Category: Urban Transit
Costs Per Rider and Willingness to Build
At the Transit Costs Project, we study the costs of urban rail lines per kilometer. This, with our usual controls, is a rough indicator of how efficient a city’s infrastructure construction program is. However, cost-effectiveness is different from efficiency, and is better measured not by just the cost but also the benefits, which are measured by ridership. Thus, cost-effectiveness is best measured by the cost of each project per rider. So what does it mean to compare different cities by their costs per rider, rather than per kilometer?
The answer is, “not much,” at least not as far as efficiency or good decisionmaking. In fact, while some projects persistently have costs per rider that are too high to be cost-effective (for example, it’s endemic to airport extensions), some cities have costs per rider that are too low, such as Berlin. The issue here is that if municipal or state decisionmaking is healthy, it will build cost-effective lines; if a line under discussion has a very high benefit-cost ratio, or equivalently a very low cost per rider, it means it should have been built long ago, and it speaks poorly to the local decisionmaking that it hasn’t been built already, as is unfortunately the case in Berlin.
Cost per rider and cost-effectiveness
As always, let’s start with Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, the project that launched my interest in construction costs and the Transit Costs Project writ large. The projected daily ridership is 202,000; the line came close to it in 2019, reaching about 163,000 (see data here; I’m taking boardings for the three new stations, adding the growth in ridership at Lexington/63rd, and multiplying by two to account for disembarkings), and would have likely reached projection by now but for the pandemic. The cost, in 2023 dollars, was $6.23 billion, or about $31,000 per projected weekday trip.
For another anchoring number, let’s use the Stockholm Metro’s entire construction from the 1940s to the 1970s. This is useful because in addition to costs per rider, there is a published ex post benefit-cost ratio, thanks to the work of Maria Börjesson. The cost of that system, in 2023 PPP dollars, was $3.7 billion, with a ridership of 1,265,900 per workday in 2019, or $2,900/rider, while the benefit-cost ratio is 6 without taking agglomeration into account, or 8.5 with. This does not mean that the value of a rider is only about $24,900; this was the value in the economic situation of postwar Sweden, a country that was substantially poorer than the Sweden of today. In 2023 PPP terms, Sweden’s GDP per capita in 1965, about midway through the opening of the original system, was about $19,400; today, Sweden is 3.5 times richer, and the US is 17% richer than Sweden.
The benefits of urban travel are largely proportional to GDP per capita. The economic benefits of agglomeration are proportional to the value of the economy writ large, and so are the benefits of reduced travel time, which in benefit-cost analyses are usually taken to be proportional to the average hourly wage. Conversely, the ability of a government to spend money on desired outcomes is proportional to its tax base, i.e. the size of its economy. All of this is approximate, but all we’re doing is first-order approximate analysis anyway, and so correcting for GDP per capita is valuable.
As it is, the difference between American and Swedish GDP per capita boils down entirely to working hours. Swedes work shorter hours than Americans, as they, like nearly everyone else in Europe, get much longer vacation time; as of 2022, Sweden’s GDP per hour worked was, by a rounding error, slightly higher than the US’s. However, at the same time, the daily ridership numbers for Sweden are specifically drawn from winter workday ridership, to avoid reporting figures from when ridership is lower during the summer vacation season, and the same is true for daily ridership counts in France. If we give Sweden and France credit by looking at ridership when people aren’t on vacation, we must compare the cost per rider with GDP per capita and not GDP per hour.
The upshot is that countries should be building metros up to a maximum capital cost per rider that’s about as large as their GDP per capita. The $24,900 computation for 1960s’ Sweden is ex post, and usually the ex ante benefit-cost ratio must be at least 1.2 or 1.3 for the project to go ahead due to risk. For light rail the allowable cost should be lower, and for bus projects it should be lower still, due to the higher lifetime operating costs; but for metros and metro-like urban rail projects (such as largely grade-separated light rail, or commuter rail tunnels like Citybanan), this analysis should hold. Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, which opened in a United States with a GDP of $73,300/capita in 2023 prices, is thus very cost-effective; Phase 2, budgeted at something like $70,000/rider in today’s prices, is marginal but makes it (in 2022, US GDP per capita in 2023 prices was $80,300).
Some more costs per rider
Our database of construction costs per km is largely complete, but we don’t have much ridership data. Worse, the costs per rider we do have have some biases. We have better information for the US and Canada than elsewhere, and for Europe than the rest of the non-North American world. Costs are also likeliest to be reported for megaprojects with notable delays or cost overruns and thus an incomplete database will be biased upward; large, international cities have better reporting in English than the rest and this introduces another upward bias in incomplete data (these are typically wealthy and therefore capable of affording a high cost per rider).
With that in mind, here are some (again, incomplete) examples:
- Crossrail cost $24 billion in 2023 PPP terms; ridership in late 2023 was 4.3 million a week, which is usually about 700,000/weekday, said to be above projections, with long-term projections rising to a million/weekday; on current ridership it’s $34,000/rider, and on future projections it’s $24,000.
- Paris Métro Line 14’s original section, opened by 2007, cost $2.44 billion in 2023 PPP terms; ridership in 2019, before more recent extensions and before corona, was 92 million, so around 320,000 per workday, which is $7,600/rider.
- Grand Paris Express was projected in 2021 to cost (in 2023 PPP dollars) around $65 billion, with a ridership projection of 2 million/day from 2022, and 2.3-2.4 million/day from 2012, for around $32,000/rider, or $28,000 if the older ridership projection is used.
- Milan Metro Line 5 cost $2.2 billion in 2023 PPP terms to date, and was said to carry 180,000 daily passengers in 2019, for $12,000/rider.
- Milan Metro Line 4 cost $2.63 billion, and was expected to carry 235,000 riders per day when complete, which would be $11,000/rider; it will be completed this year, but ridership so far is for only the half of the line that has opened so far ans is also still somewhat suffering from corona.
- The U-Bahn extensions in Berlin that are currently in development hell include U8 to Märkisches Viertel projected at 13,160€/rider (around $21,000 in 2023 PPP terms), a U6 extension to the former Tegel Airport projected at 27,200€/rider (around $43,000), and a U7 extension to the current BER airport projected at 23,000€/rider (around $36,000), among others brought up by the new coalition.
Willingness to build and Berlin’s problem
The above numbers should not be taken to mean that Italy and Germany are more cost-effective about metro construction. To the contrary, they indicate that they are leaving value on the table by not building.
Germany has a GDP per capita of $66,000 in PPP terms. The benefit-cost ratios of the U-Bahn extensions in Berlin that are being discussed but not actually brought forward and built are very high, and the U8 extension to Märkisches Viertel is scratching a ratio of 4. It is irresponsible that there isn’t a massive construction plan not just under discussion but in design and soon physical construction. This must include not just those lines but also others to be added until the benefit-cost ratio of the marginal line falls to slightly more than the minimum that deserves funding.
