Defrauding the Public on European Rail Profits

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) penned an op-ed defending his attempt to strip California high-speed rail of all funding. In the usual litany of complaints about the deficit, he referenced a 2008 study by Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General claiming that European passenger railroads lose money but keep those losses off-books. The study is fraudulent. It does not specify a methodology, which means it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly the numbers don’t match actual reality; however, some hints are provided by the following claim:

1. Public Funding to the Train Operating Companies may be accounted for as revenue, and

2. Public Funding to the Infrastructure Managers enables them to charge “user fees” to the Train Operating Companies that may be significantly lower than the actual infrastructure maintenance expenses.

Ad 1, it is not difficult to separate transport income from public funding. The balance sheets often state the source of income clearly. Most public funding comes from operating regional trains under contract, which SNCF and DB keep separate from their core intercity business, which is profitable. A minority of public funding is subsidies for social services, for example state-mandated discounts to active-duty troops, the elderly, and the unemployed; a libertarian would instantly recognize such mandates as taxes and deduct them from the subsidies. See for example page 30 of SNCF’s books, which clearly shows the majority of public funding (not counting RFF, which is nominally private) is from local sources, for operating commuter rail.

It is true that regional rail is heavily subsidized in Europe, but the same is true in the US. But in the US there’s far less national railroad involvement in commuter rail than in Europe, so comparing Amtrak to every train that has an SNCF logo is disingenuous. Worse, the study picks and chooses which Amtrak trains to compare European trains to: it ignores the long-distance trains, and in one figure (p. 13) only compares the Northeast Corridor to European networks and ignores the state-supported corridors, organizationally the closest thing to the TER or DB Regio in the US.

Ad 2, the choice of how to set the track access fees is a political one, and often the political choice is to set the access fees high. In France, in anticipation of open access RFF has recently raised tolls to far above track maintenance costs, effectively moving all French rail profits from SNCF to RFF and preventing competing companies from making a profit on the popular Paris-Lyon segment. Even in 2006, the toll on Paris-Lyon was €14.60 per train-km, the highest of all European lines although, because it has the most traffic, its maintenance cost should be the lowest per train-km.

A 2008 study of the costs and benefits of HSR in Europe published by the OECD and International Transport Forum finds that the maintenance costs per single-track-km in Europe average €30,000. This is €82 per single-track-km per day; to find the appropriate cost per train-km, divide by the number of daily trains in each direction. The LGV Sud-Est’s 2006 tolls would cover that average maintenance cost in just six daily runs; maximum frequency on the line is ten trains per direction per hour. Of the five or six lines on the list of rail links and their tolls that are HSR, the average toll is €10 per train-km. Of course this excludes depreciation and interest, but at least on the LGV Sud-Est, depreciation is quite low since the line was cheap to construct, and the construction bonds have already been paid. SNCF’s complaint that it’s being milked by tolls far above maintenance costs seems correct.

Of course, RFF’s books are more than just maintenance costs. They’re also debt accumulated by SNCF when it was run far less efficiently than today. Much like with JNR, this debt may have to be absorbed by the state, leading to predictable claims of subsidies. In reality, all this would do would be retroactively subsidize losses from decades ago. This is exactly what happened with JNR: the state absorbed the debt coming from operating losses, but required the JR companies to take over the Shinkansen construction debt, see pp. 46 and 88 of this document on privatization.

That this study has been picked up by Heritage, Reason (p. 7), and others as evidence that high-speed rail will lose money is not surprising – those organizations are paid by industry groups including the Koch Brothers and Reason spreads disinformation about trains – but for Amtrak to mislead the people who are footing its bill is inexcusable. It is probably not a matter of incompetence. Amtrak’s claim that every railroad in the world receives public funds is very unlikely to be an honest mistake. Claiming that Japan absorbed Shinkansen debt could be an honest mistake – I only found the aforementioned privatization document while looking for sources for my privatization post. But claiming that SNCF keeps public funding hidden from view when in fact it clearly states it receives regional funding for regional rail requires actively searching for reasons to tar SNCF. The alternative possibility that Amtrak included commuter rail in the calculation merely turns Amtrak’s claim from an outright lie to intentional misleading.

Amtrak’s Office of the Inspector General most likely knows what it’s doing. Nominally it’s independent of Amtrak, but if Amtrak dies, it will have nobody to supervise. Amtrak is losing money when its peer first-world railroads make money, it’s under siege by Republicans who point to those losses as a reason to private and dismember it, and it has no intention of reforming. The only way out of this conundrum is to defraud the public about peer first-world railroad practices, and I believe that this is exactly what the OIG did here. Amtrak’s existing services are sufficiently well-patronized that they have special interests behind them; therefore, feeding Reason’s propaganda is not an existential threat. But House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica’s calls for fundamental change could resonate with Republicans and moderate Democrats, and this could mean the end of Amtrak. It’s rational to lie to the public that it’s impossible to do better.

What is not rational is public acceptance of this. Heads should have rolled about this document. All involved should have resigned or been fired. Mica should have suspected shenanigans and invited both the authors of the study and officials from SNCF and DB for a hearing. Amtrak proper of course embraces the results and continues along its merry way, but I expect no better from it anymore. What I do expect is that the public in general and rail advocates in particular will be as livid as I am about being defrauded.

