At the Transit Costs Project, we’re starting to build a database not just of infrastructure construction costs but also rolling stock acquisition costs. The database is extremely incomplete and not at all ready for public consumption, so please read the following preliminaries with the understanding that more data may reverse some conclusions. All costs below are in 2023 PPP dollars.
The $100,000/linear meter cost for single-deck rolling stock, which I mentioned in previous blog posts, looks like it holds for European regional trains and Chinese metros. Smaller trains, such as trams, may just be more expensive per linear meter.
The variation in costs is, as expected, much narrower than in the costs of infrastructure. $200,000/meter exists but is unusual and generally indicates something wrong happened, such as the Berlin S-Bahn stock, which suffered from a lawsuit by Alstom over losing the bid to Stadler.
There is a rolling stock premium for rubber-tired metros in Paris, on the order of 40% over steel-wheeled metros.
Berlin and London have expensive metro stock as well, and reading some about their production, I am left to wonder if there’s somewhat of a prima donna premium for cities of such size.
To my surprise, in cases where the costs of a base order and options can be disaggregated, the options aren’t consistently cheaper than the base.
There doesn’t seem to be any secular increase in real rolling stock acquisition stock going back to the early 2000s.
The PPP conversion is dicey within Europe; there’s an integrated European supply chain, and then the question in non-euro countries is which PPP rate to delfate to, which makes a big difference where the PPP conversion differs substantially from the euro’s, in one direction in Switzerland (with its cross-border lines, to add a complication) and in the other in Eastern Europe. In contrast, it’s easy in China, with its domestic supply chain, and in the US, with its pretense of one.
American costs are near the high end, and rising gently, but even the New York City Subway orders of the 1990s and 2000s had somewhat of a premium – I’m getting $148,000/meter for the base R142/R142A (source) and $120,000/meter for the base R160 (source) with higher costs for the options. Nonetheless, at worst the cost premium for the R211 ($160,000 base, $145,000 option) is a factor of 1.6, not the factor of around 10 we see for infrastructure.
Some orders come with maintenance and some don’t, and we try to disaggregate this when we can, but sources are inconsistent on whether they mention maintenance bundles in the contract; in at least two cases, the maintenance contract drives up the cost premium, but in some others (like rubber-tired Parisian trains), the premium is not about maintenance.
Two reports that I’ve collaborated on are out now, one about high-speed rail planning for Marron and one about Northeast Corridor maintenance for ETA. A third piece is out, not by me but by Nolan Hicks, about constant-tension catenary and its impact on speed and reliability. The context for the latter two pieces is that the Northeast Corridor has been in a recurrent state of failure in the last three weeks, featuring wire failures, circuit breaker failures, track fires, and transformer fires. The high-speed rail planning piece is of different origin – Eric interviewed officials involved in California High-Speed Rail and other American projects that may or may not happen and this led to synthesizing five planning recommendations, which aren’t really about the Northeast Corridor but should be kept in mind for any plan there as well.
The broader context is that we’re going to release another report specific to the Northeast Corridor, one that’s much more synthetic in the sense of proposing an integrated infrastructure and service planning program to cut trip times to about 1:53 New York-Washington and 2:00 New York-Boston, informed by all of these insights. Nolan’s piece already includes one key piece of information that’s come out of this work, about the benefits of constant-tension catenary upgrades: 1:53 requires constant-tension catenary, and if it is not installed, the trip time is 2:04 instead, making this the single biggest piece of physical infrastructure installation the Northeast Corridor needs.
The catenary issue
Trying to go to Philadelphia, I was treated to a train stuck at Penn Station without air conditioning, until finally, after maybe 45 minutes of announcements by the conductor that it would be a while and they’d make announcements if the train was about to move, I and the other passengers got out to the station, waiting for anything to change, eventually giving up as the train and several subsequent ones were canceled. My post from three days ago about Germany has to be read with this context – while publishing I was waiting for all three pieces above to appear.
I encourage people to read the ETA report for more detail about the catenary. In brief, overhead wires can be tensioned by connecting them to fixed places at intervals along the tracks, which leads to variable tension as the wires expand in the heat and contract in the cold; alternatively, they can be tensioned with spring wires or counterweights, which automatically provide constant tension. The ETA report explains more, with diagrams, some taken from Garry Keenor’s book on rail electrification, some made by Kara Fischer (the one who made the New Mexico public transit maps and others I’ll credit upon request, not the USDOT deputy chief of staff). The catenary on the Northeast Corridor has constant tension north of New York, and for a short stretch in New Jersey, but not on the vast majority of the New York-Washington half of the line.
Variable-tension catenary is generally unreliable in the heat, and is replaced with constant-tension catenary on main lines even in Europe, where the annual temperature range is narrower than in the United States. But it also sets a blanket speed limit; on the Northeast Corridor, it is 135 mph, or 217 km/h – the precision in metric units is because 217 km/h is the limiting speed of a non-tilting train on a curve of radius 1,746 meters, a common radius in the United States as it is a round number in American units (it’s 1°, the degree being the inverse of curve radius). This blanket speed limit slows trains by 11 minutes between New York and Washington, subject to the following assumptions:
The tracks otherwise permit the maximum possible speed based on curvature, up to 320 km/h; in practice, there are few opportunities to go faster than 300 south of New York. There is an FRA rule with little justification limiting trains to 160 mph, or a little less than 260 km/h, on any shared track; the rule is assumed removed, and if it isn’t, the cost is about one minute.
Trains have the performance of the Velaro Novo, which trainset is being introduced to the United States with Brightline West. Other trainsets may have slightly better or worse performance; the defective Avelia Liberty sets are capable of tilt and therefore the impact of maximum speed is larger.
Intercity trains make one stop per state, counting the District of Columbia as a state.
Intercity and regional trains are timetabled together, on a clockface schedule with few variations. If a train cannot meet these requirements, it stays off the corridor, with a forced transfer at Philadelphia or Washington. All train schedules are uniformly padded by 7%, regardless of the type of catenary. If variable-tension catenary requires more padding, then the impact of constant-tension catenary is increased.
The bulk of the difference between 1:53 and the current trip time of about 2:50 is about timetabling, not infrastructure – when the trains are running smoothly, there is extensive schedule padding, in one case rising to 35 minutes south of New York on a fast Regional. Rolling stock quality provides a boost as well, to both reliability and acceleration rates. Faster speeds on curves even without tilt matter too – American standards on this are too conservative, and on a built-out line like the Northeast Corridor, being able to run with 180 mm of cant and 130 mm of cant deficiency (see explanation here) is valuable. But once the regulatory and organizational issues are fixed, the biggest single piece of infrastructure investment required is constant-tension catenary, simultaneously reducing trip times and improving reliability.