Italy has the same problem. No matter how pessimistic one’s view of the future of the economy of Italy is, the metro lines it is currently building, at least in Milan, are so cost-effective that there have to be more of them. In the 2010s, Italy was in a budget crunch and ended up using public-private partnerships to keep debt off-books, at very high implied interest rate based on the rate of payment to the concessionaire, about 8%. Today, fundamentally, even a stagnant economy with a GDP per capita of $55,000, which may finally overtake its 2007 peak this year, should be building more if the current extensive margin of Milan Metro construction is not even in the teens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps the benefit-cost ratios for Sweden rely not just on Sweden’s GDP per capita of the 1960s but on that of today, after 60 years of growth; but then even absent any of this growth, 55/3.5 > 12.
Paris showcases a healthier situation: the success of M14 endeared the region to driverless metros with longer interstations than the older metro lines but shorter ones than the RER, and with further growth in the region, the state decided to build the 200 km Grand Paris Express to improve circumferential rail service and add more fast radial connections from the suburbs to the city not along the RER. France’s GDP per capita is around $58,000 in PPP dollars; some elements of GPE may be marginal, but the project writ large has a solid benefit-cost-ratio starting with a 2.
Spain is like France in that when it can build, as it could before the Great Recession and as it can now after having recovered, it does. This is the right way to do it: low costs per km should translate to massive subway expansion. If you’re Madrid, you can build lines that would be completely ridiculous anywhere else in terms of land use, like MetroSur, because it’s cheap.
A Paris or Berlin cannot be so profligate as Madrid. Building a line like MetroSur here, which in the Spanish context looks silly but does pass cost-effectiveness muster, would be an economic albatross. But medium-cost cities can still cover most of the built-up area with subway and commuter rail lines; Paris is doing so but Berlin is not.
The problem for Berlin is not quite austerity, which afflicted Southern Europe last decade, producing negative economic growth. In the last coalition, it was the two most left-wing parties, the Greens and Die Linke, which opposed U-Bahn construction. In their view, trams are preferable; they complain about the high construction costs of subways, but don’t meaningfully engage with why they’re still necessary for fast urban transport beyond the range of the handful of inner neighborhoods where people vote for the Greens.
That said, in the current coalition, there’s no real political left. SPD is in it, but under an atypically conservative leader in Franziska Giffey, and the more left-wing faction in the party, including the youth league Jusos, is sidelined. Both parties in the coalition, CDU and SPD, are committed to building those U-Bahn extensions. But then nothing is happening; Giffey is not competent enough to do it, and CDU is too wrapped up in anti-environmental populism to do something that pisses off some environmentalists but makes others happy.
This way, the low costs per rider projected for Berlin U-Bahn expansion are not a testimony to cost-effectiveness. They’re a testimony to political unwillingness to build, for largely petty reasons. It is wasteful to build a subway line with a very high projected cost per rider relative to the country’s wealth, but it is equally wasteful not to build one with a low projected cost per rider, and the latter is what is happening in Berlin, unfortunately.
Security Theater on Metros
In comments, Sarapen asked me about security on urban rail. It’s common in developing Asia to require people to go through metal detectors to get to the platforms; I’ve seen this in Bangkok, she mentions this in the context of Manila, and it’s also the case on Indian metros and Chinese ones. Seung Y. Lee, a BART digital media worker and indispensable commentator on American and Asian metro history who sadly doesn’t blog enough, has an excellent post about it, talking about the use of security as a tool of social control, for example in Hong Kong.
But Sarapen is asking about the need for security to deter terrorism and violence, which do exist in the Philippines.
For this, I naturally went to the country facing terrorism and violence that I know most intimately. I haven’t visited in more than 11 years, and so I’ve never taken the light rail in either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem (which was open on my last visit but I didn’t visit the city then). So I went ahead and asked on my Discord server, and got this:
The person covered up by the two shorter white rectangles also posted a picture of a platform in Tel Aviv, with a vault for bomb disposal:
Israel Railways does have security theater – one has to open one’s bags in front of a security guard and go through a metal detector, and this being Israel, there is extensive racial profililng. But the light rail, including the underground portions in Tel Aviv, do not. There’s a lot of visible security presence, including cameras, security personnel, and K-9 units, but no metal detectors. This is in a country that, in the 1990s and early 2000s, underwent a wave of suicide bombings on buses, and still didn’t put metal detectors on them, because it’s infeasible to install such technology on surface transit, and too expensive and frankly not too useful on metros (a security line is an attractive bombing target).
This shouldn’t be too surprising, in a way. Western Europe did not install security theater on trains in response to far-left terrorism in the 1970s and 80s. Israel’s way of building and running public transportation is intended as a pan-European medley, using consultants who have done work in Europe, and with media discourse that looks up to Europe’s urban transportation systems (on other matters Israel looks up to the United States, but Israelis understand American public transportation is not good). If nobody in Europe (or at least Western Europe) does something, it’s unlikely Israel will do it, not on civilian public infrastructure.
Small Metros Aren’t Lean, They’re Underbuilt
Reece Martin does very good vlogs on public transportation, and has begun text-blogging more regularly, which I appreciate greatly. But a post of his from six days ago, talking about lean metros, misses a key aspect of short metro systems. He compares old legacy systems like Paris or New York or Berlin’s with newer ones, like Hong Kong’s, and points out that the newer ones are rather short relative to city size, saying that it’s a leaner, lower-cost way of doing things. But in fact, the reason we see such short metros relative to city size is not efficiency, but underbuilding, leading to overcrowding.
What’s a lean metro?
Reece divides leanness into two kinds. The first is the ability of some cities to build driverless metros with very short trains at very high frequencies, to save money on station construction. He gives the examples of Copenhagen and Vancouver. This is particularly common in Italy: Milan Metro Lines 4 and 5 have 50 meter long trains, the Turin Metro has 55 meter long trains, the Brescia Metro has 40 meter long trains. With this setup and with the generally low construction costs of Italy, even Brescia can afford a metro, in a city proper of 200,000 with a built-up urban area of 673,000 (and rising) as of 2011.
The second kind of leanness is just building fewer lines. He talks about Toronto’s system, with two main trunk lines, one branch line with a transfer to a main line, and a total of 70 km of length. He also brings up Hong Kong, which has, counting both proper metro lines and the two inherited commuter lines, around 212 route-km, with very high ridership. This can be supported through transit-oriented development, for which Hong Kong is famous. It can also come from strong bus-rail connections as in Toronto: a blog post from last decade that I can no longer find points out that York Mills has what looks like 14,000 weekday boardings on pre-corona numbers, despite low-density land use immediately surrounding it, because of the strong connecting buses on the Toronto grid, favorably comparing it with American metros like Washington’s.