Aesthetics and Usability

New York is spending multiple billions of dollars on two signature projects in Lower Manhattan of which the more expensive (PATH terminal at $3.8 billion) has no transportation benefits and the less expensive (Fulton Street Transit Center at $1.4 billion) has small transportation benefits. This has led Stephen Smith and Ben Kabak to posit an opposition between spending on aesthetic design and spending on good transit, leading a few irate commenters to declare that they don’t like ugly transit and that design matters. In principle Stephen and Ben are right and the commenters are wrong, but the main issue involved is broader, and somewhat different.

The first observations I made of the photos Stephen provides is that the example he gives of ugly transit, Shinjuku Station, is in fact quite aesthetic. It has nothing on any average Mediterranean city, but neither does Grand Central. From the photos I’ve seen of Shinjuku, and my best recollection of staying one night in the area ten years ago, it looks fine from street level. The opposite is true of PATH’s Calatrava terminal, which looks like a monument to the architect more than a useful train station for ordinary passengers.

What passes for great design, in other words, is not based on normal street-level impressions. It’s based on how things look in drawings or aerial photos and on the ability of the project to act as a monument. Medieval cathedrals were designed to be big to make the individual feel small compared to the greatness of the institution that built them; the same is true of modern signature train stations and downtown revitalization skyscrapers. The Twin Towers were not designed for high office capacity; the commercial floor area ratio on the site of World Trade Center was 10, compared with 33 for the Empire State Building. They were designed for urban renewal, and thus looked much better from the air than from the ground; the same is true of the Calatrava terminal.

More in general, this relates to what I said about London and how it looks better on a map than on street level. This is less about aesthetics and more about usability, but the general argument is the same.

Grids, clockface schedules, and simple fare systems all have this benefit that occasional users, or regular users going outside their usual train line or neighborhood, can easily grasp what is going on. Living in ungridded Tel Aviv, I knew how my own neighborhood’s street network looked like; similarly, a colleague who reverse commutes from Boston knows the timetable of the trains useful to her. The supposedly beautiful schedules or street networks that planners come up with aren’t as usable.

The conflation of usability and aesthetics can easily lead people to think that spending billions on an iconic train station has any benefit except to Calatrava and his company. A commenter on Second Avenue Sagas even mentioned Apple as an example of design-based success. In reality, the iPod is easier to browse than any MP3 player that came before it, leading to success at a time when Apple’s brand was in the gutter; and unlike the BlackBerry that it displaced, the iPhone has games and customizable apps and a touchscreen that everyone other than me seems to like. It’s those devices that form Apple’s core product, measured by operating income; the Mac, which is based purely on design and brand, is a niche.

So the question is what usability-oriented spending could have been done in Lower Manhattan. This is of course purely academic. Like the original World Trade Center, those post-9/11 projects have never been about the needs of users, or even about simple aesthetics; they’ve always been about agency self-aggrandizing. But for $5.2 billion, they could have done a lot to build a Hoboken-Fulton Street-Flatbush tunnel and run RER-style service (at European construction costs, they could’ve built the entire tunnel and had change to spare; at New York construction costs, probably not). They could’ve integrated the fares between PATH and the subway, instead of having each agency seek an incompatible smartcard standard (Cubic for PATH, the ISO standard for the MTA). Instead, they spent about a billion on improvements for pedestrian circulation at Fulton Street and burned the rest of the money on the altar of starchitect aesthetics.

Skewed North Shore BRT/LRT Proposal (Hoisted from Comments)

The MTA produced an alternatives analysis for transit service on the North Shore of Staten Island. The study contains zingers and various factors making the cost many times higher than it should be, but the agency response to all comments is Decide, Announce, Defend. Commenter Ajedrez reports from a public meeting on the subject on Second Avenue Sagas:

I went for part of the meeting (from about 18:30 to 19:45), and this is a rundown of what happened:

* They discussed the updates from the last meeting. They eliminated the ferry option (that didn’t even make sense), and they eliminated the heavy rail option.

* The people were given the opportunity to ask questions and make comments. This one woman (the same woman from last time) ranted on and on about something historical at Richmond Terrace/Alaska Street that would be destroyed if they paved over it.

Then a few more people made some comments, and I asked why they eliminated the heavy rail option (for those of you who are wondering, I was the kid in the yellow jacket and blue/black striped shirt. Then again, I was the only kid in the room)

* Then we went to the back to talk with the people from the consulting firm. I discussed the heavy rail more in depth, and asked why it was needed if the West Shore Light Rail would supposedly cover the Teleport. I then made a couple of suggestions for the short-term (reverse-peak S98 service, my S93 extension, cutting back more S46s to Forest Avenue) and I gave them the name of a person at the MTA who they could contact.

To elaborate on my statement about heavy rail, they said that they took it completely off the table. It just amazed me that they originally had a ferry line as one of the options, but they didn’t even have heavy rail as an option south of Arlington.

Let me think, you have an abandoned rail line (and a heavy rail line at that), and you want to put a ferry line there. What sense does that make? I could understand maybe having the ferry supplement the rail line, but doing that would have the whole thing go to waste.