Nolan’s piece goes more into costs for catenary repair, and those are brutal. The Northeast Corridor Project Inventory includes $611 million to just replace the catenary between Newark and New Brunswick, without constant-tension upgrades. This is 36.5 route-km, some four- and some six-track; the $16.7 million/cost electrifies a new line from scratch around six times over in non-English-speaking countries, and while the comparison is mostly to double-track lines, around half the cost of electrification is the substations and transformers, and those aren’t part of the project in New Jersey.
State of Good Repair projects always end up as black holes of money, because if half the money is spent and there’s no visible improvement, it’s easy for Amtrak to demand even more money, without having to show anything for it. An improvement project would be visible in higher speeds, better ride quality, higher reliability, and so on, but this is free money in which the cost is treated as a positive (jobs, the appearance of work, etc.) and not something to be minimized in pursuit of another goal. One conclusion of this is that no money should be given to catenary renewal. Money can be spent on upgrades with visible results, in this case constant-tension catenary. On all else, Amtrak cannot be trusted.
High-speed rail planning
The report we wrote on high-speed rail planning at Marron is longer than the ETA report, but I encourage people to read it as well, especially anyone who wishes to comment here. In brief, we give five broad recommendations, based on a combination of reviewing the literature on high-speed rail, cost overruns, and public infrastructure management, and interviewing American sources in the field.
The federal government needs to nurture local experimentation and support it with in-house federal expertise, dependable funding, and long-term commitment.
The FRA or another federal entity should have consistent technical standards to ensure scale and a clear operating environment for contractors.
The federal government should work with universities to develop the technology further, which in this case means importing standards that work elsewhere – high-speed rail in 2024 is a mature technology, not requiring the inventions of new systems that underlay the Japanese, French, and German networks.
Agencies building high-speed rail should have good project delivery, following the recommendations we gave in the subway construction costs report. Using consultants is unavoidable, but there needs to be in-house expertise, and agencies should avoid being too reliant on consultants or using consultants to manage other consultants.
Agencies and states should engage in project planning before environmental reviews and before making the decision whether to build; the use of environmental reviews as a substitute for planning leads to rushed designs, which lead to mistakes that often prove fatal to the project.
Currently, all American high-speed rail plans should be treated as case studies of what to avoid. However, this does not mean that all of them fail on all five criteria. For one, California High-Speed Rail largely used pan-European technical standards in its planning; Caltrain did not in related planning including the electrification project and the associated resignaling (originally intended to be the bespoke CBOSS). The criterion on technical standards becomes more important as different projects interact – for example, Brightline West is inconsistent about what it’s using. Then there’s Texas Central, which uses turnkey Shinkansen standards, but as it’s turned over to Amtrak is bound to get modifications that conflict with what Japan Railways considers essential to the Shinkansen, such as total lack of any infrastructure mixing with legacy trains.
Notably, none of this is about the Northeast Corridor directly. My own interpretation of the report’s recommendations points out to other problems. For example, the Northeast Corridor’s technical standards are consistent but also bad, coming from an unbroken legacy of American railroader traditions whose succors can barely find Germany on a map, let alone bother to learn from it or any other foreign country. This way, the New Haven Line, which with modern trainsets and associated standards has few curves limiting trains to less than 150 km/h, is on a blanket speed limit of 75 mph, or 121 km/h, in Connecticut, with several further slowdowns for curves. There’s long-term planning for the corridor, and it’s bipartisan, but this long-term planning involves agencies that fight turf wars and mostly want to get the others out of what they perceive as their own turfs. There is lush funding, but it goes to the wrong things – Moynihan Train Hall but no improvements at the track level of Penn Station, extensive track renewal at 1.5 orders of magnitude higher cost than in Germany, in-place bridge replacements on curvy track instead of nearby bypasses.
The current planning does use too many consultants – in fact, Penn Reconstruction’s interagency agreement stipulates that they use consultant-centric project delivery methods, with one possibility, progressive design-build (what most of the world calls design-build; what New York calls design-build is different and better), not even legal in New York state law, but the local power brokers are trying to legalize it and break their own construction cost records. But it’s not quite the same as not bothering to develop in-house talent – there is some, and sometimes it isn’t bad, but poor project management and lack of interagency coordination has caused the budgets for the big-ticket items that Amtrak wants to explode beyond anyone’s ability to manage. The five recommendations, applied to the Northeast, mostly speak to the low quality of the existing agencies, rather than to a hodgepodge of standards as is happening at the interface between California High-Speed Rail and Caltrain or Brightline West.
The ultimate problem on the Northeast Corridor is that it is held together with duct tape, by people who do not know how to use more advanced tools than duct tape. They constantly fight fires, sometimes literally, and never ask why fires always erupt when they’re around; it’s not the heat, because the Northeast isn’t any warmer than Japan or South Korea or Italy, and it’s not underinvestment 30+ years ago, because Germany has that history too. Nolan points out the electric traction backlog on the Northeast Corridor grew from less than $100 million in 2018 to $829 million today; the people in charge are substantially the same ones who deferred this much maintenance over the six-year period that included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I didn’t get into this project in order to study other people’s failures again, as we did with the construction costs report. But everything I’m seeing on the Northeast Corridor, even more than in California or Texas, points to what may be the worst intercity rail planning of any even vaguely modern country.
I’ve been looking at some intercity rail trips in Germany for later this summer, and was reminded of how nonfunctional the system is this season. I was asked specifically about Cologne-Frankfurt trips, and discovered that for later this month, they’re timetabled to take 2.5 hours. These cities are 180 km apart on the high-speed line, where trains normally take a little longer than an hour, but right now the trains don’t seem to be using the line – rather, they’re on the classical line, which follows the Rhine and is not at all fast. This is not the only line or the only summer that this is happening; since I moved to Germany, my summer travel plans have been constrained by these seasonal slowdowns, and between them and the mediocre average speed of most German intercity lines, I’ve forgone trips I would have made at French speeds and reliability. The rationale for these summer closures for maintenance is wholly without merit on intercity rail, and this practice holds back rail travel at the time when demand is highest. Deutsche Bahn should cease this practice and instead do like neighbors with year-round intercity rail travel.
Why?
Rail lines must have regular closures for maintenance. The norm is that this is done overnight, on both urban rail and mainline rail. However, overnight closures are sometimes supplemented by daytime closures, especially for longer-term renewal; daytime closures are especially common on lines that don’t close overnight at all. Readers from New York with its 24/7 service are all too familiar with weekend service changes, which may shut down entire line segments and direct riders to alternative routes. German U-Bahns don’t run 24/7, but do run overnight on weekends, so there are only five nights of maintenance windows and not seven. New York-style weekend closures are not common in Berlin, but occasionally some segments are shut, though in my experience it’s more common on the S-Bahn.