Small station metros
I don’t want to criticize the Italian trend too much, but I do want to separate it from the other systems Reece calls lean. The issue with the style of construction used in Brescia is that it’s really good, if your city is the size of Brescia. Small-station, partly cut-and-cover driverless metros should be in the toolkit of metro areas of about a million people, in order to save money. Other tools should be heavily relying on legacy commuter lines (as in Zurich) and using trams if they’re available (as in Bratislava or Brno), and likely combining all three solutions when feasible (in fact Zurich has a large tramway network in addition to the S-Bahn).
In a larger city, such light metro lines are only useful in a very restricted set of circumstances. Singapore has short trains on the Circle Line – but the Circle Line has not been cheap to build, and its last section has been extraordinarily expensive. On a radial line, it’s a nonstarter. A large city needs the very high throughput of a driverless metro but also larger trains; those can be medium-length trains, like the 90 meter trains of Paris Métro Line 1, or longer, like the 138 meter long trains of the now-driverless legacy lines in Singapore, or the 200 meter long platforms of the Shinbundang Line in Seoul. If the line is too short, the city may find it needs to build another just for relief, as the area that was once thought peripheral develops.
Short metros
If a metro system is short, even if its trains are long, it’s not generally a sign of efficient construction in the city. It’s a sign of underbuilding and overcrowding.
Hong Kong has very high crowding levels, even with a system length that, counted properly, is not that unreasonable: the MTR’s total route-length is almost the same as that of the Paris Métro, which has 227 km, and its ridership is, on pre-corona numbers, slightly higher, 1.7 billion a year compared with 1.5 billion. Now, to be clear, Paris has very high ridership for the system’s size. I suspect the reason I’ve never seen overcrowding on the Métro is that the nature of Parisian job concentration is such that the lines that get overcrowded are ones connecting the suburbs with the city, that is, the RER and M13, rather than predominantly intra-city lines like M1. But the situation in Hong Kong is overall less one of leanness and more one of not being to expand as fast as it would like due to extreme construction costs, which are a strong contender for the world’s second worst, after New York’s. (Toronto is an even stronger contender.)
Then there are the developing-world metros that are just far too short for their city size. Hong Kong is a city of 7 million with a little more than 200 km of metro and commuter rail. Cairo is a metro area of 22 million with 100 km of metro. Cairene construction costs are high, but when, depending on how much one trusts dead links from 10 years ago, the city has the world’s highest rail ridership per km, it needs a lot more; that Cairo has 100 km of metro rather than 800 like Shanghai, a similar-size city in a country that, during its peak expansion, was about as rich as Egypt, is not about leanness but about the Egyptian government’s spending priorities.
For a middle-income country that wants to get out of the middle-income trap that Egypt is stuck in (or Brazil, home to the almost as underbuilt São Paulo Metro), China is a decent benchmark. So is Paris – France is rich but also, precisely because it’s rich, rather motorized by any developing country standards, leading to a modal split of about 43% public transit, 43% cars for work trips in Ile-de-France. Using these benchmarks, your city should have on the order of 30 km of metro and new commuter rail per million residents. If you have 4.5 like Cairo, it’s not efficiency, it’s total disinterest in the living standards of the urban population.
The MTA Sticks to Its Oversize Stations
In our construction costs report, we highlighted the vast size of the station digs for Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 as one of the primary reasons for the project’s extreme costs. The project’s three new stations cost about three times as much as they should have, even keeping all other issues equal: 96th Street’s dig is about three times as long as necessary based on the trains’ length, and 72nd and 86th Street’s are about twice as long but the stations were mined rather than built cut-and-cover, raising their costs to match that of 96th each. In most comparable cases we’ve found, including Paris, Istanbul, Rome, Stockholm, and (to some extent) Berlin, station digs are barely longer than the minimum necessary for the train platform.
MTA Construction and Development has chosen to keep building oversize stations for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, a project that despite being for the most part easier than the already-open Phase 1, is projected to cost slightly more per kilometer. Nolan Hicks at the New York Post just published a profile diagram:
The enormous size of 125th Street Station is not going to be a grand civic space. As the diagram indicates, the length of the dig past the platforms will not be accessible to passengers. Instead, it will be used for staff and mechanical rooms. Each department wants its own dedicated space, and at no point has MTA leadership told them no.
Worse, this is the station that has to be mined, since it goes under the Lexington Avenue Line. A high-cost construction technique here is unavoidable, which means that the value of avoiding extra costs is higher than at a shallow cut-and-cover dig like those of 106th and 116th Streets. Hence, the $1 billion hard cost of a single station. This is an understandable cost for a commuter rail station mined under a city center, with four tracks and long trains; on a subway, even one with trains the length of those of the New York City Subway, it is not excusable.
When we researched the case report on Phase 1, one of the things we were told is that the reason for the large size of the stations is that within the MTA, New York City Transit is the prestige agency and gets to call the shots; Capital Construction, now Construction and Development, is smaller and lacks the power to tell NYCT no, and from NYCT’s perspective, giving each department its own break rooms is free money from outside. One of the potential solutions we considered was changing the organizational chart of the agency so that C&D would be grouped with general public works and infrastructure agencies and not with NYCT.
But now the head of the MTA is Janno Lieber, who came from C&D. He knows about our report. So does C&D head Jamie Torres-Springer. When one of Torres-Springer’s staffers said a year ago that of course Second Avenue Subway needs more circulation space than Citybanan in Stockholm, since it has higher ridership (in fact, in 2019 the ridership at each of the two Citybana stations, e.g. pp. 39 and 41, was higher than at each of the three Second Avenue Subway stations), the Stockholm reference wasn’t random. They no longer make that false claim. But they stick to the conclusion that is based on this and similar false claims – namely, that it’s normal to build underground urban rail stations with digs that are twice as long as the platform.
When I call for removing Lieber and Torres-Springer from their positions, publicly, and without a soft landing, this is what I mean. They waste money, and so far, they’ve been rewarded: Phase 2 has received a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) from the United States Department of Transportation, giving federal imprimatur to the transparently overly expensive design. When they retire, their successors will get to see that incompetence and multi-billion dollar waste is rewarded, and will aim to imitate that. If, in contrast, the governor does the right thing and replaces Lieber and Torres-Springer with people who are not incurious hacks – people who don’t come from the usual milieu of political appointments in the United States but have a track record of success (which, in construction, means not hiring someone from an English-speaking country) – then the message will be the exact opposite: do a good job or else.