I said that the current SIR is heavy rail and the South Shore is more auto-oriented than the North Shore. And I said that it provides better integration with the current SIR (they said they could put light rail in the Clifton Yard, but it’s probably automatically cheaper if you don’t have to retrofit the yard). And I also said that there’s higher capacity than light rail, so in case there’s growth, it is better equipped to handle it

So they said “Well, it was too expensive (because one of the goals was to serve the Teleport) so we didn’t even consider it.” And then they said that SI doesn’t have Brooklyn-type density to support heavy rail (but somehow the South Shore does?). And if you limit it to light rail, you’re actually limiting SI’s growth potential. Think about it: before 1900, Brooklyn had some streetcar lines, but not a whole lot of ridership. When the subway was extended, the population exploded. But if they just extended some streetcar lines from Brooklyn to Manhattan, the population would be nowhere near the 2.5 million it has today.

And then they said “Oh, well during the last meetings (which I attended, so I know they’re not being completely truthful) people expressed a sentiment for light rail”. They didn’t. They expressed a sentiment against a busway, There’s a difference. They didn’t say “Oh, it shouldn’t be heavy rail”. They just said they want rail rather than buses.

I mean, the argument I should’ve made (besides the ones I already did) was the fact that there was heavy rail there before, and the population was smaller back then. I think it’s pretty obvious.

And when I made that statement, everybody was surprised at how young I was (16). One woman said “You should be the one studying this project”, and they actually tried to avoid responding to me (they were like “Thank you. Next question”, and then everybody said “But you didn’t answer his question”, and that’s when they made up the response about expenses)

Besides the wretched DAD attitude, the cost projections and the route choice doesn’t even make sense. The proposal is to use the abandoned B&O right-of-way along the North Shore, from St. George to Arlington, and then cut over to South Avenue and serve West Shore Plaza. Here is satellite imagery of South Avenue: observe that it is almost completely empty.

Here we have a line that consists of 8.5 kilometers of abandoned trackage, which can be restored for service remarkably cheaply, and 5.5 of an on-street segment, which tends to be much more expensive to construct. Compare the costs of regional rail restoration in Germany or Ottawa’s O-Train with those of French LRT lines (including Lyon’s cheaper line). In addition, the areas along the abandoned trackage are of moderate density by non-New York standards, while those along South Avenue aren’t even suburban. And yet, the MTA is convinced that the per-km cost of an option that terminates at Arlington is higher than that of an option that goes to West Shore Plaza ($56 million/km vs. $41/km).

While the cost range proposed is only moderately high for light rail – the French average is a little less than $40 million/km – this is misleading because of the nature of the lines. French tramways tend to be on-street, involving extensive street reconstruction. Sometimes they need a new right-of-way along a boulevard or a highway. In contrast, the North Shore Branch is a mostly intact rail right-of-way, which means that the land grading and the structures, the most expensive parts of any rail project, are already in place. It shouldn’t cost like a normal light rail project; it should cost a fraction.

On top of this, to inflate the cost, the MTA is talking about a train maintenance shop. It says a light rail option allows merely modifying the maintenance shop for the Staten Island Railway. Not mentioned is the fact that SIR-compatible heavy rail would allow the trains to be maintained in the same shops without modification, to say nothing of leveraging New York City Transit’s bulk buying to obtain cheaper rolling stock.

The O-Train’s cost – C$21 million for 8 km of route – included three three-car DMUs, piggybacking on a large Deutsche Bahn order; judging by the cost of a more recent expansion order from Alstom, a large majority of the original $21 million was rolling stock. New York should be able to obtain cheaper trains, using its pricing power and sharing spares with the SIR. The electrification costs would add just a little: electrification can be done for €1 million per route-km, and in high-cost Britain it can be done for £550,000-650,000 per track-km (p. 10).

For an order of magnitude estimate of the cost of a well-designed SIR-compatible North Shore Branch, we have, quoting my own comment on SAS:

For an order-of-magnitude estimate of what’s needed, figure $20 million for electrification, $5 million for high-platform stations, and $25 million for six two-car trains plus a single spare. Go much higher and it’s not a transportation project, but welfare for contractors.

In retrospect would add about $10-20 million for trackwork, since the line is abandoned. On the other hand, fewer trains could be used: I was assuming 10-minute headways and a 25-minute travel time to Port Ivory; with 15-minute headways and a travel time under 17.5 minutes to Arlington, which is realistic given subway speeds (the MTA study says 15), only three trains plus a spare would be required.

On a related note, the loading gauge excluding station platform edges should be rebuilt to mainline standards, to allow future regional rail service to replace the SIR. Eventually Staten Island is going to need a long tunnel to Manhattan or Brooklyn if it’s to look like an integral part of the city, and once such a tunnel is built, it might as well be used to provide RER-style service across the city.

In contrast, the MTA proposal has no concern for cost cutting, and looks like lip service to the community. It’ll be an especial tragedy if the line is permanently ripped up to make room for a busway, which will likely underperform and turn into a highway. The contractors are going to get well paid no matter what: the busway is cheaper, but not by an order of magnitude. It’s just the riders who will not have good transit on Staten Island’s North Shore.

Disappointment 2050

The political transit bloggers are talking about the new RPA/America 2050 report on high-speed rail published by the Lincoln Institute, which recommends a focus on the Northeast and California. Unfortunately, this is not an accurate description of the report. Although it does indeed propose to start with the Northeast and California, that’s not the focus of the report; instead, the focus is to argue that HSR is everything its boosters claim it is and then some more, and demand more money for HSR, from whatever source.