To be clear, there are good and bad reasons to engage in daytime shutdowns. Long maintenance windows allow higher productivity, so agencies prefer them when they can get away with them. The balance of when agencies and rail companies use daytime maintenance windows depends on all of the following factors:
Traffic: daytime shutdowns are used more often during less busy times – for example, RATP uses them in the summer, when everyone is on vacation and so Métro traffic is reduced.
Redundancy: systems on which passengers can bypass closed sections, such as the New York City Subway or the German national rail networks, can reroute passengers onto alternatives, which does not eliminate the cost to passengers of the closure but does reduce it. RATP also uses the redundancy of the Métro with the RER to do summertime shutdowns and tells passengers to transfer.
Single-tracking options: this is specific to weekend closures rather than longer-term ones, but, if the system is set up in a way that permits trains to single-track around obstacles, which is common in twin-bore tunnels, then weekend closures are rather easy. The Copenhagen Metro’s combination of twin-bore tunneling and driverless operations permits single-tracking even overnight, permitting 24/7 service without weekend service changes.
Agency culture: some agencies are just more accepting of disruptions than others. MBTA insiders insist to me that concrete curing requires weekend shutdowns, often of multiple lines at once, even though Boston has regular nighttime shutdowns; evidently, Japanese subways manage to run without this.
The situation of German intercity rail
Germany uses long-term shutdowns, measured in months, to do rail infrastructure renewal. These are usually in the summer, because, in Germany as in Paris, this is vacation season and therefore people are less likely to be going to work. The national network here is highly redundant, and intensive summertime shutdowns slow down passengers but do not make trips literally impossible: the Cologne-Frankfurt work is evidently adding about 1.5 hours to trips, and work previously done on the Frankfurt-Mannheim line slowed passengers by about 40 minutes (while still permitting some timed connections); in contrast, unscheduled breakdowns on the Northeast Corridor due to summer heat lead to trip cancellations.
The stupid thing about this is that while summer vacation travel reduces demand on urban rail, it has the opposite effect on intercity rail. The summer is consistently high season for intercity travel, precisely because it’s when people take vacations. In France, at least on domestic TGVs, fast trains are in plenty. But not here – instead, the trains are the least likely to be running, due to maintenance.
Much of the problem is that, unlike Shinkansen lines and LGVs, most German high-speed lines do not have regular nighttime closure windows. They run mixed traffic – passenger trains during the day, freight trains during the night. This feature allows for more flexibility of freight rail, but raises the construction and maintenance costs. Mixed lines must be built with freight-friendly features including gentler grades and lower superelevation (see explanation for superelevation here), the latter requiring wider curves to allow high speeds on passenger trains; both features require more tunneling, and as a result, German high-speed lines are much tunnel-heavier than French ones, raising costs. Maintenance is more difficult as well due to the lack of regular nighttime shutdowns.
That said, the Cologne-Frankfurt line is not a mixed line. It’s a passenger-only line, with a ruling grade of 4%, higher than any other high-speed line I know of (LGVs use 3.5%). It also has the tightest curves I know of on newly-built high-speed lines relative to speed, running at 300 km/h on 3.35 km radius curves, a lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane of 2.07 m/s^2; only the Shinkansen has faster lateral acceleration, and that’s on older lines running tilting trains. Consequently, it’s actually the least tunnel-heavy of the German high-speed lines. Nonetheless, it evidently does not run every day, every year, the way LGVs and Shinkansen lines do.
This is where I suspect agency culture comes into play. American cities other than New York and to some extent Chicago shut down their subway systems overnight, but still force passengers onto bus diversions on weekends for maintenance, where their foreign counterparts do no such thing; this has to be understood as a combination of managers not really caring about weekend service (leading to lower base frequency as well) and comparing themselves to New York even without 24/7 service. In Germany, the culture is that high-speed lines should be built to mixed standards, even if they are useless for freight, for political reasons, and renewal should consequently be done in long-term shutdowns with accelerated work, and this culture is evidently also affecting a line that is built to passenger-only standards. This may also be compounding with the European culture of summer vacations, leading to reduced urban rail service during summers – I am not sure, having seen explicit service reductions in Paris and Stockholm but not here.
Conclusion
Long-term closures have tradeoffs. In some cases they are legitimate, especially when the time cost to passengers is greatly reduced and when traffic is lower. However, neither of these two conditions applies in the case of intercity rail traffic in Germany. The closures are happening during the busiest time of intercity travel, and delaying passengers by an hour or even more. Worse, this practice is used not just on mixed lines like Hanover-Würzburg but also on passenger-dedicated Cologne-Frankfurt, which has regular nighttime work windows. When the reason for the closures is cultural, it ceases to be legitimate; it instead points out to an agency that refuses to think outside of its box, and will not assimilate better practices from elsewhere.
The New York City Subway is showing solidarity with Israel: like public transportation in Israel, it does not usefully run on weekends. Today, while going from my hotel to Marron, I waited 16 minutes for the F train, and when I got to the platform, there was already a small crowd there; the headway must have been 20 minutes. Now writing this on the way north to Queens, I’m seeing canceled trains and going through reroutes hoping that it’s possible to get from Marron to the Queens Night Market in under an hour; revising hours later, I now know it would have been but the 7 train is skipping the nearest stop to the Night Market, 111th Street.
This is on my mind as I see that Governor Kathy Hochul, after abruptly canceling congestion pricing in legally murky circumstances, wants to also ban wearing masks on the subway. I write this on a car where I’m the only person wearing a mask as far I can see, but usually I do see a handful of others who wear one like me or Cid. Hochul told the New York Post that Jewish groups asked her to do so citing security concerns, since some anti-Semitic rioters cover their faces. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have said no such thing, and I think it’s useful to bring this up, partly because it does affect the subway, and partly because it speaks to how bad Hochul’s political knowledge is that she would even say this.
Now, I don’t think the mask ban is going very far. For a few days, instead of getting constant constituent calls all the time demanding that congestion pricing be restored, legislators were getting such calls only half the time, and got calls demanding they oppose the mask ban the other half. Congestion pricing is likely not within Hochul’s personal authority to cancel, but evidently the MTA board did not overrule her and did not sign that the state consented to congestion pricing; but a mask ban is definitely not within her authority, certainly not when it would be new policy rather than status quo policy (if not status quo law, since congestion pricing did get signed into law).