Urbanism for non-Tourists
There’s a common line among urbanists and advocates of car-free cities to the effect that all the nice places people go to for tourism are car-light, so why not have that at home? It’s usually phrased as “cities that people love” (for example, in Brent Toderian), but to that effect, mainly North American (or Australian) urbanists talk about how European cities are walkable, often in places where car use is rather high and it’s just the tourist ghetto that is walkable. Conversely, some of the most transit-oriented and dynamic cities in the developed world lack these features, or have them in rather unimportant places.
Normally, “Americans are wrong about Europe” is not that important in the grand scheme of things. The reason American cities with a handful of exceptions don’t have public transit isn’t that urbanist advocacy worries too much about pedestrianizing city center streets and too little about building subways to the rest of the city. Rather, the problem is the effect of tourism- and consumption-theoretic urbanism right here. It, of course, doesn’t come back from the United States – European urbanists don’t really follow American developments, which I’m reminded of every time a German activist on Mastodon or Reddit tries explaining metro construction costs to me. It’s an internal development, just one that is so parallel to how Americans analytically get Europe wrong that it’s worth discussing this in tandem.
The core of public transit
I wrote a blog post many years ago about what I called the in-between neighborhoods, and another after that. The two posts are rather Providence-centric – I lived there when I wrote the first post, in 2012 – but they describe something more general. The workhorses of public transit in healthy systems like New York’s or Berlin’s or Paris’s, or even barely-existing ones like Providence’s, are urban neighborhoods outside city center.
The definitions of both “urban” and “outside city center” are flexible, to be clear. In Providence, I was talking about the neighborhoods on what is now the R bus route, namely South Providence and the areas on North Main Street, plus some similar neighborhoods, including the East Side (the university neighborhood, the only one in Providence’s core that’s not poor) and Olneyville in the west. In larger, denser, more transit-oriented Berlin, those neighborhoods comprise the Wilhelmine Ring and thence stretch out well past the Ringbahn, sometimes even to city limits in those sectors where sufficient transit-oriented development has been built, and a single district like Neukölln may have more people than the entirety of Providence.
In Berlin, this can be seen in modal splits by borough; scroll down to the tables by borough, and go to page 45 of each PDF. The modal split does not at all peak in the center. Among the 12 boroughs, the one with the highest transit modal split for work trips is actually Marzahn-Hellersdorf, in deep East Berlin. The lowest car modal split is in the two centermost boroughs, Mitte and Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain, both with near-majorities for pedestrian and bike commutes – but the range of both of these modes is limited enough that it’s not supportable anywhere else in Berlin.
Nor is shrinking the city to the range of a bike going to help. Germany is full of cities of similar size to the combined total of Mitte and Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain; they have much higher car use, because what makes the center of Berlin work is the large concentration of jobs and other destinations brought about by the size of the city.
The same picture emerges in other transit cities. In Paris, the city itself is significant for the region’s public transit network, but its residents only comprise 30% of Francilien transit commuters, and even that figure should probably subtract out the outer areas of the city, which tourists don’t go to, like the entire northeast or the areas around and past the Boulevards of the Marshals. The city itself has much higher modal split than its suburbs, but that, again, depends on a thick network of jobs and other destinations that exist because of the dominance of the city as a commercial destination within a larger region.
Where tourists go
The in-between neighborhoods that drive the transit-oriented character of major cities are generally residential, or maybe mixed-use. Usually, they do not have tourist destinations. In Berlin, I advocate for tourists to visit Gropiusstadt and see its urbanism, but I get that people only do it if they’re especially interested in urban exploration. Instead, tourism clusters in city center; the museums are almost always in the center to the point that exceptions (like Balboa Park in San Diego) are notable, high-end hotels cluster in city center (the Los Angeles exception is again notable), and so on.
These tourism-oriented city centers often include pedestrianized street stretches. Berlin is rather atypical in Germany in not having such a stretch; in contrast, tourists can lose themselves in Marienplatz in Munich, or in various Altstadt areas of other cities, and forget that these cities have higher car use than Berlin, often much higher. For example, Leipzig’s car modal split for work trips is 47% (source, p. 13), higher than even Berlin’s highest-modal split borough, Spandau, which has 44% (Berlin overall is at 25%).
To be clear, Leipzig is, by most standards, fairly transit-oriented. Its tram network has healthy ridership, and its S-Bahn tunnel is a decent if imperfect compromise between the need to provide metro-like train service through the city and the need to provide long-distance regional rail to Halle and other independent cities in the region. But it should be more like Berlin and not the reverse.
Another feature of tourist cities is the premodern city core, with its charming very narrow streets. Berlin lacks such a core, and Paris only has a handful of such streets, mostly in the Latin Quarter. But Stockholm has an intact Early Modern core in Gamla Stan; it is for all intents and purposes a tourist ghetto, featuring retail catering to tourists and not much else. Stockholm is a very strong transit city with a monocentric core, but the core is not even at Gamla Stan, but to its north, north of T-Centralen, and thus the other tourist feature, the pedestrianized city center street with high-end retail, remains distinct from the premodern core.
Tellingly, these premodern cores exist even in thoroughly auto-oriented cities, ones with much weaker public transit than Leipzig. Italy supplies many examples of cities that were famously large in the Renaissance, and still have intact cores where one can visit the museums. A few years ago, Marco Chitti pointed out how Italian politicians, like foreign tourists, like taking photo-ops at farmers’ markets in small historic cities, while meanwhile, everyone in Italy does their shopping at suburban shopping centers offering far lower prices. To the tourist, Florence looks charming; to the resident, it is, in practice, a far more auto-oriented region than Stockholm or Berlin.
The Regional Connector and Network Coherence
The Regional Connector just opened in Los Angeles. This is a short, expensive tunnel permitting through-running for the city’s main light rail lines, linking the A Line (formerly Blue) with the half of L (formerly Gold) to Pasadena and Azusa and the E (formerly Expo) with the half of the L to East Los Angeles. It’s a welcome development and I only regret that this line cost, in 2022 dollars, $660 million per km. The broader question about the line, though, is that of line pairing and network coherence.
Network coherence is a nebulous concept. I can best define it as “it looks reasonable on a map,” but then the number of railfan crayons that violate coherence principles is so large that it has to be defined more precisely. Usually I talk about it in two concrete ways: a rapid transit network should avoid reverse-branching and tangential lines.
But there are some more concerns, which are less obvious than those two, and also appropriate to violate in some cases. My previous post on New York alludes to the principle of consistency of local and express trains, which is good to aspire to but may conflict with other priorities. In fact, the current pattern in Los Angeles is coherent: trains go north-south on the new A Line or east-west on the new E Line; the question, posed to me by a supporter (thank you!), is whether it should be. I think this is right, but it’s not obvious (in fact it wasn’t to the reader who posed this question).
