transit and there’s a dearth of good English-language analysis of Israeli transportation. -Alon.
As you’ve probably heard, the light rail (blight rail in Jerusalemite) is doing its final test runs before starting to operate. Here, as everyone knows, the only law that’s properly enforced is Murphy’s Law, so the train has managed to cause damage even before the first passenger has boarded when it was used as an asinine excuse to move religious Zionism’s annual hate march away from its normal route and toward Sheikh Jarrah.
Trains – like anything else, some would say – are a text, and a political text at that. Every text is like this at the place under discussion, and the series of design choices that have been taken tells us something about the people who selected them. Like every truly effective political text, it masquerades as a professional text, so that we the lay public won’t bother, but instead leave the decision makers to do what they please.
But if the considerations behind the line were professional, most likely it would have looked completely different. Today, it begins at Mount Herzl/Yad Vashem, across from the Haredi neighborhood Bayit VeGan; passes through the Central Bus Station and Jaffa Road; cuts across to Route 1, which was once the no man’s land between West and East Jerusalem; and continues from there to Pisgat Ze’ev. In short, the IDF-Holocaust-Haredis-settlers line.
Did the planners conceive of this symbolism that I see? I doubt it, but they made their choices: only about a kilometer and a half separate Mount Herzl from the Golem at Kiryat HaYovel. This is a gigantic urban neighborhood with a very diverse population whose socioeconomic status is medium or lower, for the most part. It also attracts a lot of cultural and educational activity of all sectors and the center of the city’s social activism. The people there desperately need good public transit and it’s only a kilometer and a half. But it’s been postponed to the next phase, which given the 11 years of destruction of the first one who knows when it will come. Pisgat Ze’ev, a settlement that’s closer to Ramallah than to central Jerusalem, got priority and is in the first phase even though there the need is less urgent, and at any rate the inner parts of the city need to get solutions before the bedroom communities that are already served by fast highways anyway.
The insistence on directing the train to Pisgat Ze’ev comes at the expense of the choice to build the first line as a ring line. After Jaffa Street, the train could have passed by the bonanza of rich tourists of King David Hotel, the culture and entertainment sector of the German Colony, the Talpiot industrial zone (which includes the cheap commercial center that serves most of the residents of the nation’s poorest city, among other things) and the neighborhoods nearby it, Beit Safafa, and Malha, which is home to Teddy Stadium, the under construction Arena, the train station, and the Biblical Zoo, which attracts a lot of visitors and is really not lush with public transportation. After that it would have served the neighborhoods of Malha, Ramat Sharett and Ramat Denya, the eastern end of Kiryat HaYovel and back to the Golem. It would have helped solve some difficult transportation problems of southwest Jerusalem. The axes in Jerusalem are mostly north-south, and to get by bus from Kiryat HaYovel to the German Colony or Talpiot, despite the short distance, takes longer than to get to Tel Aviv, and not much shorter than to walk. It would have been possible at the next phase to connect Gilo to the blight rail. Gilo is a settlement as well, in fact the largest of them, and it would have also served a large stream of settlers from Gush Etzion and Mount Hebron who enter the city through it. Of course unlike the popular view, the Israeli government has no interest in serving the settlers, only in serving the settlements. The settlers are like the rest of the people here – a means and not an end – only with a different spot in the hierarchy of privileges.
On its way to Pisgat Ze’ev, the train passes within a spit’s distance of the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus. It would have been easy to route the train near the university so that it would have served thousands of students who need much more public transit than they are getting. Instead of doing so, city hall went for a step that was supposed to be “modern” and built “bike paths” from the train to campus. Why the scare quotes, you ask? Well, one must see the “bike paths” to believe it, and I implore everyone who is not named Evel Knievel not to put his front wheel on one of these paths if he ever wants to see his loved ones again. Oh, and the trains have no room to store bicycles on board.
And this is before we start talking about the obvious thing. There’s no need for a train at all, and in its stead it would have been better to invest in BRT, a method with which third-world cities with less money and more mess have already solved their transportation problems. There’s BRT in Jerusalem too, but it’s mainly buses and not lanes, and those giant buses have been directed straight to the thriving Mahane Yehuda Market, choking what has become a (pedestrianized) national attraction in the last few years.