Look more closely at the section proposing to focus on New York and California. Although the authors say the US should prioritize, minimal argument was offered for why these are the best options. The report shows the map from the RPA’s study on the subject, which proposes a few other priorities and isn’t that good to begin with (it grades cities on connecting transit based on which modes they have, not how much they’re used). But it says nothing more; I’d have been interested to hear about metro area distribution questions as discussed on pages 113-5 in Reinhard Clever’s thesis and pp. 10-11 of his presentation on the same topic, and alignment and regional rail integration questions such as those discussed by the much superior Siemens Midwest study, but nothing like that appears in this report.

The report then pivots to the need to come up with $40 billion for California and $100 billion for the Northeast Corridor, under either the RPA’s gold-plated plan or Amtrak’s equally stupid Vision. The RPA first came up with the idea of spending multiple billions on brand new tunnels under Philadelphia, which was then copied by the Vision, and wants trains to go through Long Island to New Haven through an undersea tunnel. Clearly, cost-effectiveness is not the goal. Since the methodology of finding the best routes is based on ridership per km, offering a gold-plated plan is the equivalent of trying to connect much longer distances without a corresponding increase in ridership, which goes against the original purpose of the RPA study.

Together with the neglect of corridors that scored high on the RPA’s study but have not had official high-speed rail proposals costing in the tens of billions (the SNCF proposal and the above-mentioned Siemens report are neither official nor affiliated with the RPA), the conclusion is not favorable. The most charitable explanation is that the RPA was looking for an official vehicle to peddle its own Northeast HSR plan but actually believes it has merit. The least charitable is that the RPA wants to see spending on HSR megaprojects regardless of cost-effectiveness.

The treatment of other issues surrounding HSR is in line with a booster mentality, in which more is always better. Discussing station placement, the report talks about the development benefits that come from downtown stations and the lack of benefit coming from exurban stations, as nearly all stations on LGVs are. It does not talk about the tradeoff in costs and benefits; others have done so, for example the chief engineer of Britain’s High Speed 2, who also talks about other interesting tradeoffs such as speed versus capacity versus reliability, but the report prefers to just boost the most expensive plan.

More specifically, the report contrasts CBD stations, suburban stations, and exurban stations. In reality, many stations are outside the CBD but still in the urban core with good transit connections, such as Shin-Osaka, Lyon Part-Dieu, and 30th Street Station, but those are implicitly lumped with beet field stations. This helps make spending billions on tunnels through Philadelphia, as both the RPA and Amtrak propose, look prudent, when in reality both Japan and France are happy to avoid urban tunneling and instead build major city stations in conveniently urban neighborhoods. In fact, Japan’s own boosters and lobbyists crow about the development around such stations.

In line with either view of the report’s purpose, the literature it studies is partial. Discussing the effect of HSR on development, it quotes a study about the positive effect of HSR on small towns in Germany on the Cologne-Frankfurt line, but not other studies done in other countries. For example, in Japan, the effect of the Shinkansen on the Tohoku and Joetsu regions was decidedly mixed. The report also quotes the positive story of Lille’s TGV-fueled redevelopment, which was not replicated anywhere else in France, where cities just passively waited for infrastructure to rescue them. But instead of talking about Lille’s program of redevelopment, the report contrasts it with failed development cases in cities with exurban stations, never mind that no city achieved what Lille did, even ones with downtown stations, like Marseille. It’s not quite a Reason-grade lie, but it’s still very misleading.

Finally, the section about how to fund the $100 billion Northeast system and California’s $43 billion starter line has suggestions that are so outlandish they defy all explanation. The authors propose the following:

1. Raise the gas tax by 15 cents a gallon or more. Several cents could be devoted to passenger rail.

2. Add a $1 surcharge on current passenger rail tickets to produce approximately $29 million annually.

3. Shift from a national gas tax to a percentage tax on crude oil and imported refined petroleum products. RAND estimated that an oil tax of 17 percent would generate approximately $83 billion a year. Five billion dollars of this amount could be dedicated to passenger rail.

Of these, proposal #2 is by far the stupidest. Amtrak receives subsidies; to tax tickets is to propose shifting some change from the left pocket to the right pocket. Why not go ahead and propose to reduce Amtrak’s subsidy by the same amount and require it to raise fares or improve efficiency?

But proposals #1 and 3 are equally bad. Wedding train funding to a steady stream of gas taxes has been the status quo for decades; the result is that APTA is so used to this unholy marriage that it opposed a climate change bill that would tax gas without diverting the funds back to transportation. (That by itself should be reason for good transit advocates to dismiss APTA as a hostile organization, just one degree less malevolent than Reason and Cato and one degree less obstructionist than the FRA.) And if it were a wise long-term choice, if it were politically feasible to add to the gas tax just to build competing trains, the US political climate would look dramatically different, and instead of talking about focus, we’d be talking about how to extend the under-construction Florida HSR line.

