Consensus and Cities

Note: this is the first post in a series of 3-4 articles about consensus urbanism.

The dominant discourse on cities nowadays focuses on the role of visionary, top-down innovation. Some write about mayors who change paradigms, such as Michael Bloomberg and now Rahm Emanuel. Others write about entrepreneurs and the role of new technology, and invariably portray the change as groundbreaking and unforeseen by all except the dogged inventor. In contrast to this worldview, let me propose a view of urbanism based on political consensus among disparate interests, on forging agreement instead of trying to defeat everyone else.

The current trend toward livable cities, as seen in road diets and bike lane projects, is entirely top-driven. Bloomberg decided to make it his legacy, and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan moves aggressively with little consultation with community interests except those that already agree with her. Rahm Emanuel, infamous for his combative style, followed suit. This caused livable streets advocates, led by Streetsblog, to often identify community consensus with NIMBYism and top-down change with improvement; it’s unavoidable on Streetsblog, though sometimes there are glimpses of support for a more consensus-based policy on other livable streets blogs.

In reality, in cities, there are too many interest groups for one to normally dominate: labor, the middle class, multiple kinds of business, organized religion – and in the exceptional cases, such as Singapore, it comes out of autocracy. This is especially true in the US, with its multi-ethnic cities, requiring delicate acts of ticket-balancing. This is easy to paper over in majoritarian political systems, as the US is, but the actual practice of politics in American cities is far from majoritarian. Liberal cities have become cities of primaries – one wins by assembling an ad hoc coalition that can win the Democratic primary. In general, cities have multiple interest groups, even independently of ethnicity: see for example Christof Spieler’s analysis of the 2009 Houston mayoral race. The reason this political process hasn’t led to a consensus-based decision making is that the electoral process – in particular, the authoritarian strong-mayor system – is anti-consensus.

And yet, a consensus-based agenda is possible. As one of the Streetsblog community members explained to me, the way to obtain community support for a project is to talk to all stakeholders in the neighborhood, and understand what their hidden hopes and fears are; it’s important to avoid any situation in which someone later complains “Nobody informed me about this.” Ordinary people are far less intransigent than they can appear in the papers. For example, along Queens Boulevard, the long-term residents are still reeling from plans to turn the street into an expressway, and therefore will support or oppose a livable streets proposal in part based on whether they perceive it as turning the street into more of a highway (closing cross-streets) or less of one (widening sidewalks).

A community so empowered with its own ideas about how to make itself pedestrian-friendlier will of course help if a top-down reformist politician wants to make the city more livable, but it can also convince an apathetic politician to champion its cause if it can demonstrate that this cause is popular. The same is true of many other public projects and contentious issues; support for many of them crosses ideological and partisan boundaries, both the normal national ones and the specific issue of machinists vs. reformists in American cities.

Consensus must be contrasted with its distant top-down cousin, outreach. Outreach is what a partisan or dominant side in a debate does to get the little fish on board. There’s almost no possibility of dialogue. In contrast, consensus implicitly assumes that all stakeholders own the decision, more or less equally even if one side began the push for it and in reality did most of the work. One can imagine a community board agreeing to a development plan put forth by a mayor, and then criticizing the mayor for it after it fails; one can’t imagine the same if the community board is the body that created the plan.

Film critic Pauline Kael, when asked to comment on why Nixon won the 1972 election, refused to comment, saying she couldn’t know because nobody she knew voted for him. (This has been misquoted in conservative circles as her saying that she couldn’t believe he could have won.) Kael’s contrition was unusual; most people are more than happy to generalize based on the few people they know who fit a type, or, even worse, based on stereotypes they’ve heard from others. It’s bad enough in a bipartisan world, but in city politics, the large number of different factions and worldviews is such that no one force can possibly know enough to govern for everyone.

Although the political process of any non-autocratic city forces some cooperation among groups, the practice can be authoritarian enough that many are completely unheard of in the halls of power. This is especially true of recent immigrants and others who have no long-term activist presence, or of racial minorities in cities with a majority race and racist politics. But even groups with some organization and voting power can be shut out by a Bloomberg, an Emanuel, or even a Villaraigosa. The result is that even policy that isn’t malevolent can be destructive; this is the sin of many postwar urban renewal programs, which didn’t have to accommodate the concerns of the neighborhoods they leveled and had no intention of listening to anyone they didn’t have to listen to.

The alternative is to embark on a process that’s slow, but more robust. It’s immune to changes in electoral fortunes, since swings from 52-48 to 48-52 don’t have such a huge impact on policy. The roads movement in the US got everything it wanted from the 1910s to the 1950s, from governing ideologies ranging from Hooverism to New Deal liberalism. It’s important to imitate this one aspect of the roads movement, and ensure as many groups as possible pull in the same direction.

There are always authoritarians-in-making, people who pay lip service to any consensual and democratic concept they need to be seen to support but in reality seek power for themselves and surround themselves with yes-men. Those we need to be watchful of, to make sure that they never have the power to cause permanent damage. Streetsblog has shown glimpses of holding the Bloomberg administration’s feet to the fire on issues on which the city has not been a positive force for livability – for example, the 1st/2nd Avenue bike lanes – but we need to do more than that, and ensure that even if an autocrat has power, we use him more than he uses us.