And what is even more obvious: you may have noticed this post, like the train’s route, is concerned only with West Jerusalem and the big Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The idea that the blight rail is supposed to serve the forever and ever united city’s Palestinian residents, except those who live right on Route 1 and those who are rich enough (or collaborators the Shin Bet helps) to live in Pisgat Ze’ev, is still science fiction in Israel of 2011. Palestinian East Jerusalem is simply left on purpose (come on, say “the Arabs can build up”) in a third world state of urban design, in the hope that the Arabs will leave it. There’s probably no clearer example to the regime of separation in the city than the two separate public transit systems, for Jews and Arabs. True, an Arab can get on a Jewish bus and vice versa, but the transportation doesn’t even flow on the same grid. But this is worth a separate post, and simply reflects on the city level what is happening on the national level.
Because if you’re sighing in relief at this stage thinking that you live in a city with saner urban policy, let me spoil your party. If this is so, it’s only because you have an urban policy. In Jerusalem, there’s only national policy, managed by the same government that runs the rest of the country. The city is run directly by the government, and is governed for symbolic and geopolitical needs and not for the welfare of its residents. Jerusalem’s city government is the weakest in the country and the role of the mayor, in addition to “taking out the garbage” (as Prime Minister Golda Meir clarified to Mayor Teddy Kollek back in the day), is to foment riots, do public relations, and finagle money from American Jews. Other than the part about removing the garbage, Mayor Nir Barkat is indeed great at his job. And we, the locals, simply feel the wrath of the government’s arm directly.
Staten Island’s Closed BRT Disaster
After having constructed something like bus rapid transit in the Bronx and Manhattan, the MTA is moving forward with its plan to have a line in each borough and has made a proposal for Staten Island Select Bus Service. Buses would run from the Staten Island Mall to Hylan Boulevard, the main corridor serving the South Shore, and thence to Brooklyn over the Verrazano Bridge to connect to the subway. As Ben Kabak reports, this is intended to resuscitate the idea of SBS after the cancellation of the 34th Street Transitway.
To see why this is such a bad plan, let us look at Staten Island’s existing bus map. The S79 follows the route proposed by the MTA and would become an SBS line under this proposal. But there are nine other lines on Hylan: the S78, which goes to St. George and connects to the Ferry, and eight express routes, which cross to Brooklyn and use expressways to get to Manhattan. The S78 has about two thirds the annual ridership of the S79; the eight express routes have between them about 30% more ridership than the S79.
The problem with MTA-style BRT is that it’s inherently closed, because it bundles lane separation with innovations that should be applied everywhere, such as proof of payment. Although buses could run partly in mixed traffic and partly in dedicated lanes, as they should, the fare collection systems and incompatible, and the MTA has ruled out off-board fare collection on non-SBS routes. Recall from the MTA’s smartcard report that:
Local and express buses will continue to have a farebox unit
o Accept contactless cards as primary payment method
o Accept coins (nickels, dimes and quarters) as secondary method
…
o Bus operator must be able to confirm fare paid by all means of payment
In other words, the best industry practice is ruled out, and the attempts at fixing it within the MTA’s rules only make things worse. On First and Second Avenues, where local and select buses use the same bus lanes, the stations are separate, reducing the effective frequency of buses on the corridor. On Hylan, which is a much lower-traffic and therefore lower-frequency route than First/Second, this is devastating to frequency on the shared trunk line. If the inspectors keep forcing buses to sit still during inspections, as they have on the Bx12 and M15 SBS routes, then reliability will drop as well.
The configuration of Hylan is such that open BRT, used in cities from Berlin to Brisbane, would be perfect for the corridor, if the fare collection were done right. The entirety of the Hylan corridor (except perhaps in the far south of Staten Island) as well as the approaches to the Verrazano Bridge would get dedicated lanes, and buses would be free to use parts of the infrastructure as needed. People with express bus passes who don’t mind taking a local or SBS pass for the trip could even board and transfer.
Because under open BRT dedicated lanes would not involve special branding, it would be easy to extend this to congested portions of Staten Island’s two other batches of relatively busy buses: the S53, which runs from the North Shore to the Verrazano and Bay Ridge, and the S44/S46/S48, which run on parallel streets from the North Shore to St. George. The S53 would be especially important, as it runs orthogonally to the borough’s rail infrastructure, and does not compete either with the Staten Island Railway or with a future North Shore service on the existing railroad corridor.