A report that was serious about a mode shift from cars to cleaner forms of transportation would not talk about 15 cents per gallon; it would talk in terms of multiple dollars per gallon, as gas is taxed in Europe and high-income Asia. The best explanation I can think of for the funding mechanisms is that the RPA has internalized the tax-as-user-fee model of ground transportation, one that has never worked for cars despite the AAA’s pretense otherwise and that won’t work for anything else.

The overall tone of the report slightly reminds me of Thomas MacDonald’s Highway Education Board, with its industry-sponsored “How Good Roads Help the Religious Life of My Community” essay contests. It reminds me of Thomas Friedman’s “win, win, win, win, win” columns even more – which is unsurprising since I think of Friedman as the archetypal booster – but when this boosterism applies not to a policy preference but to spending very large amounts of public money, I begin to suspect that it’s advertising rather than optimism. Friedman for all his faults crows about American and Indian entrepreneurs inventing new things rather than about extracting $100 billion from the Northeast to pay for unnecessary greenfield tunneling.

Therefore, good transit activists should dismiss this report, and avoid quoting it as evidence that prioritizing is necessary. This was not what the RPA was preaching back when it thought it could get away with proposing more, and the rest of the report is so shoddy it’s not a reliable source of analysis. There may be other reasons to focus on those corridors, but the RPA did not argue them much, instead preferring to literally go for big bucks.

Quick Note: California HSR Could Save $4 Billion on the Grapevine

California HSR’s just-released July progress report, as reported on bakersfield.com, contains the pleasant surprise that switching the alignment from the Tehachapis and Palmdale to the I-5 alignment on the Grapevine could save $4 billion.

Furthermore, the study indicating such cost savings “identified more than one feasible alignment over the mountain pass.” The Grapevine option was rejected in 2005 because the preliminary engineering found only one feasible alignment that crosses known faults at-grade and has a maximum tunnel length of 6 miles and maximum 3.5% grade, compared with hundreds through the Tehachapis. Therefore finding multiple alignments, such that even if further meter-scale geological studies discover new faults then some option will make it through, is likely to tilt the field back toward the Grapevine.

Robert Cruickshank is surprisingly pessimistic about the Grapevine, on the grounds that Palmdale is an important market to serve. In reality, Palmdale is a small commuter market – i.e. it has a strong peak and low revenue per rider – so giving it up is a small deal, probably fully canceled out by the gain of about 10 minutes’ trip time on the shorter Grapevine.

But most importantly, it’s most important to get an initial operable segment ready, and this means connecting the Central Valley to the LA Basin. As I’ve explained before, a major advantage of the Grapevine is that it allows connecting to the legacy Metrolink line at Santa Clarita rather than at Palmdale, avoiding tens of kilometers of sharp curves on the climb between the LA Basin and Antelope Valley.

I’m unable to find the progress report, so I don’t know to what extent “$4 billion in savings” literally means coming in $4 billion under budget. If it does, it means that theoretically, the money available suffices to build from Los Angeles to a point between Bakersfield and Fresno; Obama’s now-moribund $4 billion for HSR, matched 50:50, would be more than enough to build from Los Angeles to Fresno.

Update: here is the progress report. The relevant section is on page 27. It says only that “an alternative via the Grapevine may save between $1B and $4B in capital cost” – still unclear whether it means coming $1-4 billion under budget, or staying within budget while avoiding a $1-4 billion cost overrun on the Tehachapis.

It’s too bad the approximate amount remains unclear. The required budget is on the same order as the amount that may become available in the next two years depending on Congressional machinations, and so it’s important for California to know how much it should be asking for. For example, if it were made clear that an additional $2.5 billion in federal funding were enough to complete LA-Fresno, then Dianne Feinstein might try to include the full amount for high-speed rail in the transportation bill for 2012 rather than just $100 million.

Quick Note: ACS 2010

The Census Bureau has just released the American Community Survey numbers for 2010, using data calibrated to match with the 2010 census. At least, calibration is the best reason for why the ACS believes that New York went from 8,391,881 people in 2009 to 8,184,899 in 2010 (according to the new Factfinder). Because of such jarring discrepancies in results, people should under no circumstances directly compare numbers from the 2010 ACS with numbers from previous ACSes.

The best demographic survey in the US is still the 2009 ACS, which avoids the whopper claim that New York added more housing units than people at a time of skyrocketing rents, and should be used until it becomes completely outdated.

And even if 2010 census data is at all reliable, it’s still not directly comparable. Claims about absolute mode share or commute time are okay (the census after all only underestimated New York’s population by about 3%), but claims about change from 2009 are not. At best the 2010 ACS should be compared to the 2000 estimate base, and even that is strained – too much reliance on a census that doesn’t count everyone, insufficient reliance on years of rigorous statistical sampling.

Suburbanization of Poverty: What’s New?

The current trend toward suburbanization of poverty is worth examining. It is incontrovertible that on the whole, the American poor are moving to the suburbs. Simultaneously, city centers are gentrifying, seeing large increases in income, with an influx of rich and upper middle-class people. This could lead to a French-style geography in which the rich live in central cities and the poor outside them. It’s not my intention to doubt that this trend is happening; my question is whether it represents a break from the past.

On the one hand, the consequences of such a trend clearly do represent a break from the past. We’re already seeing demands from business-oriented groups for more transit investment, and a new focus on urbanism in elite magazines. However, this by itself does not mean that the reasons for this trend are at all new. In fact, in one way, we’ve really been seeing the same trend for fifty years, in which both the inner and the outer limits of poverty are pushed outward. What we saw last decade was just a tipping point in which the expansion of the gentrified core was by itself enough to offset the wealth loss coming from the expansion of the ghetto.