Switching from a fundamentally authoritarian booster mentality to consensus governance has no hope of getting us demolition of low-performing or city-splitting freeways, or Hong Kong-style traffic restraint, at least not until the far future. It will take a long time to overturn preexisting anti-urban biases – even longer than necessary, since it will be based on consultation with many groups that oppose gentrification and find what’s happening to American cities now a bad thing. It requires letting go of many proposals that are currently too expensive, and focusing on making the process friendlier to good transit and walkability and less so to boondoggles and pollution. It requires sitting down with people we may find abhorrent on other issues. Its saving grace is only that, in the medium and long runs, it works.

Followup on the Providence Line and Woonsocket Trains

There’s a pretty bad mistake in my post about MBTA-HSR compatibility: the length of the Boston-Providence line is 70 kilometers, not 67 as stated in the post. In my defense, 67 (42 miles) is what the official mileposts say, on Wikipedia and on the catenary poles along the line. In calculating travel times I used a mix of milepost and Google Earth data, leading me to slightly understate the travel time difference between future high-speed trains on the corridor and improved regional rail. The difference is small, but is important for choosing overtake locations.

The correct technical travel times for nonstop 300 km/h HSR and 160 km/h regional trains making all current MBTA stops are 19.25 and 38.75 minutes, respectively. It’s offset by just half a minute from the technical time I originally thought was correct, but more of the difference occurs near Providence than near Boston. The upshot is that the single-overtake option in Sharon is loose in the north, allowing an additional Boston-area stop, and extremely tight in the south, requiring 200 km/h trains and not necessarily allowing regional trains to stop at Pawtucket.

This doesn’t directly affect Woonsocket trains, for which my example schedule is based on Google Earth lines and should be considered accurate given the assumptions. However, in a comment, I’ve been linked to a 2009 Providence Foundation study of the feasibility of a regional train to Woonsocket, under present FRA regulations, achieving similar trip times to those I propose but with fewer stops. The service proposed is very good relative to the regulatory and organizational environment it has to deal with – the projected cost per rider is about $25,000, fairly low by US standards.

The Providence Foundation study also includes a timed transfer at Pawtucket between Woonsocket and Boston, something I did not originally think of. Since the exercise on this blog assumes organizational competence on the MBTA’s behalf, we can choose an overtake option that makes this work optimally with short turnaround and transfer times. We should also include fare integration in the scenario, something that doesn’t currently exist even just between the MBTA and Amtrak. Under some HSR operating scenarios, it could charge the same fare as low-speed rail on the same corridor and have integrated ticketing, making a Pawtucket transfer less useful than an HSR transfer at Providence. Under others – for example, an HSR fare surcharge as currently practiced on the Shinkansen or ICE – it is not possible, and while integrated ticketing is still possible and desirable, cost-conscious commuters would need a solution not involving intercity trains.

It turns out that a single-overtake option does not accommodate Pawtucket transfers well, even if a Pawtucket stop could be squeezed into the schedule. Consider the following 200 km/h schedule north of Providence, with the 7% pad, rounded to a half-minute:

Providence 0:11:30
Pawtucket-Central Falls 0:15
South Attleboro 0:18
Attleboro 0:22:30
Mansfield 0:28
Sharon Arrive 0:33:30, Depart 0:37:30
Canton Junction 0:40
Route 128 0:44
Readville 0:46:30
Hyde Park 0:48:30
Ruggles 0:54
Back Bay 0:56
Boston South 0:58

It’s possible to replace Readville with Forest Hills; the point is that there’s room in the schedule for it. The times above were chosen to make :00 the symmetry axis – i.e. southbound regional trains leave Boston at :02. Moving the symmetry axis is possible but requires giving up through-service to Warwick – the timetable would be too tight. Under this schedule, southbound regional trains would arrive in Pawtucket at :45, and HSR trains would arrive immediately after, at about :48; thus, southbound Woonsocket trains would arrive at the earliest at :50 and :20, timing them to just miss the northbound connection to Boston. Clearly, under such an option, the only way to provide satisfactory Woonsocket-Boston service is to connect to HSR at Providence.

The two-overtake schedule looks much better. It’s a tighter fit for Woonsocket trains between the faster MBTA and HSR trains, but once they fit, the transfer works well. Consider the following 160 km/h two-overtake schedule, with four-tracking between Readville and Route 128:

Providence 0:07
Pawtucket-Central Falls 0:10:30
South Attleboro 0:13:30
Attleboro Arrive 0:18, Depart 0:22
Mansfield 0:27:30
Sharon 0:33:30
Canton Junction 0:36:30
Route 128 Arrive 0:40, Depart 0:41
Readville Arrive 0:43, Depart 0:45
Hyde Park 0:47
Forest Hills 0:51:30
Ruggles 0:54
Back Bay 0:56
Boston South 0:58

Southbound MBTA trains arrive at Pawtucket at :49:30 and southbound HSR trains pass by Pawtucket at :44. Southbound Woonsocket trains have a window of about 1.5 minutes – they can arrive at Pawtucket between :51:30 (after the MBTA) and :53 (before the next HSR) to fit in on the same track pair used by the MBTA and HSR – but within that window they have a convenient transfer: 2.5-4 minutes to the next northbound MBTA train, at :55:30. Note that even in the off-peak, when MBTA trains would come every 30 minutes rather than every 15 minute, this works – we can just shift the slots used by MBTA and Woonsocket trains. Earlier arrival is good for the entire turnaround schedule for Woonsocket trains, which based on trip times would “like” to arrive at Providence at :58 and at Pawtucket at :51, though, if the Mineral Spring stop for Woonsocket trains is dropped, then :52 arrival is very comfortable at all ends.