Once you count the need to pay first-world wages to more drivers, BRT infrastructure is not cheaper than rail for equal capacity, unless traffic is very low. The advantage of BRT is that it can branch out and run in mixed traffic. Closed BRT, as the MTA is proposing, is the worst of both worlds – high operating costs, no branching – and with the splitting of frequency for riders who stay on Hylan, it may not even be much of an improvement over local buses. It deserves no support from good transit advocates.
Development-Oriented Transit
Occasionally, people faced with very high transit construction costs propose value capture, where some of the increase in land value coming from transit access is directed to the transit agency. Yonah Freemark has just brought up this issue again, in the context of Toronto’s failure to find private investors willing to put money for its extravagant suburban subways in exchange for greater land value.
Despite the list of examples of value capture used to fund transit, the idea remains a poor one. Jarrett Walker gives a list of consequences of value capture, one good (it ties transit success to density) and two bad (it is bad at serving existing density, and at social justice).
In New York, Second Avenue Subway and the 7 Extension are both very expensive, but the 7 Extension is getting funded by value capture whereas to construct Second Avenue Subway, backroom deals by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver were required. If anything, Jarrett’s first bad consequence is understated: politicians prioritize projects they can find private support for, especially reformists, and ignore transit lines that merely have very high ridership potential. At worst, it encourages collusion with developers and therefore corruption.
Jarrett misses one additional problem: nobody expects developers who build near highways to contribute to highway construction costs, and until they do, to tax developments near transit is to give developers an incentive to build near highways. Transit agencies should either reform themselves to become profitable or seek a reliable source of tax subsidy, but they should not tax people who do the right thing and build compact, transit-oriented development.
There’s a common misconception that in Japan and Hong Kong, both famous for the integration of rail construction and development, development is used to subsidize transit. Reality is the other way around: in most cases, Japanese private railroads use development to raise transit ridership, and although the real estate dealings are often higher-margin, the rail transportation is profitable by itself without exception. The Hong Kong MTR, too, is profitable on transportation alone, but keeps engaging in development to raise profit margins and provide patronage for the trains.
Many cities do in fact follow the model of Hong Kong and the private railroads of Japan, but entirely in the public sector. They upzone around transit stations, reduce or eliminate parking minimums, and restrain or avoid expanding auto capacity. This was done intensively in Calgary and Vancouver, which in recent years have been North America’s leaders in both efficient transit construction and transit modal share increase.
Note that this is still to a large extent development-oriented transit, and still creates problems with politicians who overfocus on greenfield TOD, but not to the same extent as value capture. Vancouver is seriously planning a rapid transit line to UBC, the main neglected urban line, just later than it should have. In contrast, New York is sidelining future phases of Second Avenue Sagas entirely; even PlaNYC only incorporates the first two of four phases, which are too far advanced to ignore.
Toronto could not follow the positive example of Vancouver and Calgary; there was too much NIMBYism along the routes proposed. This same problem also plagued the proposal for land value capture. The problem is that Toronto’s bad government is so suburban-focused it really believes in building transit to low-density suburban regions, and at the same time in enhancing auto accessibility (Mayor Rob Ford demagogued about a war on cars in his campaign).
In this sense, land value capture, and in general development-oriented transit, should be viewed as a failure of consensus for good transit, regardless of whether this consensus allows transit to be profitable or to be stably subsidized. At its best, for example in the Vancouver suburbs, development-oriented transit is a political price to be paid for suburban support for high-ridership urban lines. More commonly, as frequently happens with value capture, it sidelines the high-ridership lines completely. And at its worst, as is happening with the 7 extension, it’s a transfer of wealth from the public to private developers in the hopes of future tax revenues.
Whither BRT?
The Institute for Transport and Development Policy has joined Brookings in publishing a completely pointless transit system ranking, this time focusing on the quality of BRT, the mode of transit ITDP advocates.