The issue is that simple coherence – lines from the south should go north and not east, express trains on one side should go through city center and then be express on the other side, and so on – is a good starting point. But there may be other concerns at play. When SEPTA opened the Center City Commuter Connection in the 1980s, it relabeled its commuter rail lines R1 through R8, skipping R4, pairing each branch on the former Pennsylvania Railroad side with one on the Reading side; the resulting map, for which this was an early plan, was not at all coherent and featured self-intersecting lines, but it matched the lines based on expected ridership and railyard locations.
The New York City Subway, likewise, has some pairings that only make sense in light of railyards. The R train shares local tracks in Manhattan with the W train, but in Queens it goes to the Queens Boulevard Line whereas the N shares tracks with the W to Astoria, because the Queens Boulevard Line has a yard at the end and the Astoria Line does not, and the N has a yard at the Brooklyn end of Coney Island whereas the R does not at Bay Ridge; the R is the longest all-local line in the system and railfans periodically propose to switch it with the N in Queens, but the railyard issue makes it problematic in the current situation.
Matching branches by ridership, though, runs into the problem of inconsistent headways on the trunk. A light rail line running every eight minutes can share a tunnel with another light rail line running every eight, but if one of them runs every six minutes, they will run into each other on the shared section. This problem is magnified if both the shared section and the branches are long, which is usually the case in New York; thankfully, in Los Angeles the shared section is short enough that optimizing on it is less important. At most, it’s possibly to match branches by ridership if the train lengths can be made different.
The final concern that may lead to violations of coherence is origin-and-destination ridership patterns; I think this is what my reader had in mind when querying it. Such patterns may be ethnic – there’s a notable bump in ridership between Anacostia and Columbia Heights on the Washington Metro, and it’s likely that such patterns also exist elsewhere in cities that just don’t track O&D pairings, like New York with its internal Chinatown buses. They may even be classed, in the sense that wealthier Americans are likelier to be working in city center, but on the whole, rich and poor people are mostly traveling to the same places. They may be sporadic – a university may be driving ridership enough that there could be connections to either places students want to go or (for commuter universities like UBC) where students live.
O&D pairings like this should, as a rule, never drive infrastructure decisions. These patterns are too fleeting – for example, Columbia Heights’ gentrification is so rapid that the links with Anacostia are unlikely to last for more than a generation. However, it’s not always bad to look at them when making decisions on service for a given infrastructure network.
The issue, though, is that there’s no real compulsion to connect Long Beach with East Los Angeles or Santa Monica with Pasadena and Azusa. The commute data doesn’t suggest special links (which, to be fair, it also doesn’t in Washington). I am not aware of any other big pattern that would create such ridership. So it’s something that I think Metro should have looked at (and probably did), but ultimately made the right decision on.
Assume Normal Costs: An Update
The maps below detail what New York could build if its construction costs were normal, rather than the highest in the world for reasons that the city and state could choose to change. I’ve been working on this for a while – we considered including these maps in our final report before removing them from scope to save time.
Higher-resolution images can be found here and here; they’re 53 MB each.
Didn’t you do this before?
Yes. I wrote a post to a similar effect four years ago. The maps here are updated to include slightly different lines – I think the new one reflects city transportation needs better – and to add light rail and not just subway and commuter rail tunnels. But more importantly, the new maps have much higher costs, reflecting a few years’ worth of inflation (this is 2022 dollars) and some large real cost increases in Scandinavia.
What’s included in the maps?
The maps include the following items:
- 278 km of new streetcars, which are envisioned to be in dedicated lanes; on the Brooklyn and Queensborough Bridges, they’d share the bridges’ grade separation from traffic into Manhattan, which in the case of the Brooklyn Bridge should be an elevated version of the branched subway-surface lines of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and most German cities. Those should cost $8 billion in total, based on Eno’s European numbers plus some recent urban German projects.
- 240 km of new subway lines, divided as 147.6 km in the city (97.1 km underground) and 92.4 km across the Hudson and in New Jersey (45.2 km underground). Of those 240 km, 147.5 km comprise four new trunk lines, including the already-planned IBX, and the rest are extensions of existing lines. Those should cost $25.2 billion for the city lines and $15.4 billion for the New Jersey lines.
- Rearrangement of existing lines to reduce branching (“deinterlining“) and improve capacity and schedule robustness; the PATH changes are especially radical, turning the system into extensions of the 6 and 7 trains plus a Hoboken-Herald Square shuttle.
- 48.2 km of commuter rail tunnels, creating seven independent trunk lines across the region, all running across between suburbs through the Manhattan core. In addition to some surface improvements between New York and Newark, those should cost $17.7 billion, but some additional costs, totaling low single-digit billions, need to be incurred for further improvements to junctions, station platforms, and electrification.
The different mode of transportation are intended to work together. They’re split across two maps to avoid cluttering the core too much, but the transfers should be free and the fares should be the same within each zone (thus, all trains within the city must charge MetroCard/OMNY fare, including commuter rail and the JFK AirTrain). The best way to connect between two stations may involve changing modes – this is why there are three light rail lines terminating at or near JFK not connecting to one another except via the AirTrain.
What else is included?
There must be concurrent improvements in the quality of service and stations that are not visible on a map:
- Wheelchair accessibility at every station is a must, and must be built immediately; a judge with courage, an interest in improving the region, and an eye for enforcing civil rights and accessibility laws should impose a deadline in the early to mid 2030s for full compliance. A reasonable budget, based on Berlin, Madrid, and Milan, is about $10-15 million per remaining station, a total of around $4 billion.
- Platform edge doors at every station are a good investment as well. They facilitate air conditioning underground; they create more space on the platform because they make it easier to stand closer to the platform edge when the station is crowded; they eliminate deaths and injuries from accidental falls, suicides, and criminal pushes. The only data point I have is from Paris, where pro-rated to New York’s length it should be $10 million per station and $5 billion citywide.
- Signaling must be upgraded to the most modern standards; the L and 7 trains are mostly there already, with communications-based train control (CBTC). Based on automation costs in Nuremberg and Paris, this should be about $6 billion systemwide. The greater precision of computers has sped up Paris Métro lines by almost 20% and increased capacity. Together with the deinterlining program, a single subway track pair, currently capped at 24 trains an hour in most cases, could run about 40 trains per hour.
- Improvements in operations and maintenance efficiency don’t cost money, just political capital, but permit service to be more reliable while cutting New York’s operating expense, which are 1.5-2.5 time a high as the norm for large first-world subway systems.