That said, the invocation of Jewish or pro-Israel concerns was troubling, for a number of reasons, chief of which is that the groups so named did not in fact demand a subway mask ban. The Anti-Defamation League asked for a mask ban at protests, where the current left-wing American protest culture involves wearing masks but very rarely medical ones. Hochul cited unnamed Jewish advisors, when at no point has any significant element in the American Jewish community called for this. There are a number of possibilities, all of which are derogatory to her judgment, knowledge, or other political skills.
The first possibility is that she’s just lying. Nobody asked for this, not on the subway, and she’s trying to change the topic from her total failure on congestion pricing; a mask ban at protests alone, as proposed by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (at least before she just got corona), would not change the conversation on issues of public transportation.
The second is that she is using the ADL for cover because the ADL has little patience for anything it perceives as too left-wing, and Hochul wants to position herself as a moderate and her pro-congestion pricing opponents as too liberal. If that was the intent, then it’s dumb – subway advocacy is not at all radical, and the people spearheading both the lawsuit against Hochul and the rallies in favor of congestion pricing are neither anti-Israel nor baitable on this subject.
And the third is that she internalized a kind of conspiratorial anti-Semitism; she doesn’t weaponize it against Jews like properly anti-Semitic politicians, but a politician from Buffalo, thrust into a stage with different demographics from what she’s used to, might still believe, in the back of her mind, that Jews are conspiring and say things they do not mean. It’s complete hogwash – pro-Israel groups are open about who they are and what they want, and have little trouble calling for changes that they think are necessary for the protection of the great majority of American Jews who are at least somewhat pro-Israel. They have no need to whisper in a governor’s ear and every reason to call for such a ban in the open if they believe it is good; that they haven’t should end any suspicion that they want it.
In any of the above cases, the inevitable conclusion is that Hochul knows neither how to govern nor how to do politics effectively. She can’t distract the public from her own inability to run the state, certainly not by piling one failure upon another.
After my last post detailing how high American subway construction costs cannot be attributed to high incomes, people in comments were talking about inequality instead. Matt was talking about lack of union power, calling high US and UK costs “social democracy by stealth,” and Michael James was talking about political elite elements of inequality including domination by Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates with their old boy networks. Just as the story that high US costs are about wealth does not stand up to closer scrutiny, the converse story, relating high US and UK costs to a negative exceptionalism about their inequality and class systems, is also false.
Inequality and costs
The Luxembourg Income Study has comparative data for inequality in most of the world, looking at inequality after taxes and transfers. The OECD has its own dataset, which mostly agrees with the LIS, except notably in the UK: on LIS data, the UK nowadays has similar inequality to Germany and France, after a long period of decline from post-Thatcher levels under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, whereas on OECD data, the UK has higher inequality than nearly anywhere else in Europe, and is slightly more unequal than halfway between Germany and the US.
But regardless, among the countries and macro-regions that build a lot of subways, the highest inequality is in India and Latin America. India’s Gini index on LIS numbers is 0.5; Indian costs are in theory below-average, but only by virtue of high use of els, and correcting for that, its costs are high by global standards and low by Anglosphere ones. Chile, remarkable for its low costs (as explained by Eno), has a Gini index of 0.46. Much more expensive Brazil is rather similar. Next to Latin America there is China, which the LIS gives a Gini of 0.41, and which has rather average costs. Any attempt to do correlations between a country’s subway construction costs and its Gini will run into those outliers; I expect the correlation is still going to be positive because of high American inequality (0.39) and high American costs, but dropping the US it might not even be positive, let alone statistically significant.
Canada and Australia
The US unambiguously has high inequality and high costs. The UK has ambiguous inequality, and other features of high inequality, such as low income mobility (see for example an OECD review). However, Canada and Australia both have lower inequality and high income mobility; a more recent paper, by Corak, Lindquist, and Mazumder, finds that Canada has more mobility than Sweden and not just more than the US.
The sort of elite that the UK and US have does not exist in Canada. The United States is a country of “where did you go to college?”; the UK is the same, except it’s called university and not college. Most of Continental Europe is not like this at all – what one studied matters much more (engineering is good, humanities are not) than where one studied. Canada is rather like Continental Europe in this – there just isn’t an equivalent of the Ivies or Oxbridge there, just a number of huge, very good research universities like Toronto, McGill, and UBC, none of which is anything like an elite American university. The current prime minister is literally the son of a previous prime minister, but his predecessor, Stephen Harper, worked his way up from the mail room of an oil company; the previous PM, Paul Martin, is the son of politicians; the PM before, Jean Chrétien, was born indigent, more reminiscent of classical Victorian literature more than modern first-world poverty. This is not the consistent middle-class or princeling upbringing of leaders in the US or UK.
And yet, Canada has horrifically high construction costs. This, again, is in a country without any of the elite hangups of the US or UK. It doesn’t have Nordic or even Franco-German inequality, but it’s very close to France and Germany and not at all close to the United States. It doesn’t have nearly so much core-periphery dynamics (every single province has received net equalization payments at least once in the history of the program). Its provinces have local core-periphery dynamics, but nothing by the standards of any region or small country that builds subways at reasonable costs. It doesn’t need to do stealth social democracy.
Italy and East Asia
While Canada (and Australia) has American costs without American inequality, in Italy we see low costs while inequality is, by European standards, high. On LIS numbers, Italy is the worst in Western Europe on this. It also has low income mobility, and very sharp core-periphery dynamics, with incomes in Lombardy clocking in at about twice the level of Campania and Sicily. If anywhere needs to do stealth social democracy, it’s Italy – the core-periphery dynamic does lead to social disaffection on both sides of the North-South divide.
And yet none of that happens. Construction costs in Central and Northern Italy are rather low. They’re higher in Naples, for geological reasons more than any stealth social democracy.
What’s more, Italian costs fell between the 1980s and 2000s, an era of much cleanup of the endemic corruption of the First Italian Republic. This did not involve any resolution of longstanding social tensions – the North-South divide remained as large as ever, economic inequality rose (slightly), the one-party rule of Democrazia Cristiana was replaced with left-right polarization and the growth of the both extremist and regionalist-to-secessionist Lega Nord as one component of the right coalition. Economic growth ground to a halt – Italy took until about last year to recover to 2007’s GDP per capita, which itself was not too far above 1990s levels.
And again, Italian costs fell.
Democratic East Asia has different tensions – very deep political polarization in Taiwan and South Korea, political corruption, distaste for a universal welfare state of exactly the kind that encourages stealth place-based replacements, brutal test meritocracies in which the leadership comes from the same narrow social milieus as the US and UK. Taiwanese costs are high, though not Anglosphere-high; Japanese ones are lower; Korean ones are quite low. None of this seems to matter.