I want to like ITDP for its BRT planning guide tome, but this BRT ranking uses random criteria, with bad weightings. Every system is ranked out of 100 points, with points divided into small criteria and subcriteria. On page 17, we see the following:
Off-vehicle fare collection 7
Multiple routes use same BRT infrastructure 4
Peak period frequency 4
Routes in top 10 demand corridors 4
Integrated fare collection with other public transport 3
Limited and local stop services 3
Off-peak frequency 3
Part of ( planned ) multi-corridor BRT network 3
Performance-based contracting for operators 3
Enforcement of right-of-way 2
Operates late nights and weekends 2
Operational control system to reduce bus bunching 2
Peak-period pricing 2Bus lanes in central verge of the road 7
Physically-separated right-of-way 7
Intersection treatments (elimination of turns across the busway and signal priority) 4
Physically-separated passing lanes at station stops 4
Stations occupy former road/median space (not sidewalk space) 3
Stations set back from intersections (100 feet min) 3
Stations are in center and shared by both directions of service 2Platform-level boarding 5
Buses have 3+ doors on articulated buses or 2+ very wide doors on standard buses 4
Multiple docking bays and sub-stops ( separated by at least half a bus length ) 3Branding of vehicles and system 3
Safe, wide, weather-protected stations with artwork (>/=8 feet wide) 3
Passenger information at stops and on vehicles 2Bicycle lanes in corridor 2
Bicycle sharing systems at BRT stations 2
Improved safe and attractive pedestrian access system and corridor environment 2
Secure bicycle parking at station stops 2
Those criteria are for the most part not bad, but they’re weighted wrong. Observe that off-peak frequency counts for only 3 points, the same as contracting out the operations. It’s actually worse: a system gets 1 point for having any off-peak frequency, even if it’s worse than 15 minutes; 15 minutes is enough for 2 points. Peak-period pricing, which is absent or all but absent from many well-run rail and bus operations around the world, gets 2 points. The core elements of BRT – level boarding, physically separated median lanes, off-board fare collection, signal preemption – have 36 points between them.
In first-world cities, BRT has two uses. One, lower-capacity, slightly lower-quality transit on corridors with less demand. Two, dedicated guideways that can branch out and make local stops in shared lanes in lower-traffic areas, on the model of Brisbane. The full-fat BRT in Guangzhou and Bogota cited by BRT proponents requires a lot of concrete and many operators, and is best-suited to a city with low labor costs.
Many of the features touted for BRT can and should be used for all buses. Off-board fare collection with proof of payment is practiced systemwide in such cities as Singapore, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, and Florence; in conjunction with multi-door boarding, this reduces bus dwell times and increases speed with zero investment in concrete. Signal priority can be practiced independently of all else. Physical separation of lanes requires barriers only a few centimeters wide, and can be done selectively on the most congested and highest-demand segments.
Buses can be great buses; they make bad trains. By all means first-world cities should increase frequency, procure better buses with low floors and more doors, make sure riders know which routes are frequent and which are not, and give buses dedicated lanes when necessary. But the focus on specially branded rail-like BRT only detracts from this goal.
In American cities, BRT is more often than not an excuse to not implement those features on local buses. In New York, not only does the MTA rule out proof-of-payment on non-SBS buses, but also backroom state legislative dealings banned bus camera enforcement of painted lanes except on a closed list of six SBS routes. All this while SBS service levels are comparable to those of local buses in Singapore and many European cities – in fact lower if those local buses have signal priority. This and not low scoring on an arbitrary rubric is what ITDP should have complained about.
High Costs Should not be an Excuse to Downgrade Projects
In an environment of high construction costs, there’s an impulse to downgrade projects: build light rail instead of subways, BRT instead of rail, commuter rail on existing tracks instead of greenfield light rail, shared-lane buses and streetcars instead of ones running in dedicated lanes. Some of those downgrades have already gotten flak individually from transit supporters, of which Jeff Wood’s recent article about commuter rail and Mike Dahmus‘s repeated attacks on BRT and the Austin commuter rail are good examples.
I do not think anyone has made the following point connecting those projects: the same causes that lead to incompetence in running one mode will lead to incompetence in running all other modes. Regardless of the mode chosen, a project in the US can expect to cost several times as much as a comparable European projects. (As a single exception, FRA-compliant commuter rail can be expected to be especially bad, because there the regulations and operating traditions are especially bad.) With very few exceptions, building BRT in a corridor that begs for rail, suburban transit in a city that needs urban transit, peak-only commuter rail, and other apparent cost savers will incur the same cost escalations as in every other mode.