The frequency on the subway and streetcar lines depicted on the map must conform to the Six-Minute Service campaign demand of Riders Alliance and allies. This means that streetcars and subway branches run very six minute all day, every day, and subway trunk lines like the 6, 7, and L get twice as much frequency.
What alternatives are there?
Some decisions on the map are set in stone: an extension of Second Avenue Subway into Harlem and thence west along 125th Street must be a top priority, done better than the present-day project with it extravagant costs. However, others have alternatives, not depicted.
One notable place where this could easily be done another way is the assignment of local and express trains feeding Eighth and Sixth Avenues. As depicted, in Queens, F trains run local to Sixth Avenue and E trains run express to Eighth; then, to keep the local and express patterns consistent, Washington Heights trains run local and Grand Concourse trains run express. But this could be flipped entirely, with the advantage of eliminating the awkward Jamaica-to-Manhattan-to-Jamaica service and replacing it with straighter lines. Or, service patterns could change, so that the E runs express in Queen and local in Manhattan as it does today.
Another is the commuter rail tunnel system in Lower Manhattan. There are many options for how to connect New Jersey, Lower Manhattan, and Brooklyn; I believe what I drew, via the Erie Railroad’s historic alignment to Pavonia/Newport, is the best option, but there are alternatives and all must be studied seriously. The location of the Lower Manhattan transfer station likewise requires a delicate engineering study, and the answer may be that additional stops are prudent, for example two stops at City Hall and South Ferry rather than the single depicted station at Fulton Street.
What are those costs?
I encourage people to read our costs report to look at what goes into the numbers. But, in brief, we’ve identified a recipe to cut New York subway construction costs by a factor of 9-10. On current numbers, this means New York can cut its subway construction costs to $200-250 million per kilometer – a bit less in the easiest places like Eastern Queens, somewhat more in Manhattan or across water. Commuter rail tunnel costs are higher, first because they tend to be built only in the most difficult areas – in easier ones, commuter rail uses legacy lines – and second because they involve bigger stations in more constrained areas. Those, too, follow what we’ve found in comparison cases in Southern Europe, the Nordic countries, Turkey, France, and Germany.
In total, the costs so projected on the map, $66.3 billion in total, are only slightly higher than the total cost of Grand Paris Express, which is $60 billion in 2022 dollars. But Paris is also building other Métro, RER, and tramway extensions at the same time; this means that even the program I’m proposing, implemented over 15 years, would still leave New York spending less money than Paris.
Is this possible?
Yes. The governance changes we outline are all doable at the state level; federal officials can nudge things and city politician can assist and support. There’s little confidence that current leadership even wants to build, let alone knows what to do, but it’s all doable, and our report linked in the lede provides the blueprint.
Quick Note: Los Angeles Spends $50,000 Per Bus Shelter
I saw a few months ago that Los Angeles was planning to equip its entire bus network with shelter, and rejoiced that such an underrated amenity finally gets the attention it deserves. Unfortunately, the cost of the program is now $50,000 per bus shelter; to lower the cost, the city is experimenting with a substandard shelter providing no protection from the elements for $10,000. In Victoria, as pointed out by one commenter on Twitter, a full shelter is around $15,000 in 2018 Canadian dollars, comparable to 2023 American ones.
Ordinarily, it would be a dog-bites-man story: of course the costs are at a premium of a factor of three over Canada (let alone a place that builds cheaply), it’s an American transit infrastructure project. But this one is significant because bus shelter is small in scope – it’s not a megaproject, and this means that rules of megaprojects do not apply to it.
For example, installing shelter at thousands of stops, as Los Angeles is doing, allows for repetition of a standard design that vendors can figure out on their own. This means that the usual privatization of decisionmaking should not be a problem. (It’s been pointed out to me that design-build works well for municipal parking garages, since they’re so streamlined at this point.)
Moreover, bus shelter, even repeated so many times, is still small enough scope that a small in-house team could handle it. LACMTA has been talking to us about how to scale up their in-house team, and we couldn’t give them concrete numbers, but I believe what they have for design review is in the teens, which is probably not enough for a subway extension but should be for a bus shelter program measured in the tens of millions of dollars or (with the cost blowouts factored in) very low hundreds of millions. Elsewhere, for example in Boston, we’ve seen agencies build small things affordably – Boston’s premium over Berlin for building infill commuter rail stations is a factor of maybe 1.5 – and fail at building large things such as urban rail expansion, because their design review team is sized for small and not large things.
Finally, there’s a problem with politicization, in which when politicians insert themselves into a piece of infrastructure, hoping to make it their legacy, it will end up raising costs with at best no and at worst negative benefit to users. Small items like this ordinarily do not have this problem, as they fly under the radar of politicians as well as surplus-extracting community groups.
So why is this so expensive?
I don’t know the details of this failure – all I know is a handful of links to the current cost. I suspect, judging by the tone used in press coverage, that it’s politicization. Note that the piece linked in the lead paragraph centers the issue of gender equity; this isn’t stupid (as the other link points out, bus shelter has a disproportionately positive impact on women), but it does suggest someone thought about the political implications of this. The piece also quotes the designers as having developed the new substandard option “with input from female riders,” suggesting some waste on community consultation.
If I’m right on this, then this suggests a great peril for any city that looks at small and large projects, finds that the small ones are more cost-effective, and decides to prioritize them over large ones. In a city that builds subway expansion and also installs bus shelter beneath anyone’s notice, the bus shelter may be achievable at reasonable cost. But as soon as the shelter turns into a splashy program, beloved by incompetent managers who figure it’s within their span of control and by politicians (who are by definition incompetent on managerial issues), it will acquire the same problems of politicization usually associated with megaprojects. In this case, it’s waste coming from community consultation. In other cases, it might be demands for neighborhood signatures, or intransigence by abutting property owners or by utilities figuring there is surplus to extract, or any of the other causes of cost overruns.
And in particular, downgrading your city’s investment plan just because the flashiest items have cost blowouts wouldn’t end the cost blowouts. If you can’t build subways, work on making yourself capable of building subways; avoiding that mess and building other things instead of subways would run into the same problems and soon you’d be paying $50,000 for a single bus shelter.
Local Elected Representation is Bad
I am in awe of Marco Chitti’s depth of knowledge and quality of analysis on matters of public transportation; what he’s written about coordinated planning on his blog, not to mention his Italian construction costs case study, is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in improving public transportation at any scale. So it’s against this background that I feel compelled to point out, regrettably, that he’s wrong when he calls for local representation on public transit planning boards. Specifically, he promotes a model in which a transport association’s decisions flow from a board that represents the mayors of the municipalities in the region. And this is a model that exists (he gives the example of provincial France) and just plain does not work. EU-level observers see this every time we are reminded that the Council of Ministers exists.