The inclusion of Woonsocket service also favors ant6n’s proposed no-overtake schedule, in which Boston-Providence trains run at 200 km/h and skip stops near Boston and let Stoughton trains provide local service, and trains run every 20 minutes. It’s tight if MBTA trains stop at Pawtucket, but gives Woonsocket trains ample time for anything. Assuming a Pawtucket stop can be squeezed, for :58 Boston arrival northbound regional trains would depart Pawtucket at :27, i.e. southbound MBTA trains would depart at :33 and HSR would pass by at :35, right on their heels. Woonsocket trains could be slotted anytime between :37 and :47:30, where :41 would be optimal for their own turnaround times and :45-46 would provide the shortest robust connection.

Quick Note: Amtrak’s Rolling Stock Shortage

It’s a commonplace that Amtrak can’t expand service frequency or even lengthen consists because it has a shortage of rolling stock. This is usually what is meant by “Amtrak is at capacity,” since there’s ample room to run longer trains. So I’ve been trying to investigate how much rolling stock constraint Amtrak actually has.

The sharpest shortage would be present in the Acela trains, since they have high seat utilization – about 60-65%, vs. 45-50% on the Regional. There are ten daily Acela roundtrips north of New York and fifteen south of New York, so at worst, fifteen consists are sufficient. The maximum frequency is hourly; the Boston-Washington trip time is just over 6.5 hours, so fourteen consists should be enough to provide more service than is available today, and with the current mix of hourly and two-hourly service currently used north of New York, thirteen are enough. There are twenty consists, so there are more than enough spares, and rolling stock does not actually limit capacity.

The New York-Washington trip time is 2:47-2:52, and the turnaround time is 8-13 minutes, which means that six trainsets could provide one extra hourly train. This implies Amtrak could do one of three things with the seven spares:

1. It could increase the frequency south of New York to half-hourly, except in the peak one hour in which the North River Tunnels are at capacity with current signaling.

2. It could couple two trainsets together. It could also mix this with option 1, depending on North River Tunnel capacity – i.e. couple two trains together just during rush hour and run every 30 minutes otherwise, and use the seventh spare to cover the mismatch in peak scheduling if necessary.

3. It could cannibalize the cars of some of the spares to lengthen the other consists from six to eight cars – or even ten if service to Boston is strictly two-hourly, which would require only ten consists.

For the most part, the platforms are long enough for the reconfigurations in options 2 and 3. All platforms are long enough for eight cars, and it’s fairly trivial to lengthen the few Acela platforms that are only eight-car long to ten cars except New London. All from New York south are long enough for twelve cars, used in the Pennsylvania Railroad days; Washington’s long platforms are low-floor, but it suffices to convert just one to high-floor. Option 2 really requires fourteen-car platforms – there are twelve cars but two power cars are in the middle – but the platforms are long enough at New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and at the other stations people at end cars could walk to an adjacent car, a practice already used at the low-floor Regional stations in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Note that in option 3, it’s in principle possible to make all service north of New York half-hourly, and either run all trains in double or cannibalize trains to create twelve-car consists. The problem with this is not platform length, but the complete lack of spares throughout the day.

There is, in other words, capacity for doubling Acela service south of New York, where the highest demand is. If Amtrak doesn’t provide this service, it could be an artificial shortage meant to keep prices high, or just insufficient demand for the quality of service. And if it cries capacity, it’s just after more money.

Pedestrian Observations from Barbados: Followup to Caribbean Car Ownership

The biggest criticism I’ve gotten in comments to Matt Yglesias’s link to my previous post was about my comparison of Puerto Rico’s car ownership with that of neighboring middle-income Caribbean nations. Multiple people claimed that Puerto Rico is much larger than the other countries and therefore needs cars, whereas in the rest of the countries people can walk everywhere. The correlation between size and car ownership is not statistically supported – whereas that with urban density is – but I’m going to instead narrate the pedestrian experience in Barbados to explain why positing such correlation doesn’t make sense. One commenter, Peter from the Block, writes:

Unless you are on a small island like Barbados or Antigua or Barbuda, in which case everything is close [enough to walk]!

My experience with Barbados comes from a week-long conference in Holetown last year. The conference was at the beginning of May, when the Sun came within two degrees of the zenith. The main road we’d use to get back and forth from the institute where we slept and the conference was held to the area where we could shop for food has little shade and even less tree coverage. The sidewalks are narrow, and there’s no real street wall: on the contrary, commercial buildings are fronted by parking lots. With the Sun directly overhead, the high asphalt coverage made for intense heat.