The timing of Anglosphere cost growth
To be clear, there are elements of the Reaganite and Thatcherite package that I do think are responsible for high costs – namely, the delegitimization of the civil service. But they’re not usually core to what people perceive as Thatcherism, and much of the dismantling of state capacity happened under people trying to come up with a synthesis of postwar big government and the Reaganite and Thatcherite antithesis thereto, leading to public-private partnerships and outsourcing of government functions.
None of that has anything to do with inequality or stealth social democracy or elite theory, though. The same cost explosion happened in Canada, where on LIS numbers, inequality has been largely the same since the 1970s; Brian Mulroney, unlike Thatcher or Reagan, did not preside over a rise in inequality. It did not happen in Germany, where inequality did rise under Gerhard Schröder and early Angela Merkel; Schröder’s ideology was similar in broad outline to that of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, except that under Schröder economic growth was weak and inequality rose, the opposite of Clinton and Blair, and yet Anglo-style privatization of state planning to consultancies did not happen.
Rather, the culprit for high costs must be a more specific set of project delivery mechanisms that have been popularized in 1990s Britain – the same globalized system I mentioned in the previous post, workshopped by British consultants in Hong Kong and Singapore, and now in the Gulf states. British neoliberalism had Singapore and Hong Kong to absorb consultants, whereas German neoliberalism had Russia, which led to different dynamics, such as gas dependence and geopolitical weakness, rather than Russia inviting Germans to teach it how to redo the way RZhD contracts infrastructure and operations.
And in the US, costs rose from an already high base. This is not the same situation as in the UK, where in the 1960s and 70s costs were the same as in Continental Europe. Rather, American costs were already high, New York costs having exploded in the 1920s. Things have gotten worse in the last 40 years, but the mechanisms aren’t always the same, and the atrophying of the civil service is not a matter of stealth social democracy, not when postwar New York was incapable of building.
The Baumol effect is a mechanism for how the real costs of goods and services can rise over time: wages rise due to economy-wide productivity growth, including in sectors with no productivity growth, and this raises their overall real costs of production. The original example for Baumol was classical concerts – they use the same number of musicians as in the 19th century, but wages have increased from 19th-century levels. More generally, it’s also used to explain higher real costs of services as service productivity growth lags manufacturing productivity growth.
Unfortunately, I’ve also seen people use Baumol as a way of explaining rising infrastructure construction costs, for which it is not at all a good explanation. In fact, even though growth in average infrastructure costs over time is documented, there is very little cross-national correlation between GDP per capita and per-km subway construction costs. Notably, the Anglosphere’s very high construction costs affect not just very rich countries like the US and Singapore but also ones that are poorer than the Western European average, like New Zealand, Ireland (which has high GDP per capita due to corporate profits but unimpressive local wages), or increasingly the United Kingdom. Conversely, Nordic and Swiss wealth has not at all led to high construction costs, and until recently the Nordic countries and Switzerland had some of the world’s lowest tunneling costs.
Metro construction costs and GDP per capita
In an earlier version of the construction cost database, there was some positive correlation between GDP per capita and construction cost per km (about 0.23), but nearly all of it came from the fact that poorer countries tend to build more els and fewer subways; correcting for that, the correlation fell to about 0.04, and turned negative if New York and Singapore were dropped. We made a scattergram at the national level:
While looking at the scattergram, bear in mind that the poorest country as of 2020 on our list, Pakistan (the small gray circle touching the much larger gray circle of India), built an all-elevated line, and in general, substantially-elevated or even all-elevated lines are common in developing Asia, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and India. The only all-underground Indian line in our database, Mumbai Metro Line 3, cost $535 million/km in 2023 PPP dollars; Mumbai Line 11 and Chennai’s first-phase program are the only other two items that are majority-underground, both a bit more than $300 million/km.
At this point, even if we restrict our attention to Europe, the correlation between GDP per capita and construction costs per km isn’t clear. For example, Railway Gazette has just reported on the groundbreaking of the first metro line of Cluj-Napoca, to cost 13.7 billion lei/21 km, which is $8 billion in PPP terms, or $380 million/km. But then rounding up the bottom of the EU’s GDP per capita table is Bulgaria, with fairly low costs.
This is not supposed to happen if the Baumol effect is what’s going on. Grocery prices in developing countries are lower than at first-world discounters like Walmart or Aldi, even in PPP terms. Even at tourist traps, the prices are usually lower than where the tourists came from, not because retail and food service are atypically efficient in developing countries, but because these are labor-intensive industries and labor wages are lower in Thailand or China, let alone in India or Pakistan, than in the US or Germany.
The issue of the Anglosphere
The Anglosphere has atypically high construction costs. A dummy variable that takes the value 1 in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong, and (when it starts building) Ireland, and 0 elsewhere, has a correlation of 0.41 with per-km construction costs. In contrast, the tunnel percentage only has 0.15 correlation, due to the aforementioned effect of high-cost developing countries building els. I’ve heard the high Anglosphere costs blamed on a kind of areal Baumol effect: high pay in professional services drags the costs up, on the theory that the United Kingdom may be poorer than Germany and no richer than France, but at least it has productive London finance that drags engineering wages up, so Britain can’t just Germanize or Francize, right?
Well, no. British engineering wages are not at all high by Continental Western European standards. London finance pays a lot, but also has been stagnating for a while, and a number of professional service firms and regional HQs have left the country in response to Brexit to locate in the rump-EU, for which Amsterdam is a popular destination. British costs remain high, and if anything, they’re exploding again. The Bakerloo line extension is now projected to cost £5-8 billion in 2023 prices for what looks like 8 km, which is around $1.2 billion/km in PPP terms, somewhat more than the much more complex Crossrail and about twice as expensive as the comparably complex Northern line extension to Battersea.
Then-Singaporean minister of transport Khaw Boon Wan excused the meteoric growth in Singapore’s MRT construction costs on the grounds that the Singaporean economy had grown rapidly as well. But we’re seeing the same cost explosion in the slower-growing United Kingdom, and conversely we’re not seeing high costs in fast-growing South Korea. New Zealand, which has had okay growth but from low levels for a Western country and remains poorer than Italy, has these extreme costs as well. It’s not that the Anglosphere is rich; it’s that it’s the Anglosphere and builds inefficiently.
So why have costs grown?
While there is no correlation between subway tunneling costs and GDP per capita, there is an evident secular growth in costs over time. It’s not uniform everywhere – German costs are barely up compared with the 1970s and Italian costs are slightly down – but it’s huge in the Anglosphere and also evident elsewhere (for examples, in France and in the Nordic countries). So what’s going on?