To the contrary, any path forward on public transportation requires the steady disempowerment of local electeds, including mayors of small municipalities or neighborhood-level representation in a larger city. The EU-level observation that the Council of Ministers is the epitome of the democratic deficit is true at all lower levels as well, down to a single city.
Local representation does not work in France
Marco puts a parenthetical in his tweet: “or the region president for IDF-mobilités.” This makes the entire difference. In Ile-de-France, the transport association is governed at the level of the entire region, which has a single elected regional government with competitive partisan elections and high-profile campaigns; the current president of the region, Valérie Pécresse, was the national presidential candidate of Les Républicains last election. The dominant players within Ile-de-France Mobilités, RATP and SNCF, are both owned by the French state, and Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne was the politically-appointed head of RATP in the Hollande era, which was her stepping stone from a string of advisor positions to a ministry under Macron. This is not at all a situation with much localism.
Where there is localism in the Paris region, it promotes pettiness and NIMBYism. The increase in the rate of housing production in the region starting in the mid-2010s was promoted by the state and by the region, over the objections of suburban mayors, who were livid at the idea of more housing in their enclaves, especially social housing. The state never so coerced the city, where housing growth remains anemic, but Anne Hidalgo has likewise built social housing in rich arrondissements over the objections of their local mayors.
In fact, the model in which there is a single metropolitan government that is responsible at once for multiple services, is being implemented in Lyon. The traditional department it’s part of, Rhône, isn’t really coterminous with the metropolitan area, while some suburbs spill over to neighboring departments; for planning purposes, France set up the intergovernmental Urban Community of Lyon in 1969, comprising Lyon and its inner suburbs (equivalent not to Ile-de-France but to the combination of Paris and the Petite Couronne), but then in 2015 it replaced it with the Lyon Metropolis, with direct elections of a single government.
Elsewhere in France, inter-municipal relations remain more intergovernmental, and local mayors are in the loop on many decisions. But provincial France is hardly an example of success in transit governance. The modal splits in regions like Marseille, Nice, Lille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Strasbourg are all in the mid teens. They have little to recommend them as models over similar-size cities in the German-speaking and Nordic worlds.
This is something that’s recognized in France too – hence the formation of the Lyon Metropolis. France has excessive fractionalization of municipalities – it has around 35,000 communes, where Italy and Spain have 8,000 each and Germany has 11,000. It’s had little municipal consolidation since the Revolution; this way, Paris has fewer people than Berlin or Madrid, while possessing a metro area about the size of Berlin’s and Madrid’s combined. Local traditions make it hard to do further consolidation, often for petty reasons (Paris is wealthier than most of its suburbs and in the postwar era the poorer suburbs voted for communists); instead, where it cares that things should work, France sets up direct institutions with enough heft that people can vote for one government and expect that it should have the last say on big political questions.
Local representation does not work in the United States
The United States does not quite use the provincial French system of direct representation of mayors on transit boards. However, it has analogs, with extensive local empowerment. And those analogs do not work.
For example, in and around Springfield, Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA) is governed on the basis of representation of each municipality within the region. These are not the directly-elected mayors of those municipalities but it doesn’t matter – the problems do not stem from how they are elected but from which interests they answer to. The problem starts with the fact that nearly all PVTA ridership is in the urban core – Springfield itself and a small handful of working-class suburbs like Holyoke – but the representation structure gives snob suburbs veto power, which they use to block any consolidation plan focusing service on where people ride.
Worse, the suburbs of PVTA have a combination of two political attitudes that explodes any possibility of good governance. They are snobs and NIMBYs, opposing any attempt to make buses useful for poor urbanites trying to access service jobs in their jurisdictions. But they also have left-wing identity politics and want to be seen as progressive places where there are alternatives to the car. Therefore, they demand that PVTA serve every municipality in the region, but often just peripherally, so that they can say “we have buses”; those buses have practically no ridership, and serve to trigger Massachusetts’ accessibility requirement, in which paratransit must be provided on demand not just within 0.75 miles of a bus or urban rail stop as in the federal ADA but also within the entire town’s jurisdiction.
Marco says that the solution to bad politics is good politics. But the problem with PVTA and similar intergovernmental agencies is not that local representation is based on local appointment or recommendation rather than the direct mandate of the mayor. The mayor wouldn’t be any better than what is currently available, because at the end of the day, when a small enclave in a wider region gets to self-govern, the people it represents will be selected for pettiness (since the great majority of people who socialize outside the municipality are effectively disenfranchised) and snobbery (since the enclaves safeguard their insulation from poorer people). In some places, the worst NIMBYism may even be spearheaded by a county executive, if the county is itself an enclave, which Westchester County, New York is.
Transportation and Localism
In New York City, 92% of workers commute out of their community board. Representation at such level has a democratic deficit that exceeds that of the EU; the ministers who comprise the Council were after all elected in their respective countries, in democratic elections in which the important portfolios are doled out to acceptable parties and politicians. Fractional suburbs like those of France or the parts of the United States that have public transit are little different from city neighborhoods in this way. To continue with the example of PVTA, the two largest suburbs of Springfield by population are Chicopee and Westfield. Chicopee has 24,431 employed residents and 18,228 jobs, but only 4,131 of those live and work in the city, or 17%; Springfield has 17,656 employed residents, 14,863 jobs, and 3,820 people working and living in the city, or 22%. In effect, the mayors of both cities are elected in enclaves in which the most empowered people are not at all representative of the jurisdictions.
This situation is especially bad when it comes to transportation. There, the interests of those 17-22% of the Springfield suburbs who work locally, not to mention the 8% of New Yorkers who work in-community board, diverge the most from the general interest. People who live and work in an outlying local area do not really ride public transportation; people who commute to a city center do. This is not just a feature of transit cities – the transit modal split for people working in Downtown Los Angeles is not awful (I remember reading it was 50% in the 2000s-10s), they’re just swamped by people who work in places that don’t even rise to the category of a secondary center.
Even when the time comes to build a transit network that works for people who don’t work in city centers, it still is intended for the majority, which doesn’t work locally. PVTA and other non-Boston Massachusetts agencies (called RTAs) struggle with span of service – buses stop running anytime between 6 and 8 pm to shopping malls that close at 10. Regional representation could catch those riders, who would have a single point of contact to vote for; local representation cannot, because they are formally disenfranchised where they work and in practice disempowered where they live.
Americans – not Marco, but some of the people who responded to him on Twitter – are paranoid that regional representation in an auto-oriented area would lead to the defunding of transit.