There was not much traffic by suburban American standards, but enough that it was still impossible to walk in the roadway, making the narrow sidewalks a problem whenever more than about 3 people walked together. In addition, the mall we used for food shopping is surrounded on all sides by parking, with a gas station on the side. My recollection of the people I saw in the area, including in the mall, is that they were mostly black, therefore majority-local (for while presumably there were some African-American tourists, most tourists would be white), but tourists comprised a disproportionate fraction.

For trips to other parts of the island, we got around with a tour bus rather than on foot. I tried at one point and failed to learn to use the local bus system and visit the main city, Bridgetown; walking would take far too long. The tour bus took us to a patch of rainforest and back, with a stopover at a beach; none of the points we passed in between looked especially dense, and few looked walkable.

Bear in mind, the above does not apply to Bridgetown. Purely from Google Maps tourism, it looks like a pedestrian-centric traditional city to me, of the kind that Charlie Gardner and Nathan Lewis would rave about. Presumably, car ownership is low because people in the cities can walk to their daily errands. But this is precisely the point I was making about the role of national policy in transportation mode choice: while Barbados’s size and national density are features of geography, the shape of its cities and its urban density are features of government policy.

Another thing one should note is that although walking to local errands was annoying, it was possible. This, again, is a feature of land use and transportation policy – probably inertia rather than a conscious choice, but still a different path from that taken by the US. Local travel is not that sensitive to national size and density.

Barbados is not Monaco. Its national population density, 660/km^2, is high by any global standard, but it’s not a high urban density. There are plenty of suburbs in New Jersey with several times that density where one could not walk to a supermarket. Under an American (or Malaysian) transportation policy, Barbados would’ve not only been pedestrian-hostile, but also sprawled like San Juan or Honolulu.

Special Interests and the General Interest

Via Market Urbanism, I learn that the Obama administration’s latest push for jobs is to subsidize manufacturing batteries for electric cars. The New York Times article about it lets us know that manufacturing in America is bleeding and needs this support:

We may marvel at the hardware and software of mobile phones and laptops, but batteries don’t get the credit they deserve. Without a lithium-ion battery, your iPad would be a kludge. The new Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf rely on big racks of lithium-ion battery cells to hold their electric charges, and a number of new models — including those from Ford and Toyota, which use similar battery technology — are on their way to showrooms within the next 18 months.

This flurry of activity comes against a dismal backdrop. In the last decade, the United States lost some five million manufacturing jobs, a contraction of about one-third. Added to the equally brutal decades that preceded it, this decline left large swaths of the country, the Great Lakes region in particular, without a clear economic future. As I drove through the hollowed-out cities and towns of Michigan earlier this year, it was hard to tell how some of these places could survive. Inside the handful of battery companies that I visited, though, the mood was starkly different.

While it’s true that the decline of the US auto industry has hollowed out Michigan, it’s not true that it’s a general feature of manufacturing. The recession barely hit Upstate New York and Pittsburgh, two regions with heavy, non-auto manufacturing; even prior to the recession, those regions had much faster per capita income growth than both the US as a whole and their respective states’ primate coastal cities. Even Providence, with unemployment that was at one point in the recession higher than Michigan’s, managed to eke out good income growth numbers. Not every Rust Belt region is Detroit.

But industrial policy in the US is decidedly auto-focused, and if it’s not, it’s based on hi-tech. Car batteries, offering both, can unite two different special interests, ensuring those industries will retain their government support.

Fundamentally, the US attitude to transportation is unchanged from the 1950s, when a former GM CEO tapped to serve as Secretary of Defense could tell the Senate that “For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the nation is considerable.” Sprawl is good, not for the average American who’s forced to spend thousands per year on cars, but for favored industries; thus, the federal government has no interest in stopping it, and local governments merely use the zoning tools handed down by the federal government.

Although the original good roads movement was about transportation, and was fueled in part by populist anger at railroads and concentration of wealth in the cities, from about the 1920s on it featured collusion between government and industry: for example, Bureau of Public Roads chief Thomas MacDonald created a pseudo-scholarly Highway Education Board, funded primarily by the auto and tire industries, featuring such essay contests as “How Good Roads Help the Religious Life of My Community.” By the postwar period, the US had no coherent transportation policy, just an industrial policy. The Interstate network was partly the culmination of the 1920s and 30s’ efforts and partly fiscal stimulus in a recession; everything since then has been about preserving the status quo for the benefit of the relevant industries, which can buy Congress more cheaply than they can make good cars or diversify their products. Even public transit investment is essentially about preserving the status quo of the early 1960s in the big cities, which goes to explain why APTA’s culture is so wedded to keeping things as they are and avoiding policies that would benefit transit at the expense of cars.

It’s common to attribute the failure of American transportation policy to uniquely American features such as new urban design or low density, but when the same policy was tried elsewhere, it produced the same result. For example, compare Puerto Rico to Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago, which have comparable density and income: Puerto Rico has Interstates, the rest have no freeways; Puerto Rico’s car ownership is higher than in most European countries, and twice that of the other middle-income Caribbean nations.