Well, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs. All three show evidence of having gotten worse, the first in the Northeastern United States and the other two throughout the Anglosphere and sometimes also elsewhere.
Ad labor, staffing levels in New York are just higher than elsewhere. More workers are required to service a tunnel-boring machine in New York than in Istanbul, let alone richer European cities. This is, in theory, an eexample of the Baumol effect: higher wages raise the real cost in an industry without productivity growth. But in fact, there has been plenty of productivity growth in this industry, the Northeast just refuses to make use of it. Stockholm has been able to keep up and keep its labor share of the hard costs to the same 20-something% as Turkey and Italy; New York and other Northeastern US cities are in the 40-60% range instead. Swedish construction productivity has grown at slower rates than the overall Swedish economy, but American construction productivity has fallen.
Ad station and system design, we have pointed out that stations for Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 dug a cavern twice as long as necessary for the train, for the benefit of extensive back-of-the-house spaces, where in non-UK Europe and in China, the digs are typically a single-digit percent longer than the train. This is a general North American problem, also evident in Los Angeles and Vancouver, and I believe also in London. It’s also a new problem: in the 1980s, the overage in the United States was small, comparable to contemporary European levels. Then there’s the issue of poor standardization of materials, systems, and designs; we are uncertain whether this is a growing or longstanding problem, but it is smaller in magnitude than that of excessive station size, and in general, standardization is more important in a richer economy than a poorer one since the richer economy will have more reliance on big businesses with division of labor, which is also one of the speculated causes of the falling construction productivity (it’s a less standardized sector).
Finally, ad procurement, the invention of the globalized system in which state planning is outsourced to private consultancies, and with time even the supervision of the consultants is outsourced to consultants, is an Anglosphere special, dating from the 1990s onward. This system comprises design-build procurement (confusingly called progressive design-build in New York), very large contracts sometimes growing to $1 billion apiece, lump-sum rather than itemized contracts, and privatization of risk. It’s turned entire countries, like the United Kingdom, incapable of building more than about one line per generation. The Nordic countries have been affected as well, leading to sharp cost growth from very low levels to rather average ones. Canada went from fairly normal costs in the early 2000s to building the most expensive subway outside New York with the new Ontario Line cost overruns, and this can be traced to Toronto officials visiting Madrid, a city that sticks to traditional design-bid-build procurement, and coming back convinced that to imitate Madrid’s low costs Toronto should adopt design-build.
None of this is the Baumol effect or some general cost disease. When agency officials lose interest in building things and instead want to outsource their own jobs to consultants, it’s not Baumol; it’s experimenting with a new way of project delivery and then refusing to admit that it’s a failure. The same is true when nobody bothers to say no as each operating department demands more back-of-the-house space until half the station dig is about providing high-cost underground break rooms and storage rather than about providing space for trains and passenger circulation.
It’s a comforting story for Americans, Brits, and Singaporeans to tell themselves that their infrastructure costs are so high as a byproduct of their wealth. It happens to be entirely false. It’s not even interestingly wrong; it’s just plain wrong, ignorant of the explosion in station size, of the failures of the globalized system of project delivery, and (in New York) of labor productivity innovations elsewhere. The Anglosphere is not expensive because it’s ahead in anything, but rather because it’s behind. And as we see in the United Kingdom, it doesn’t even require American or Singaporean wealth to be totally incurious of Continental European success.
Picking consistent standards in order to make use of economies of scale is an important part of good planning. In our construction costs report, we attribute a high cost premium on systems and finishes in New York to lack of standardization of station designs and parts, to the point that the three stations of Second Avenue Subway used two different escalator vendors. This point has appealed to a number of area activists, who reach to not just what we report cross-nationally but also American history. John Pegram, who comments here as BQRail and writes an excellent blog on Substack, gave the example of the PCC streetcars of interwar America a week ago, and I promised I’d follow up on this; the news of the cancellation of congestion pricing delayed this post somehow but it’s still important to discuss. The issue here is that good public transportation procurement requires not just consistent standards, but also good ones, which give international vendors a familiar environment and keep in touch with technological advances.
The starting point for me is that the rolling stock on American subways and commuter rail is fairly standardized. New York City Transit procured standard designs in the 1990s, dubbed the R110A and R110B, and for decades kept buying trains based on these designs. In the 1990s and 2000s, it worked, in the sense that the trains were of comparable quality and cost to rolling stock in other large cities (although they were on the heavy side). But over time, technology diverged, and by the 2010s, a cost premium started to appear. By now, NYCT subway car contracts have a noticeable premium over the European norm, even if this premium is far smaller than the infrastructure cost premium.
Commuter and intercity rail cars have a similar issue with what the standard is. American commuter rail cars follow a few standard designs – the EMU design (in either the LIRR/Metro-North version or the SEPTA one), and the unpowered car hauled by a diesel locomotive one. DMU designs are not at all standard, and do have cost premiums as a result, especially since these are also small orders. That said, nearly all American commuter rail ridership is on EMUs or locomotive-hauled trains (usually diesel, occasionally electric), and those, too, have their problems.
The most glaring problem is that those designs are not at all what the rest of the world does. A few of the changes are modular, including the platform height and the loading gauge. The others are not; the consultants who write the design specs do so without trying to fit themselves to common products made by the multinational vendors.
Then, those specs are extremely detailed; there’s little room for a vendor to try to pawn off a standard Coradia or FLIRT and make that fit with little modification. The RFPs run into the deep hundreds of pages; SEPTA had one with more than 500 pages, and Amtrak’s most recent one ran to, I believe, 1,000. They define even what a train is, as opposed to the looser RFPs common in Europe – Spanish RFPs are 50-70 pages and have single-digit summaries, detailing just how many cars are needed, what the loading gauge is, what electrification is required, and what the expected performance level is.
Designs exist that do dialog with the international vendors and aim at a comparable product – the FRA reform process that led to alt-compliance did exactly that. But then no American commuter rail operator has bothered to make use of alt-compliance; they still buy the heavy, low-performance, low-reliability equipment that they’re used to buying, even as technology marches on and vendors don’t specialize in making that anymore.
The original example of the PCC standard is well-taken in the sense that there need to be repeatable standards. However, it’s important to understand that technological advances in trains exist in East Asia and Europe, and not in North America. American standardization needs to be around what is sold on the other side of either the Atlantic or the Pacific, with no wheel reinvention, and no “we are familiar with this so we’ll keep buying this” excusemaking.