The best example for this is New York, whose regional income distribution is arguably more regularly donut-shaped than that of other Americans metro areas, with less of a favored/ill-favored quarter geography. Furthermore, in Manhattan, there is a sharp color line between the Upper East and West Sides and Harlem, which is relatively easy to discern if you’re a resident. Mad Men contains multiple citations establishing Manhattan north of 86th as a bad area, and based on the geography of the 1970s, Joel Garreau placed the boundary at East 86th and West 96th. By the 1990s, we see citations putting the line at West 110th Street; moreover the Upper West Side has joined up with Morningside Heights, itself gentrified, moving the color line up to about West 123rd. This is a decades-long trend, rather than a recent development. Conversely, the boundary between the poor South Bronx and the middle-class North Bronx has, too, moved north over the decades, and is still moving north as the black middle class leaves for greener pastures.

In general, a similar story played out in the first-ring suburbs of many Rust Belt cities, especially in ill-favored quarters: the places that people used to flee the city to are now cities that people flee.

This is not to say that nothing has changed. Harlem and the South Bronx of today are richer than Harlem and the South Bronx of 1980, leading some people to think that they (especially Harlem) have gentrified far more than they actually have. People are no longer abandoning the Bronx in droves. But in terms of relative geographical income across the metropolitan area, we’ve really just witnessed an expansion of the donut going back to at least the establishment of the first modern suburbs in Westchester and Long Island, nearly a hundred years ago.

What we see is therefore inconsistent with the usual story of suburbanization of poverty. The exurbs are not terribly rich, but the Rust Belt exurbs are a far cry from their housing bust-stricken Sunbelt counterparts. Poverty is suburbanizing from the inside out rather than from the outside in, just as wealth and the upwardly mobile middle class did fifty years ago.

Although this implies that suburbia is unsustainable, the way it implies it is different from the usual explanation. It’s not that the future is bad for low-density settlements and good for high-density ones. It’s that the American urban form and political geography, especially but not only in the suburbs, are fundamentally unsustainable, and require constant growth to persist. Greenfield sites have an inherent advantage with respect to pensions, debt, and fossilized community relations;the debt-fueled system of growth in the US encourages moving on to the next tract rather than maintaining what exists. Thus today’s boomburb is tomorrow’s decaying eyesore. This can only be countered in persistently favored quarters, but those by definition only hold a small proportion of the population; not everyone can live in the richest 15% of the region.

The thing to wonder then is not why suburbs are hollowing from the inside out, but why city centers are expanding and gentrifying so rapidly. One answer is that Jane Jacobs was right, and diverse city neighborhoods can resile from the shock of middle-class flight. Indeed, the only significant non-Jacobsian neighborhoods in the expanding cores tend to be projects, and those tend to significantly lag in gentrification (for example, see Stuyvesant Town – and that’s a project that was originally white-only, thus middle-class). On the other hand, the projects are protected by public ownership laws, regardless of urban form, so even if Jacobs was wrong, developers would only eye them after exhausting private buildings.

A second answer is that today’s gentrified cities are something like greenfield sites. It holds up well with the analogy between gentrification today and suburbanization a century ago. That said, this analogy is political and sociological rather than geographical or economic: cities still have to pay pensions, and the buildings that are now selling for a million dollars per apartment are often very old. On the third hand, the social networks of the newcomers are mostly independent from those of the older residents: for example, they rarely send their children to neighborhood public schools, or if they do, they organize a separate school in the same building as the established school; so on the social level they really are greenfield.

That said, in the future, the trend for suburbanization of poverty can accelerate and become different from what it has been since the 1940s, if it reinforces itself. Cities are getting closer to a tipping point of being richer than their suburbs, possibly even to the point of having better social services for the middle class. This is to some extent already occurring with crime, though we’ve seen an absolute decline more than a relative decline in central cities, and is occurring more slowly with schools. Although on the whole the trend among people who care about schools and crime is to move to the suburbs, if the suburbanization of poverty, coming about from movement of people with other concerns, gets to this tipping point, then a large mass of people will abandon much of suburbia in favor of the cities, as urbanist common wisdom holds that they already are.

At least, they will try. The number of people who can live in a city is bounded by the product of household size and the number of available housing units, and the number of available housing units grows glacially in brownfield sites. Here, gentrified cities cannot imitate the properties of greenfield exurbs. As a result, we can expect to see an acceleration of the current trend of demand for cities translating into high housing prices rather than population growth. In such a scenario, cities will not become middle-class, but rather turn into enclaves of the rich and upper middle class. Of course there’s a natural limit on how high rents can go, especially in New York, Chicago, and other cities with large city proper populations, allowing the middle class to be comfortable in their suburban neighborhoods. But a transition to a French urban geography will be very rapid and self-reinforcing, and the rents will take every penny the upper middle class can afford.