In particular, downgrading service will not save any money, and going to the FRA will actually raise costs. This affects both the choice of technology and the choice of how to use it: American light rail lines keep the per-km costs reasonable by building out to exurbia, creating ersatz commuter rail with low ridership. This is epitomized in Dallas, whose light rail is setting records for low per-km ridership, and whose plans for the next decade are projected to cost $2.4 billion for 60,000 additional weekday riders, i.e. $40,000 per rider. In contrast, Houston’s urban Main Street Line cost $300 million for 34,000 riders, which is about $10,000 per rider in today’s money, the lowest per-rider cost in the US in the last 15 or so years. And Houston is unusual; more common is the Portland Milwaukie light rail extension, projected at $55,000 per rider and $110 million per km.
If we start looking abroad, we see the same pattern. When European LRT is more expensive, as for example in Nice, it’s because it’s very high-ridership urban infill. And Nice is an exceptionally expensive case; Lyon’s trams are cheaper. Few European light rail lines go over $10,000 per rider, and on Yonah Freemark’s list of recent and planned projects in Paris, a few lines are below $5,000.
Something similar is true for bus transit. Despite Jaime Lerner’s admonition that “Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget,” American cities have failed to create good BRT under budget constraints. The Los Angeles Orange Line is expensive for the ridership it has ($15,000/rider in construction, with the high operating costs of a bus) and has mediocre signal priority. Under a budget constraint, Los Angeles still built something inferior to the Blue Line, or even the expensive-to-build, cheap-to-operate Red Line subway.
As an aside, this also holds for the costs of transit versus highways. In the rest of the developed world, prudent cities invest most or all of their transportation money into mass transit, and try to restrain traffic. This should also be true in the US, where subways and light rail are expensive, but so are highway projects: see the 8-times-over-budget Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, the Big Dig, and the proposed Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, and compare them to the more complex Øresund Bridge-Tunnel connecting Denmark and Sweden.
At worst, the high costs of transportation in the US imply that government should spend its money elsewhere – on health or education, or perhaps tax cuts. Even then I’m personally skeptical about the efficiency of the marginal dollar: American health care is infamously expensive, tax expenditures are byzantine and in such cases as the mortgage tax credit create the wrong sort of incentives, and so on.
Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 is by far the most expensive urban rail project in the world today, but its per-rider cost is only $25,000, high by European and Japanese standards but lower than any other rail line proposed or under construction in the US today. It would not be approved in today’s pennypinching climate, and even ten years ago it was funded only thanks to legislative blackmail by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district would be served by Phase 3. Of course at normal cost it would be very cheap, just as at normal cost everything else in the US would become much more affordable, but it is still more cost-effective than seemingly cheap commuter lines.
The upshot is that from the perspective of transit planning, high costs should not deter anyone. Other than the special rule that FRA-compliant commuter rail is practically never justifiable, the relative merits of projects are about the same in the US as in all other developed countries. Agencies all over the world have to choose between a subway, five trams, and twenty busways. In an environment of high costs, it still make sense to draw plans as if the costs are normal, and when the costs are not normal, build more slowly and start with the most cost-effective lines. If agencies and activists behave as if there’s no money for good transit, they will only get bad transit.
Frequent New York City Buses
Following Jarrett Walker‘s repeated focus on frequency as the main distinguishing feature of local transit service, some people have gone and made maps of the frequent buses of their local areas, complementing official maps in such cities as Portland and LA. The importance is that regular bus maps are overly complex, and do not make it clear which buses can be relied upon all day and which are too low-frequency for show-up-and-go service.
So as a service to the New York City bus-riding public, here are my maps of frequent routes in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The standard I use is 10-minute service in the afternoon off-peak, barring slight one-time irregularities. Some frequent trunk lines have infrequent branches; only the trunk lines appear on the map. The color scheme is meant to help dissimilate routes and reduce confusion. If multiple routes sharing the same trunk line are frequent, then they all appear, helping indicate very high frequency.
A slightly stricter map of Queens, using an 8-minute standard, is available on Cap’n Transit’s blog.
Pedestrian Observations 