Much like its richer, better-known tiger neighbors, Malaysia has had fast economic growth in the last few decades, involving heavy industrial policy. But unlike in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, in Malaysia one of the industries chosen to be winners in the crucial period of early motorization was the car industry; to encourage the spread of this industry, the Malaysian government built highway infrastructure and let transit wither through benign neglect and overregulation, effectively turning Kuala Lumpur into a guinea pig for industry. Unsurprisingly, Malaysia’s car ownership is high for its income, and Kuala Lumpur’s transit mode share is 16%, compared with figures higher than 50% in richer East Asian cities.

The best source is Paul Barter’s thesis, comparing traffic policies in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore on the one hand, and Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok on the other. The first four cities engaged in traffic restraint early in their motorization: they imposed sin taxes on cars or on gasoline, or in Tokyo’s case required car owners to purchase off-street parking space before being allowed to buy cars. Hong Kong has had no industrial policy, but the other three are in countries with heavy government involvement in industry. But Singapore has no auto industry, and the Japanese and Korean auto industries were late entrants to their respective countries’ export-fueled growth. In contrast, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok imposed no such controls on traffic, and on the contrary built large urban freeway networks; if you’ve ever visited Bangkok, you’ve seen the double-decked freeways and the traffic cops with face masks.

Similar special interests dominate even in pro-transit policy in the US, since it’s so unused to having transportation policy whose primary purpose is to provide good transportation to users. I’ve already mentioned APTA, which is more interested in funding than in ridership, but the same can be said about development-oriented transit, which is judged based on its use to developers and ribbon-cutting politicians. A cleverer solution, due to Michael Moore, is to develop a domestic rolling stock industry from the carcasses of the auto industry – in other words, convert a special interest that promotes pollution into one that opposes it. But this won’t work, either, not when rolling stock is an order of magnitude cheaper than the cars it replaces; most of the costs of transit are local construction and operations rather than manufactures. An America that chooses transit over cars is an America that doesn’t need Detroit.

In a one-to-one match, special interests always win: they’re invested in their side and often fighting for survival. Detroit needs the rest of the US to keep driving much more than the rest of the US needs to reduce its sprawl. The gas and oil interests are more invested in their own existence than consumers are in rooftop solar panels. Corn farmers need ethanol subsidies more than people who aren’t corn farmers need the money for healthy food.

The reason general public interests can succeed is that while individual special interests are popular, the idea of special interests isn’t. The special interest-ridden politics of the Gilded Age led to the progressive movement – a movement that had its own special interests (including driving and suburbanization as the solution to social ills!) but somewhat cleaned up governance. Today the oil industry is unpopular in the US, even if its lobbyists are everywhere. The ideas of transit and clean energy are popular – in the few polls done on the subject, solar and wind power polls at the minimum in the 70s and often in the 80s, and “subway, rail, and bus systems” poll in the 60s, even higher than fuel-efficient cars.

The correct political strategy is therefore to keep hammering on the distinction between the general interest in good transit and walkability and special pollution and old-time practice interests. The general interest is what transportation policy is, as opposed to industrial policy. Some individual issues are too difficult and NIMBY-ridden, especially on the local level, but on the national level, policies promoting good government and a mode shift do not have those obstacles. Few politicians want to have to face entrenched special interests, but even fewer want to be branded as being for bad government.

California High-Speed Rail Alignment Questions

The most contentious technical issue about the California High-Speed Rail project is which alignment to use to get from the Central Valley to the Bay Area. The two options are Altamont Pass, roughly paralleling 580, and Pacheco Pass, much farther to the south. A summary of all alternatives can be found on page 115 of the revised Bay Area-Central Valley EIR. For more detailed examination of the alternatives, see the old EIR: the base Altamont option is on pages 903-4, the base Pacheco option on pp. 969-70. Although Altamont is somewhat longer, the two alignments are about even on travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco (in fact, Altamont is 2 minutes faster).

The basic tradeoff is that Pacheco is somewhat faster for LA-San Jose and serves San Jose and San Francisco on one line, while Altamont is much faster for Bay Area-Sacramento and requires less construction overall and has separate branches to San Francisco and San Jose. Overall, Altamont is superior because of its advantage for travel from the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Upper Central Valley (except Merced, whose commute ties to the Bay Area are weaker than those of Modesto and Stockton). Transit activists and environmentalists either preferred Altamont or did not have an opinion. However, San Jose didn’t want to be left on what it perceived as merely a branch, and lobbied hard for Pacheco, and as a result Pacheco became the preferred alternative; in addition, unlike the NIMBYs on the Peninsula, the NIMBYs in Pleasanton and Tracy complained about HSR early.

A third option is to go via Altamont but enter San Francisco from Oakland via a second Transbay Tube (old EIR, pp. 957-8). The EIR projected it to have the highest ridership, since it serves both San Francisco and Oakland on one branch and has the shortest LA-SF travel time. It was rejected because a second tube would be very expensive, though in fact the EIR pegs the cost of this option at a few hundred million dollars more than the base Pacheco and Altamont options; urban construction along the Caltrain line is expensive as well. In a crunch trains could continue along an electrified but not otherwise upgraded Caltrain line at lower speed, reducing cost, but by a similar token people could transfer to BART at Livermore under any Altamont option and at West Oakland under a second tube option. However, should a second tube be built anyway to relieve the near-capacity BART tube, such an option would become far and away the best, making all others redundant.

