Why Smartphones’ Effect On Transit Is Overrated

The spread of smartphones, with their apps for maps and transit schedules, is leading the usual tech boosters to claim that the world is on the cusp of revolution and transit and urbanism must change to accommodate. This video by Gensler Architects is a typical example, rightly excoriated on Human Transit for trying to replace fixed-route public transit with glorified taxi-share and calling it “liberated transit.” What this could be called is smartphone-oriented transit, and it’s rarely good transit.

In reality, technological progress is slow and painstaking, and does not offer many good reasons to reinvent the wheel. Consider clockface schedules: one would expect that in an environment in which everyone has a smartphone and could look up schedules in an instant, there’s no need for an easily memorable timetable. One would expect the benefits of clockface schedules to evaporate, and agencies with arbitrary schedules to have sharp ridership increases, as if they suddenly adopted such timetables.

However, this is not observed. We haven’t seen outsized ridership increases in the last few years in takt-less regions imitating the ridership gains coming from a memory schedule. See, for example, the anemic ridership gain on the MBTA commuter rail in the 2000s. It turns out that being able to know when your train is coming without consulting software is still worth something, just as it was worth something to not need to consult a printed timetable.

For another example, consider good service maps, including a listing of route frequency. Google Transit will tell you when the bus is expected to come, but not delve into which routes are more frequent and reliable than others. Thus separate listing of frequent buses remains important – in fact, it’s gradually being adopted in American cities now, without any fanfare from urban visionaries.

Since smartphones don’t have that big of an effect on transit, there are two questions that naturally follow. First, why do some agencies, such as New York’s MTA, constantly plug their growing body of transit-related apps? And, second, if smartphone-oriented transit doesn’t work, what technologies do meaningfully affect transit use, and how?

The answer to the first question is that it comes from ideology. If you think like an American entrepreneur, or like a Friedmanesque booster who likes American entrepreneurs, this attitude is understandable. Smartphones were invented in North America; apps are written by upstart members of Richard Florida’s creative class. It’s much easier for people with such a mentality to get the role of the software superstar than to get that of the transit planner. If a transit planner gets fame from such quarters, it’s for doing bold, individualist, technological things, which are almost never best industry practice. Former MTA chief Jay Walder’s ideas about smartcards are a good example: his idea of how to speed up commuter rail ticket-checking is to equip conductors with smartcard readers but still require them to go through the entire train every single time. Proof-of-payment is for light rail and European bureaucrats; true American entrepreneurs use hi-tech solutions.

A related issue is one of competence. The MTA is bragging about everything, since it’s under criticism about everything and there’s no progress about costs; apps are one of several things to brag about, to make it look as if lemons are actually lemonade. This is not ideological, but it’s closely related to reformism and boosterism. Since part of the Friedmanesque ideology is that progress comes from individualists, good government does not really come into play, except when it encourages individualists to make apps. If government is inherently incompetent, then there’s no need to engage in good design or follow best practices; the app developers will take care of everything.

The answer to the second question is that smartphones do make transit more convenient – the map is right there – but are not a game changer. The technology most relevant to transit is the kind that makes it possible to run more smoothly, cheaply, punctually, and quickly. Recent examples include improved TBM designs, regenerative braking, guided buses, articulated train interiors, 100% low-floor buses and trains, DMUs that can be maintained in bus shops, hybrid and electric buses, more aerodynamic vehicles, and catenary-free light rail. None is a game changer; all taken together make transit much more efficient and convenient than it was in 1950, all else being equal. Of course, comparable technological improvements also made cars more convenient, and the spread of cars has made transit less useful, but the vehicles themselves are a huge improvement.

It’s easy to think of technology as a series of gamechanging innovations, but it really isn’t. The assembly line was a gamechanger, but it took multiple decades for mass-produced cars to remake society in their image, and every step of the way it was intimately related to such preexisting trends as urban renewal and anti-railroad populism. It should be thought of as a painstakingly long process of growth, which is nothing more than employing more resources and employing them more efficiently.

The upshot is that everything that was important for good transit in 2000 is important today. Although it may dismay some reformers with too much vision, it’s actually a good thing for riders: it means that the last few decades’ knowledge of how to run trains and buses is still relevant. The wheel is a familiar, well-studied technology. The challenges today are somewhat changed, but the knowledge of how to face them is the same. Good transit is not only different from smartphone-oriented transit, but also technically much easier to implement well.

Every Time You Justify Infrastructure on Competitiveness Grounds, A Kitten Dies

You’ve heard it before: the US is falling behind China and Europe, and has to build more infrastructure to stay competitive in the 21st century. It’s unavoidable in almost any Thomas Friedman article. Boosters, construction industry interests, and even ordinary high-speed rail supports keep asking, how can a country grow without matching other countries’ HSR investment? Never once do they stop to ask why HSR should do anything to help increase competitiveness, beyond vague promises about reducing oil dependence and carbon emissions, issues for which HSR is roughly priority #20.