Pedestrian Observations from Central London

As I got off the Underground, I was greeted by a fenced roadway without easy crossings. I found the way around a roundabout and started to walk toward the hotel where I was to meet my family, on the wrong side of the street. Although traffic was relatively light and the street was not very wide by New York standards, a fenced median required me to cross at one crosswalk, a Z-crossing with beg buttons and different pedestrian signal phasing for the two halves of the road. About five minutes after I first emerged above ground in London on foot, I realized: this city hates pedestrians.

Of course, the 20 mph zones, the naked streets, and the streets that are officially neither 20 mph nor naked but so narrow they might as well be are not, by themselves, hateful toward pedestrians. They’re rather pleasant. Even when they have beg buttons, which is often, those buttons can be ignored, as they routinely are in Providence. Beyond them, there’s a class of streets of about the same width as Manhattan streets, for example Portobello, which are busy and pedestrian-scaled. The issue is that the wider ones, the main streets, have completely abandoned any attempt at catering to pedestrians; they’re run by road engineers rather than by urban designers.

The failure of London is not a matter of preferring cars to cities, as is the case in American cities. The London Underground is quite nice, though it’s more because it charges exorbitant fares (see page 45 here, and realize that the graph seems to use a depreciated pound:Euro exchange rate) than because it’s particularly well-run. The commuter rail system is treated like modern rapid transit and is treated with lavish investment. There is an extensive bike share system, but with substandard bike lanes that tend to disappear into bus stops. None of this comes from a deliberate attempt to destroy alternative transportation; it’s just an unintended consequence of modernist planning.

In the view of the modernist planner, pedestrians and cars should always be strictly separated with fences if necessary, all crosswalks must be signalized, and it should be impossible to have any spontaneous crossings, or spontaneous anything for that matter. Ideally, crossings should be in pedestrian underpasses or overpasses, to eliminate all conflict. There can be delineated zones for pedestrians – side streets or some busy pedestrian malls, such as Covent Garden – but those should be placed away from the main streets.

In contrast, New York and Paris do things differently. Streets are wider both on average and at the minimum. Parking is done on the street, providing a buffer from traffic that’s wide enough to make me feel protected but porous enough that I can cross when I want to. Sidewalks are wide, crosswalks are frequent and let pedestrians cross in just one cycle, and increasingly protected bike lanes are cannibalizing road space that used to belong to cars. Of course, London’s main streets are wide enough that they could look like the delightful mess that is First Avenue if TfL wanted to. At a few places, they do look like New York streets, such as the aforementioned Portobello Road, with parked cars on one side. But for the most part, London treats its main streets, where most activity is, as arterial roads for cars.

This contrast between New York and London’s style of planning is jarring. New York’s grids are meticulously planned, without much variation except in the parts of Brooklyn and Queens where two separate grids meet. London is nothing like that – its street network is famously labyrinthine, and walking there with one’s roaming function turned off in order to save money requires hopping from one public map to another. But on the level of the individual street, this situation is reversed: London’s streets are meticulously traffic-engineered, while New York’s avenues are chaotic. It’s true even on the level of stereotypical cabbie behavior: for one, London’s cab drivers tend to obey traffic laws.

More fundamentally, it shows just why car-centric planning is so incompatible with urbanism: it tries to impose order on something that resists it. According to Christopher Alexander and the rest of the traditional urbanists, I’m supposed to shun the mechanistic design of New York (or Paris, which is as planned) and gravitate toward the traditionalism of London. In reality, my reaction is the exact opposite – on the micro level, New York is much more emergent and chaotic, and, at the level that is relevant to a local who doesn’t feel the need to constantly look up, vastly more human-scaled. London may appear to succeed on grand urban design principles on a map and in diagrams, but on little things that matter, it fails. It may have little pockets of success, and enough activity on the streets that I’m willing to spend 3 minutes crossing them when necessary, but it has nothing on its peer Western megacities.

That is not to say I avoided walking around London. On the contrary, I explored Central London during what little time I had to ditch my family. But the streets were not particularly inviting, and at some points it felt more like an adventure than like an ordinary walking trip. This never happened to me in New York or Paris or the (very few) other cities I’ve found to be walkable.

Travel Time to Work

The Census Bureau has a new publication about commuting in the US as of the 2009 American Community Survey. There isn’t much change from 2000 that’s mentioned, but one table of commute time piqued my interest. This is figure 8, on page 11, showing mean travel time to work by mode of transportation and time of departure to go to work.

It is well-known that commutes on transit take much more time than commutes in a car, but the breakdown based on time of departure defied my expectations. I thought transit trips take the least amount of time at rush hour, when frequencies are the highest, and the most amount of time late at night; car trips should be the opposite. Since people with very long commutes would leave earlier, perhaps around 7 to get to work at 9, the longest commutes by car should be for people leaving to go to work between 6 and 7 or between 7 and 8.

However, it turns out that by all modes, late-night commuters travel the longest. Trip-to-work time declines monotonically with departure time until the 9 am-noon category, where it’s at a minimum (my guess is that people in this category are disproportionately academics and other flex-time professionals who live close to work). This is close to expectation for transit, but for cars, it’s weird: why would people take longer to drive when the roads are clear than when they are congested?

I’d reject an explanation based on leaving very early to work. Insignificantly few people travel 3 hours to work. Instead, the only answer I can think of is that the groups of people who travel to work at rush hour and late at night are of different social classes, and this is reflected in commute times. Late-night commuters are usually low-paid service workers at gas stations, casinos, etc.; those also live on the wrong side of their metro area or in low-income exurbs, and need to drive considerable distances to the favored quarter.