The news about the congestion pricing cancellation in New York is slowing down. Governor Hochul is still trying to kill it, but her legal right to do so at this stage is murky and much depends on actors that are nominally independent even if they are politically appointed, especially New York State Department of Transportation Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez. I blogged and vlogged about the news, and would like to dedicate this post to one issue that I haven’t developed and barely seen others do: the negative effect last-minute cancellations have on the cohesion of the civil service.
The problem with last-minute cancellations is that they send messages to various interest groups, all of which are negative. My previous blog post went over the message such caprice sends to contractors: “don’t do business with us, we’re an unreliable client.” But the same problem also occurs when politicians do this to the civil service, which spent years perfecting these plans. I previously wrote about the problem with Mayor Eric Adams last-minute canceling a bike lane in Brooklyn under pressure, but what Hochul is doing is worse, because there was no public pressure and the assumption until about 3.5 days ago was that congestion pricing was a done deal.
With the civil service, the issue is that people are remunerated in both money and the sense of accomplishment. Industries and companies with a social mission have been able to hire workers at lower pay, often to the point of exploitation, in which managers at NGOs tell workers that they should be happy to be earning retail worker wages while doing professional office work because it’s for the greater good. But even setting aside NGOs, a lot of workers do feel a sense of professional accomplishment even when what they do is in a field general society finds boring, like transportation. One civil servant in the industry, trying to encourage an activist to go into the public sector, said something to the effect that it takes a really long time to get a reform idea up the hierarchy but once it happens, the satisfaction is great; the activist in question now works for a public transit agency.
Below the threshold of pride in one’s accomplishments, there is the more basic issue of workplace dignity. Workers who don’t feel like what they do is a great accomplishment still expect not to be berated by their superiors, or have their work openly denigrated. This is visible in culture in a number of ways. For example, in Mad Men, the scene in which Don Draper won’t even show a junior copywriter’s idea to a client has led to the famous “I don’t think about you at all” meme. And in how customers deal with service workers, ostentatiously throwing the product away in front of the worker is a well-known and nasty form of Karenish disrespect.
What Hochul did – and to an extent what Adams did with the bike lane – was publicly throwing the product that the state’s workers had diligently made over 17 years on the floor. A no after years of open debate would be frustrating, but civil servants do understand that they work for elected leaders who have to satisfy different interest groups. A no that came out of nowhere showcases far worse disrespect. In the former case, civil servants can advocate for their own positions with their superiors; “If we’d played better we would have won” is a frustrating thing to come to believe in any conflict, from sports to politics, but it’s understandable. But in the latter case, the opacity and suddenness both communicate that there’s no point in coming up with long-term plans for New York, because the governor may snipe them at any moment. It’s turning working for a public agency into a rigged game; nobody enjoys playing that.
And if there’s no enjoyment or even basic respect, then the civil service will keep hemorrhaging talent. It’s already a serious problem in the United States: private-sector wages for office workers are extremely high (people earning $150,000 a year feel not-rich) and public-sector wages don’t match them, and there’s a longstanding practice by politicians and political appointees to scorn the professionals. It leaves the civil service with the dregs and the true nerds, and the latter group doesn’t always rise up in the hierarchy.
Such open contempt by the governor is going to make this problem a lot worse. If you want to work at a place where people don’t do the equivalent of customers taking the coffee you made for them and deliberately spilling it on the floor while saying “I want to speak to the manager,” you shouldn’t work for the New York public sector, not right now. I’ll revise my career recommendation if Dominguez and others show that the governor was merely bloviating but the state legislature had passed the law mandating congestion pricing and the governor had signed it. I expect this recommendation will be echoed by others as well, judging by the sheer scorn the entire transportation activist community is heaping on Hochul and her decision – even the congestion pricing opponents don’t trust her.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul just announced that she’s putting congestion pricing on pause. The plan had gone through years of political and regulatory hell and finally passed the state legislature earlier this year, to go into effect on June 30th, in 25 days. There was some political criticism of it, and lawsuits by New Jersey, but all the expectations were that it would go into effect on schedule. Today, without prior warning, Hochul announced that she’s looking to pause the program, and then confirmed it was on hold. The future of the program is uncertain; activists across the region are mobilizing for a last-ditch effort, as are suppliers like Alstom. The future of the required $1 billion a year in congestion pricing revenue is uncertain as well, and Hochul floated a plan to instead raise taxes on businesses, which is not at all popular and very unlikely to happen.
Area advocates are generally livid. As it is, there are questions about whether it’s even legal for Hochul to do so – technically, only the MTA board can decide this. But then the governor appoints the MTA board, and the appointments are political. Eric is even asking about federal funding for Second Avenue Subway, since the MTA is relying on congestion pricing for its future capital plans.
The one local activist I know who opposes congestion pricing says “I wish” and “they’ll restart it the day after November elections.” If it’s a play for low-trust voters who drive and think the additional revenue for the MTA, by law at least $1 billion a year, will all be wasted, it’s not helping. The political analysts I’m seeing from within the transit advocacy community are portraying it as an unforced error, making Hochul look incompetent and waffling, rather than boldly blocking something that’s adverse to key groups of voters.
The issue here isn’t exactly that if Hochul sticks to her plan to cancel congestion pricing, there will not be congestion pricing in New York. Paris and Berlin don’t have congestion pricing either. In Paris, Anne Hidalgo is open about her antipathy to market-based solutions like congestion pricing, and prefers to reduce car traffic through taking away space from cars to give to public transportation, pedestrians, and cyclists. People who don’t like it are free to vote for more liberal (in the European sense) candidates. In Berlin, similarly, the Greens support congestion pricing (“City-Maut”), but the other parties on the left do not, and certainly not the pro-car parties on the right. If the Greens got more votes and had a stronger bargaining position in coalition negotiations, it might happen, and anyone who cares in either direction knows how to vote on this matter. In New York, there has never been such a political campaign. Rather, the machinations that led Hochul to do this, which people are speculating involve suburban representatives who feel politically vulnerable, have been entirely behind the scenes. There’s no transparency, and no commitment to providing people who are not political insiders with consistent policy that they can use to make personal, social, or business plans around.
Everything right now is speculation, precisely because there’s neither transparency nor certainty in state-level governance. Greg Shill is talking about this in the context of suburban members of the informal coalition of Democratic voters; but then it has to be informal, because were it formal, suburban politicians could have demanded and gotten disproportionately suburb-favoring public transit investments. Ben Kabak is saying that it was House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries who pressed Hochul for this; Jeffries himself said he supports the pause for further study (there was a 4,000 page study already).