The choice of Pacheco became one of the galvanizing features of the technicals in California, who without exception preferred Altamont. To answer concerns that Bay Area-Sacramento travel has to be served, both the HSR Authority and various politicals have proposed a cure that’s worse than the disease: build a high-speed commuter overlay along Altamont (the official version) or the I-80 corridor used by Capitol Corridor trains (consensus among pro-Pacheco blog commenters, see e.g. this map with a second tube just for SF-Sacramento trains).

Pacheco itself is mildly defensible. It would arguably have been superior if Sacramento did not exist, and I-80 would have been the better alignment for SF-Sacramento service if LA did not exist. But given that LA and Sacramento both exist, Altamont’s ability to serve LA, Sacramento, and SF with just one expensive bit through the pass becomes more valuable. If Altamont is built, there would be no point in a Pacheco overlay, whose primary use would then be a frankly uncompetitive connection to Monterey. But Pacheco leads to demands for an overlay service, one that’s almost certainly too expensive to build just for Bay Area-Sacramento travel.

The Capitol Corridor, the other option for SF-Sacramento service, is too slow. With a bus connection from SF to Emeryville, the fastest service takes 2:08 from downtown SF to Sacramento. Even Pacheco beats that: express trains detouring through Gilroy and Merced will nominally take 1:53; service via Altamont is a little more than an hour . For SJ-Sacramento travel, it’s 3:05 on Amtrak and 1:24 via Pacheco. Substantial upgrades are impossible since Union Pacific owns the track and restricts passenger trains’ performance in order to remove a headache for freight operations. The remaining option is to build passenger-dedicated bypasses, at considerable cost and with little benefit over doing it right the first time.

Amtrak’s Role in Regulatory Reform

In my previous post, I focused on the FRA’s self-justifying bureaucratic approach to regulation. However, the other main institute of intercity rail in America, Amtrak, too doesn’t come out of the comments looking very well. Unlike the FRA, Amtrak is not actively malevolent, and on the narrow issues it raised, it’s in the right. However, its choice of what to comment on betrays a warped sense of priorities.

On pages 35-36 of the document detailing the comments to transportation regulatory changes and the agency responses, Amtrak effectively asks the FRA to permit it to operate trains at up to 160 mph, rather than 150 mph as is the limit today. Says Amtrak,

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) states that regulations governing high-speed track are duplicative and overlapping.  Amtrak notes that one set of regulations for track Class 8 governs speeds from 125 mph up to 160 mph, and yet another provision in this section states that operations at speeds above 150 mph are currently authorized by FRA only in conjunction with a rule of particular applicability (RPA) that addresses the overall safety of the operation as a system.  Amtrak believes that the speed threshold for an RPA should be 160 mph, to be consistent with the class track speeds.

This is a sensible request, within the boundaries set by accepting the rule of particular applicability in principle. The FRA is wrong to brush it off. However, Amtrak’s decision to make this its stand about speed while neglecting to ask for a waiver from the static buff strength rule shows it’s more interested in pizzazz than in performance.

Amtrak trumpets its 24-mile catenary upgrade, permitting trains to plow the tracks between New Brunswick and Trenton at 160 mph, up from 135 mph today. The time saving from this move is 1:40 minutes, minus a few seconds for acceleration; the time saving from going at 160 mph rather than 150 as the FRA currently permits is 36 seconds, again minus a few seconds for acceleration. The sole purpose of this is to let Amtrak brag about top speed, as it already does. The literally hours that could be saved by higher cant deficiency and higher acceleration are not on Amtrak’s radar, for they do not by themselves let Amtrak write press releases about its top speed.

Although the FRA is unwilling to repeal its regulations preventing unmodified European or Japanese trains from running on US track, it also practically begged agencies to request waivers. The process is sure to be onerous and frankly masochistic, but if Amtrak is willing to make a comment to try to cut the Acela’s travel time by 36 seconds, it ought to be willing to go through the motions of submitting a waiver request to cut it by 2 hours.

The FRA Doesn’t Need Reform – It Needs A Revolution

Via Systemic Failure, I’ve learned that the federal government is implementing regulatory reform, including some cosmetic changes to railroad regulations; for details, go to this file and see pages 30-41, 54-61, 105-106, 108-109, 112-113, and 115-127.

Drunk Engineer already rightly excoriates the FRA for sticking to its static buff strength regulations even in the face of positive train control, but the full quote given by the FRA to the SRC, which raised the issue, showcases Kafkaesque malevolence. On pages 39-40, the FRA says:

FRA’s regulatory approach to passenger equipment safety is balanced and does incorporate both crash avoidance and crashworthiness measures.  FRA necessarily considers the safety of the rail system as a whole, beginning with ways first to avoid an accident, such as through adherence to standards for railroad signal and operating systems (to avoid a collision) and railroad track (to avoid a derailment).  Yet, FRA is indeed concerned about mitigating the consequences of an accident, should one occur, and crashworthiness features are an essential complement to crash avoidance measures in providing for the overall safety of the rail system.