But we can concretely compare what happens when auto-oriented suburbs have local representation (as in most of the US) and what happens when they’re incorporated into a larger whole and can then vote there (as in Ile-de-France, or Berlin, or Toronto). Kai Wegner became mayor of Berlin after an explicitly pro-car campaign; what this means in practice is a halt on some road diet projects, the latter pushed by Green voters who work close to where they live and care about bikes more than about public transit. The far more populist, far more pro-car Rob Ford became mayor of Toronto powered by resentment of David Miller’s Transit City concept, which had the same failings as the agenda of the Berlin Greens; Ford’s election caused far more damage in its politicization of transit, leading to repeated changes in the Eglinton rail plan just so that Ford could prove that he existed, than at the basic level of defunding transit or closing the streetcars (which Ford promised to do and then didn’t).
We can even see the interplay between local and regional in Ile-de-France. The pro-car suburban mayors tried to sue Paris to stop its road diets, alleging that they are discriminatory against them, and one might expect that those suburbs, if given a seat at the table, would favor pro-car policy. But in practice, the same voters who vote for these mayors at the local level also vote for Pécresse at the regional level, and Pécresse hasn’t compelled Paris to remotorize and is a lot YIMBYer than any of those suburban mayors. The issue is less that people in those places are pro-car and more that local representation consistently returns people who drive more than the average and who represent a minority that drives more than the average, and in the absence of such local representation, even someone like Rob Ford can’t do much damage through his transportation policy. (Doug Ford, in contrast, has done considerably more damage in micromanaging the megaprojects to the point that Toronto is careening past the $1 billion/km mark.)
The need for professionalism in democracy
Professional civil service arises in part from the fact that it’s not possible to have meaningful local representation in an urban area. A city the scale of Berlin can have a democratic election, since people generally live and work in the city, and not many commute in from or out to elsewhere. The same is true of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or even New York City, which has less than half the population of its metro area and yet this is enough that the populations of disempowered in- and out-commuters are limited. It’s true of Lyon Metropolis. It’s true of the combination of Paris and the Petite Couronne, which France occasionally considers amalgamating into a single Grand Paris and mostly doesn’t because the elected layer of Ile-de-France is so far sufficient and there is a lot of identity politics involved in the formal separation of the city from the suburbs.
And at this scale, it’s impossible for a single government to control everything. Berlin, New York, and so on have the populations of small countries. Such countries can elect a government, but the span of control of the elected ministers comprises an order of magnitude of 100 people across all ministries combined.
Thus, the need for a professional civil service. This is why the role of politicians in a healthy political environment is to macro- and not micromanage. They can make big yes-or-no decisions, and that’s it – decisions on alignments should be left to professionals, who are hired and promoted based on apolitical criteria. A Wegner or Ford can choose to fund roads more and transit less and halt or even reverse road diets, but the details have to come from experts, because the span of control of the Wegner cabinet is far too small for there to be any real democratic check on the sort of advisors who in the United States are politically appointed.
What’s more, even when they do make decisions, the tendency of politicians to do things just to prove that they exist is, always, bad for governance. In some cases, including what we’ve seen in Boston when we wrote the Green Line Extension report, megaprojects even act as siphons for bad ideas, while contemporary small projects beneath the notice of politicians are done more smoothly and efficiently. The danger is that the practices developed for the megaprojects then later poison the local infrastructure ecosystem, as when some of the decisions made for Grand Paris Express are now leading to overdesign for shorter Métro extensions.
The ideal role for elected leaders is to set overall funding levels and then just let the professionals work. If the professionals are failing, it’s fine to replace them with other professionals, chosen based on past successes in the same field (in the US, this has to mean foreigners), rather than chums who the politicians are comfortable with, like the repulsive political appointees I’ve seen in New York and Boston.
In the same way that most people writing about EU governance understand that Parliament has democratic legitimacy and the Council is the opposite, it’s critical to understand that localism subtracts from civilian democratic control of the state, through its elevation of petty voices. And if subdividing territory into local fiefs doesn’t work, the alternative is to subdivide it thematically and let subject-matter experts handle planning. Marco, and I think other people who are much more uncomfortable with top-down unitary civil services than he is (after all, Italy is governed by such civil service and builds infrastructure very well), errs in portraying this depoliticization as antithetical to democracy; it’s to the contrary the tool with which democracy governs anything bigger than an isolated village.
President Navalny Announces Metro Expansion to Accommodate Migrants From Viipuri and Královec
President Alexei Navalny (RB) has been beset by political instability since taking office three months ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Russian Armed Forces in face of a Ukrainian offensive with two divisions’ worth of Leopard 2s and 10 squadrons’ worth of F-16s. The loss of Královec in particular has generated a movement of nearly a million refugees, most of them headed to Moscow. Simultaneously, an estimated 400,000 Russians who left last year are returning, most of them, too, headed to Moscow or Saint Petersburg.
Navalny promises to react to this crisis through construction of housing and infrastructure, in the capital as well as in secondary cities. He says that the reduction in military spending and removal of sources of corruption will be enough to pay for this program, and says that while the loss of what he calls Vyborg and Kaliningrad is regrettable, at least no reparation payments were imposed. Analysts from the United States suggest that this early focus on material goods and growth is intended to increase popular support for the new regime and suggest continuity with the apolitical aspects of the prewar Russian state.
The focus on migrants from Viipuri and the larger Královec comes as interest groups speaking for those migrants are the most strident revanchists, calling for rearmament and saying that protesters and urban interests stabbed the Russian Armed Forces in the back. Russia Budushchego is rooted in Moscow and Saint Petersburg more than in the provinces, and Navalny is, according to analysts from Kazan and Chelyabinsk, trying to fold such migrants into big city society, hoping that they would integrate into what he views as the new Russia.
The proposed spending levels for the rail construction program bear out those analysts. The program includes 200 km of new rail in and around Moscow and another 90 in Saint Petersburg. All other cities combined are to get about 250 km, including restarting metro construction in Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Chelyabinsk; expanding the existing systems of Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, and Yekaterinburg; and building new systems in Volgograd, Krasnodar, Ufa, Perm, Voronezh, and Rostov-on-Don.
Nonetheless, this program represents a quadrupling of the length of metro in Russia outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg; Navalny himself has personally visited Rostov-on-Don, the third largest destination for Russian refugees, mostly people expelled from Crimea and the Donbas for collaboration, and promised that democratic Russia would take care of all Russians, and repeated the line about quadrupling metro length outside the two main cities.
Navalny also pledged that housing construction would accelerate from a prewar average of 80 million square meters a year to 150 million. Here the new administration is open about focusing construction in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where demand is the strongest and rents are the highest; in Moscow, the government promises that incentives to private builders would create high-quality, high-density housing on top of existing and planned metro stations.
Pedestrian Observations 