The chaos of this process is what plays to the impression that the state can’t govern itself; Indignity mentions it alongside basic governance problems in the city and the state. This is how the governor is convincing anti-congestion pricing cynics that it will be back in November and pro-congestion pricing ones that it’s dead, the exact opposite of what she should be doing. Indecision is not popular with voters, and if Hochul doesn’t understand that, it makes it easy to understand why she won New York in 2022 by only 6.4%, a state that in a neutral environment like 2022 the Democrats usually win by 20%.
But it’s not about Hochul personally. Hochul is a piece of paper with “Democrat” written on it; the question is what process led to her elevation for governor, an office with dictatorial powers over policy as long as state agencies like the MTA are involved. This needs to be understood as the usual democratic deficit. Hochul acts like this because this signals to insiders that they are valued, as the only people capable of interpreting whatever is going on in state politics (or city politics – mayoral machinations are if anything worse). Transparency democratizes information, and what Hochul is doing right now does the exact opposite, in a game where everyone wins except the voters and the great majority of interests who are not political insiders.
In 2018, Eric’s and my Brooklyn bus redesign proposal included a new route to run between Red Hook and Lower Manhattan using the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. This was not our idea; a junior planner we talked to suggested this. Our plan was not adopted, but in the formal process New York City Transit and consultancy Sam Schwartz engaged in, at community meetings riders proposed the same idea, and junior staff seemed to like it but it was still not adopted. Now, a coalition of neighborhood groups and city-wide transit advocacy groups is directly calling for such a bus to be included in the Brooklyn bus redesign, including ETA. My goal in this post is to look at some alignment possibilities, more carefully than we did in the 2018 proposal. On the Manhattan side, it is not too hard to hit Lower Manhattan jobs and subway transfers on a short bus loop, but on the Brooklyn side, the Red Hook street network and its connection to the tunnel force serious compromises.
Current conditions
There are express buses in the tunnel from points much farther out to Lower Manhattan, but they don’t make stops along the way. Red Hook is instead served exclusively within Brooklyn, in three directions: one north along Van Brunt to Downtown Brooklyn, one east along Lorraine to the Smith/9th Street subway station and Park Slope, and one also along Lorraine to Smith/9th but then going north to Downtown Brooklyn. The first two are together the B61 route, in an awkward C-shaped through-route; the third is the B57, which through-runs past Downtown Brooklyn to points northeast along Flushing Avenue.
The neighborhood has roughly three major destinations to serve. Visible in the center-bottom of the map are the Red Hook Houses, with a total of 6,000 residents. At the very bottom of the map is Ikea, the main destination for people coming into the neighborhood from elsewhere. Then on the left there is Van Brunt, the local commercial drag.
Per OnTheMap, the entire neighborhood has 6,700 jobs and 5,000 employed residents as of 2019; it is not at all a bedroom community. Ikea is not even one of the main job centers – the biggest are elsewhere, such as the nearby Amazon warehouse. The neighborhood’s residents work about 40% in Manhattan, 40% in Brooklyn, and 20% elsewhere, while the workers are half from Brooklyn with no other origin having much concentration (the second biggest county origin, Queens, is 14%). Only 300 people both live and work in Red Hook, so a transit system connecting the neighborhood to the rest of the city, for both origins and destinations, is vital.
Why the tunnel?
Red Hook’s current bus connections are only with the rest of Brooklyn. This materially slows down travel for the 40% of residents who work in Manhattan and roughly 10% who work in places one accesses via Manhattan, such as the Bronx or Long Island City. The on-street bus connections are slow, and the neighborhood is not well-located relative to the Brooklyn subway network. The B57 only kind of hits Smith/9th southbound, since Smith is one-way northbound and the southbound trip is one block west on Court. Smith/9th itself is not accessible, and is the highest subway station in the system above the local street level as it was built with high clearance below for shipping through the Gowanus Canal.
Let’s look at how fast it is to get to 42nd Street. Via the B57 or B61, it’s about 10 minutes by bus from Ikea to Smith/9th; the B61 runs every 12 minutes and the B57 every 15 or 20, for maximum inconvenience. Then from Smith/9th to Bryant Park, it’s 27 minutes on the F. A bus in the tunnel would get to Fulton Street in 25 minutes and then it’s 12 minutes on the A. In theory, it’s the same trip time from Ikea, and around three minutes faster in relative terms from the Red Hook Houses depending on the route. In practice, being able to connect in Manhattan means having a much wider variety of destinations than just what’s on the F, which doesn’t even get to Lower Manhattan. The benefits for Red Hook-to-rest-of-city commuters would be noticeable.
The Manhattan street section would have variable traffic. On the other hand, the tunnel is less congested than its approaches, and congestion pricing stands to reduce traffic exactly there, as on other roads into the Manhattan core. With no bus stops in the tunnel, the average speed would be reasonable even with a short loop through Lower Manhattan. Diverting ridership from slower buses to Downtown Brooklyn would save revenue-hours, which could then be spent on higher frequency on all remaining routes.
Compromises on the route
The routing within the neighborhood for any bus route using the tunnel cannot be perfect; the neighborhood is not laid out for it. This is seen in how awkward the buses through Red Hook are today, as mentioned above; none of them even goes through the Red Hook Houses, which are the dominant origin. All of the following constraints require creating a single compromise bus route:
The ridership potential is not there for more than one route. Whatever option is chosen, whether it’s a shuttle as I’m implying in this post or an extension of an existing route that goes deeper into Manhattan (or Brooklyn), that’s the only thing that can run. Even with one route, there may need to be compromises on frequency (by which I mean a bus every 8-10 minutes instead of 6, not 12).
Van Brunt, Ikea plus the other waterfront jobs, and the Red Hook Houses are not at all collinear.
The only place to get to the tunnel from Red Hook is the ramp from West 9th or Huntington, and West 9th is one-way west and may need to be converted to two-way. In particular, Van Brunt is too far, and the interface with the tunnel needs to be to and from the Red Hook Houses directly.
In effect, what all of the above implies is that a bus to Manhattan on Van Brunt is not likely to work. Here is one version of what could:
The circles along the path denote control points on Google Maps, and not stops. The western waterfront may have to just not be served; people could walk from Van Brunt across Coffey Park and it would be faster than taking the bus the long way around, down Van Brunt and then along Beard and up Columbia.
At the Manhattan end, the route would either loop just far enough north to hit the Fulton Street subway complex, or through-run. Fulton is necessary because the Wall Street stations are inaccessible, and is generally useful for the connection to World Trade Center. Beyond that, one option is to through-run to the M9, which hits more Manhattan destinations. That said, Manhattan bus speeds are so low that nearly all riders would switch to the subway; M9 frequencies are also low, every 15 minutes off-peak, and when there’s not much traffic this is almost unusably low for Red Hook Houses-Wall Street trips.
Pedestrian Observations 