FRA has tailored the application of its crashworthiness standards.  See 49 CFR 238 Subpart C, and § 229.141.  SRC itself notes that, as a tourist railroad, it is exempt from the crashworthiness standards.  Similarly, FRA has established a policy to issue waivers under appropriate circumstances to help limit the impact of these standards on light rail equipment that shares use of trackage or rights-of-way with conventional rail equipment (see appendix A to 49 CFR part 211).  FRA has also continued to explore means of making its standards more performance-based.  FRA has developed guidelines through the RSAC process for waiver approval to use alternative, performance-based crashworthiness standards for passenger equipment operating at speeds up to 125 mph.  FRA is pursuing a similar approach through the RSAC process to develop standards for passenger rail equipment operating at speeds up to 220 mph.

FRA’s intent has been to develop a set of standards in the alternative to FRA’s structural and occupant protection requirements for railroad passenger equipment operating at speeds up to 125 mph that would provide the same level of safety and yet be more performance based and more technology and design neutral.  Consequently, FRA does anticipate that the alternative standards will provide a benefit to the industry to the extent regulated entities take advantage of the additional flexibility.

Observe that, after saying its regulations are important for the safety of the entire system, the FRA basically admits they’re bad for modern passenger rail, and proposes that railroads that want to do better seek waivers. At this stage, I doubt even the FRA believes that its trains are safer for occupants in crashes with freight trains than UIC-compliant EMUs with crumple zones. The FRA is simply justifying its own existence here, giving itself more jurisdiction than it really needs. Demanding that railroads paint an F on the front end of every locomotive (p. 40-41) is a joke; making agencies jump through hoops to obtain trains that don’t telescope in crashes is a danger to public safety.

If the FRA truly believed its rules were necessary for freight compatibility – or if it were simply captive to freight interests – it would promulgate a streamlined process by which passenger-primary lines can switch to UIC or Japanese rules. New operations could convert lines to those rules by consent of the host freight railroad; it would be a bonanza for the freight rail industry and a ripoff for passenger rail, but it would only impose costs on the public that the public could pay. It would not require a new waiver application from each operator, which costs more than what smaller operators can pay.

Note also that Amtrak, far from following the FRA’s request for waiver applications, only asked for one major change: it asked for performance-based track inspection regimes (p. 124), rather than ones based only on top speed as determined by track class. The FRA brushed it off, saying that maintenance requirements and derailment risk depend on speed. An agency that really thinks this, and doesn’t think axle load or center of gravity matters, should not be in charge of developing alternative standards.

The FRA is beyond hope. Its direct boss, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, should submit a list of about 10-20 existing regional and high-speed trains, from both Europe and Japan, and tell the FRA that it has until the end of the year to write rules under which all listed trains can run on US tracks unmodified except for such modular changes as loading gauge, or else it’ll be dissolved. Freight rail could regulate itself; the AAR won’t do a worse job than the FRA is currently doing. Passenger rail should just pick either the UIC or Japan and follow its rules consistently. Without this gun to the FRA’s proverbial head, nothing will change. It needs revolution, not gradual reform.

Blackstone River Regional Rail

Following up on my proposal for improving regional and intercity rail service between Providence and Boston, let me propose a line from Providence to Woonsocket, acting as an initial line of a Providence S-Bahn. The basic ideas for how to run a small-scale regional railroad, as usual, come from Hans-Joachim Zierke’s site, but are modified to suit the needs of a line with a larger city at one end. It is fortunate that the road connecting the two cities is not a freeway, and takes 24 minutes, allowing good transit on the same market to be competitive.

RIPTA’s bus route 54 goes from Providence to Woonsocket, generally taking 53 minutes one-way, with a few express runs taking as little as 39; the frequency is about half-hourly both peak and off-peak. A regional line would effectively railstitute it. Lincoln Mall, which is on the bus route but not near the rail line, would be served by a branch bus with timed connections to the train. See map here, together with some proposed intermediate station locations. Depending on the stop pattern, additional buses could be replaced, most readily route 75.

To avoid degrading service, frequency must be at least half-hourly. Of course, complete fare and schedule integration with the buses is non-negotiable: the fare on the train should be the same as on the buses it’s to replace, and transfers should not cost extra money.

As in the case of Zierke’s proposal for regional rail in southern Oregon, this is impossible under FRA regulations. Unlike the case of MBTA-HSR compatibility, getting a waiver here is difficult, since RIPTA is a small agency and can’t afford to conduct the studies required for a waiver request. In addition, north of Pawtucket, the line is an active freight line owned by the Providence and Worcester Railroad, and passenger service with high platforms (low-floor equipment is ruled out by the high platforms at Providence) may well require a new passenger-dedicated single track, raising capital costs by tens of millions of dollars.