Observe that the long late-night commute trend is the sharpest for carpoolers, who in general skew poor and nonwhite: eyeballing the graph, carpoolers who leave for work between midnight and 5 am travel twice as much time a those who leave between 9 am and noon, compared with a 50% time premium for single drivers (who are wealthier) and transit riders (who tend to work in CBDs, which are equally accessible from all directions).

Obviously, I’m going on partial data here; anyone with access to fuller data could potentially trivially refute my theory. If the theory is true, then two things will be observed in a fuller set of data. First, the late-night time premium will be the longest in large metro areas with favored and unfavored quarters, such as Los Angeles and Washington, and shortest in metro areas with less edge city-favored quarter development, such as New York. And second, if the departure time is broken into more granular categories, then the peak travel time will be at night rather than very early in the morning.

The Option of Profitable Transit

David Levinson’s post saying that transit should strive to restructure and be profitable stirred much discussion on neighboring blogs, including Human Transit (which broadly agrees with the idea if not the libertarian tone) and The Transport Politic (which does not), as well as multiple commenters who chimed in noting that it’s ridiculous to require transit to break even when cars get so many subsidies. While I agree with Levinson and Jarrett’s sentiments about core versus welfare services in principle, in practice the causes of transit losses are orthogonal to the subjects under discussion; the actual issues are somewhat related to what the commenters mention, but those commenters don’t go nearly far enough.

In the original post, Levinson proposes the following distinction:

Mass transit systems in the United States are collectively losing money hand over fist. Yet many individual routes (including bus routes) earn enough to pay their own operating (and even capital costs). But like bad mortgages contaminating the good, money-losing transit routes are bogging down the system.

We can divide individual systems into three sets of routes:

1. Those routes break-even or profit financially (at a given fare). This is the “core”.

2. Those lines which are necessary for the core routes to break-even, and collectively help the set of routes break-even. These are the “feeders”.

3. Those lines which lose money, and whose absence would not eliminate profitability on other routes. These money-losers are a welfare program. We might politely call them “equity” routes.

Jarrett, whose work has focused on priorities, not only agrees with the distinction but also downplays the importance of routes in category #2, and has often advocated that agencies let go of low-performing routes and concentrate on trunk frequency. While Jarrett is right and this distinction is critical when an agency needs to reduce its expenditure, it’s not going to make any agency profitable.

The number of routes in the US that break even financially is minimal. It’s easy enough to come up with routes that cover their avoidable costs, but transit has enough fixed costs that retreating to them is not going to be enough. For a New York example, see this spreadsheet, due to Cap’n Transit: although multiple bus routes are portrayed as profitable, once one checks the more detailed spreadsheet the Cap’n links to, it turns out that when including both direct and indirect operating costs, the best-performing route, the M86, drops from an operating ratio of 172% to one of 91%. Moreover, the best-performing routes do not form a trunk system, but are for the most part short-hop crosstown buses, with very high ridership per kilometer of route length. Most networks that actually are profitable consist of buses feeding into the Lincoln Tunnel, a choke point that has an exclusive bus lane in the morning rush hour.

Since in some other parts of the world urban transit is in fact profitable, we need to address causes other than the existence of lesser-used routes. I propose that instead of classifying American lines into profitable and unprofitable ones, a division in which one category is going to be very lonely, we classify whole networks according to what makes them lose so much money. I believe the following list of causes is relatively uncontroversial for good transit advocates:

1. High labor costs, predominantly overstaffing, but at some agencies (for example, Muni) also very high salaries.

2. Poor design, e.g. of intermodal transfers.

3. Low fares on some networks, which exist predominantly to provide minimal mobility of last resort rather than core transportation.

4. Bad regulations, especially when it comes to regional rail.

5. An auto-oriented policy.

Cause #5 is the elephant in the room. It’s not just ongoing auto subsidies and such mandates as Euclidean zoning and free parking. It’s also a decades-long history promoting auto-centric development, as a result of which uses are too widespread and low-intensity for transit to be of much use on most trips. Even edge cities are too dense sometimes; if you can find Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy’s sadly now behind paywall article Edgeless Cities, read it for a quick explanation of the limitations of the relatively intense but auto-centric development form of Tysons Corner or White Plains.

The best analogy I can give here is a growing industry or industrial zone. Early on in a country’s development, it will want industrial policy: subsidies, tax breaks, protectionism. The US railroads got it, most Japanese exporters got it, Samsung and Hyundai got it. As a country becomes richer and its economy becomes more mature, those industries become profitable and suddenly start advocating free trade and free markets, even for themselves, and whine loudly at the suggestion that rich regions or industries should subsidize poor ones.

There are plenty of routes in the US that, while unprofitable now, could be made profitable with better management and operating practices. This is usually what I write about. Those are causes #1, 2, and 4. Cause #3 applies to some but not the most relevant agencies; fares in large US cities tend to be average or high by international standards, though perhaps lower than the revenue-maximizing fares. Altogether, fixing what are essentially issues of competence is going to raise transit use, possibly to acceptable levels. But it will not turn New York into Tokyo, Boston into Taipei, or Providence into Zurich.