Nonetheless, in a regulatory environment more favorable to passenger rail, such a line can succeed. Travel time of about 25 minutes, comparable to driving, is realistic. The length of the line is 25.5 km, and could still support a minimum speed of about 90 km/h even in its curvier northern half. The technical travel time is about 15 minutes plus 1 minute per stop. To ensure one-way travel time remains well under 30 minutes, enabling two trains to provide half-hourly service, there’s a maximum of about 9 stops. The map above includes 7 stops I believe are necessary for the line’s success, and a few optional locations. The explicit assumption for the following schedule is 90 km/h speed north of Lincoln Junction and 120 km/h south of it. Together with 7% padding, we obtain:

Woonsocket 0:00
East Woonsocket 0:02
Manville-Cumberland Hill 0:06
Albion 0:09
Lincoln Junction 0:12
Valley Falls 0:16
Pawtucket-Central Falls 0:19
Mineral Spring 0:21
Providence Place Plaza Shopping Center 0:24
Providence 0:26

Trains meet south of Lincoln Junction, requiring at a minimum two tracks at and south of the station. If trains leave both ends simultaneously, then they stop at Lincoln Junction within 2 minutes of each other, making timing the connecting bus easier.

This meshes with the sped-up trains to Boston well. Travel time from the junction with the NEC in Pawtucket is 7:30 minutes, versus 3 minutes on a 200 km/h intercity trains. Under the one-overtake option, intercity trains arrive in Providence 3 minutes after regional trains from Boston, giving the DMUs an ample window to make local stops (8 minutes with a 2-minute headway and 15-minute Boston service), even with the flat junctions at the split in Pawtucket and at Providence Station. Under the two-overtake option, Boston regional trains arrive about 5 minutes after intercity trains assuming no additional stops in the Providence area; adding the same three stops made by Woonsocket trains to the Boston trains would turn this into 9 minutes, and the DMUs would have a window between the intercity and regional trains, combining to provide intense local frequency between Providence and Pawtucket.

In other words, capacity constraints at Providence do not exist under this service pattern, answering concerns raised in comments on a post Greater City: Providence. The post itself has important ideas for pleasant development near Providence Station, which is currently urban renewal hell. The only drawback of railstitution is that Kennedy Plaza is closer to the jobs of downtown Providence than the train station, and even with the trip time cut from 53 minutes to 26, it’s essential to provide easy pedestrian access from the station to nearby city destinations.

Modern DMUs have fuel consumption similar to that of buses and are maintained in the same shops, so with higher speed RIPTA can expect similar or lower operating costs and higher ridership. If a passenger-dedicated track is not required, then 9 high platforms, a passing siding, and 4 DMUs should suffice; capital costs would be very low, especially relative to ridership, and may well receive federal support. Based on Zierke’s German examples, daily ridership in the low to middle thousands would be good but realistic; 10,000 would be a miracle and 2,000 a bust.

(With thanks to Jef Nickerson for the idea.)

Quick Note: Zombie Myths About Amtrak And Profitability

Greater Greater Washington has a post up invoking almost every myth Amtrak and its backers use to argue that the National Railroad Passenger Corporation is actually doing okay. Of those, the single worst is about finances: “Amtrak nevertheless covers over 80% of its total costs through revenue from passengers, whereas most of the world’s passenger train operators fall in the 50% to 60% range.” The link sends us to an Amtrak page that states revenue and expense numbers leading to a 67% operating ratio and contains the following lie:

In FY 2010, Amtrak earned approximately $2.51 billion in revenue and incurred approximately $3.74 billion in expense. No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without some form of public support for capital costs and/or operating expenses.

Until Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore are erased from the face of the Earth, this statement is trivially false even in its weakest reasonable form; in those countries the government constructs many lines but then charges the private operators market rent. The JRs get no slack from the government: recall that the notion that the government wiped their Shinkansen construction debt is a myth. But even in Europe, intercity rail is profitable. Those profits are net profits, counting depreciation and interest on capital (often obliquely, e.g. SNCF’s LGV construction interest shows up as tolls to infrastructure owner RFF), which Amtrak prefers not to in order to boost its farebox recovery numbers.

The GGW post has worse whoppers than the Amtrak page does, but the one about profitability is the worst: not even Amtrak dares claim it has better finances than the world’s major passenger railroads. But there are others. One is about seat occupancy: the blog claims “Amtrak still manages to fill most of the seats it carries between Washington, New York, and Boston on both on Acela Express and Northeast Regional services”; in reality, while Acela seat occupancy is 60-65%, Regional seat occupancy is about 45%, both figures coming from comparing per-passenger-mile and per-seat-mile finances in Amtrak’s monthly reports. Another is a general claim that Amtrak is at capacity because Penn Station is; in fact, Penn Station itself has ample unused capacity, and even the North River Tunnels could support a few more trains per hour with better signaling.

The only myth missing from the post is the one that states Amtrak has majority share of travel in the Northeast Corridor; in fact, Amtrak only has majority share of the air/rail market, and its Vision claims 89% of present travel is by road. This myth I believe is a product of honest confusion; it’s simply easier to talk about mode share without specifying that it’s just air/rail, and there’s much more literature about air-rail competition than competition with roads, leading people to conflate the two. Here Amtrak is actually more honest than JR Central, which only states air/rail shares and ignores highways. My own preference is to make it clear which share I’m talking about, to prevent such misunderstanding.