Countries do not in fact compete with one another. This is made clear in Paul Krugman’s 1994 article in Foreign Affairs, Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession. If China builds HSR and becomes richer as a result, the US does not suffer. It’s not competing with Chinese productivity in any meaningful way. In principle, the effect on US wages could be negative if production moves to China or positive if the larger Chinese market buys more American goods; in practice, the effect of other countries’ growth on the US is negligible.

But let’s zoom in and discuss how exactly HSR, or other large infrastructure projects, could lead to more competitiveness. They could boost productivity, but that is mostly an issue for freight transportation. Passenger transportation is mainly a consumer product, not a producer product. In fact, during its own spurt of fast growth from the 1960s to 1997, South Korea lagged in building passenger transportation, explicitly because it prioritized capital investments in industry over such consumer products as highways.

International corporations looking for a place to site a new factory will not look at the general infrastructure situation; they’ll look at what’s useful to their needs. Nissan chose Smyrna, Tennessee for its plant because it had good freight rail and Interstate access and was in a low-wage, anti-union state. The closest thing to passenger-oriented infrastructure that we could look at in such cases is international airports, and the Nashville area only has a small one; Nissan, and the other Japanese and European companies locating plants in the South, would have clustered in Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston if they’d cared.

Let’s zoom in even more, specifically on Nissan and what it’s done to Smyrna. Smyrna is a company town; Nissan even told it to zone the area around the plant as industrial-only, on the theory that commercial development would distract the workers too much. In any other context, the proponents of competitiveness and high-value-added industrial policy would decry such cases as a race to the bottom; and yet, those are among the few situations in which there’s actual competition among regions. The local drivers of a productive economy, rather than one that’s simply a passive recipient of other companies’ transplant factories, have nothing to do with infrastructure megaprojects. Silicon Valley exists because of Stanford, not because of the Peninsula Line or US 101.

At least, there’s competition among regions looking for foreign investment. In other contexts, it’s not as clear. The effects of HSR on national economic growth are too small to be visible, which means that it’s impossible to conduct a study that reliably tells if they exist. But the effects on regional development, a related trope, are decidedly mixed. It’s clear that HSR promotes development near the station; it’s unclear whether it actually develops the surrounding areas, rather than merely concentrates development near the station. Evidence from the Shinkansen as well as other high-speed systems is decidedly mixed – see for example this review.

Building public infrastructure is not a race. Other countries’ experience is a good teacher of what works and what doesn’t, and, provided adjustments for different circumstances are made, can help gauge whether HSR will be successful in the US. However, there is a very big difference between saying that HSR succeeded on a route similar to an American proposal and saying that the US must build because other countries are building as well.

As Krugman notes, the mentality of treating things as if they were races oversimplifies, and leads to bad projects. In the case of transportation, it means focusing on visibility, prestige, and spectacle rather than on cost-effectiveness, usability, and mode share. This is where development-oriented transit comes in: one of the causes of airport transit boondoggles is the insistence of cities and airport authorities that their airport access be world-class, which means a no-expense-spared people mover or, worse, premium rail link to downtown. Those projects, too, often come with promises of competitiveness, as if an airline is going to choose its hub based on the existence of a rail link with a 10% mode share rather than low landing fees or proximity to many travelers and destinations.

At least, development-oriented transit is transit. Paul Barter’s thesis explains how in the postwar period, Asian cities often started building freeways simply because that was what the US was doing and they wanted to be modern. I’m most reminded by the line from the Onion, attributed to the Chinese government: “this year, a million people in China will die from cancer – cancer is a very modern disease.” HSR exists largely because Japan National Railways President Shinji Sogo refused to accept a railway decline and instead built the Tokaido Shinkansen. Although HSR is not freeways, some of the rhetoric coming from various boosters glorifying China’s lack of environmental and community protection has the same basic problem of placing a national race over quality of life.

(Some) HSR projects are good economic and transportation development; they should be sold as good economic and transportation development. Read this summary on Reason & Rail and note how nowhere does Paulus Magnus mention competitiveness. Japan didn’t build the Shinkansen in order to compete with anyone, and France and Germany didn’t build the LGVs and ICE system in order to compete with Japan. If what they’ve done has succeeded then it’s likely that similar American lines could also succeed and should be built, but it’s not a race and the concept of being behind or of needing to imitate what others have done promotes boondoggles, not good transit.

Cost Overruns: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Bent Flyvbjerg

Let me preface this post by saying I have nothing against Bent Flyvbjerg or his research. My problem is purely with how it’s used in the public media, and frequently even in other academic studies, which assume overruns take place even when they do not.

Stephen Smith sent me a link to an article in The Economist complaining about cost overruns on the California HSR Central Valley segment. The article gets its numbers wrong – for one, the original cost estimate for Merced-Bakersfield was never $6.8 billion, but instead was $7.2 billion in 2006 dollars and $8 billion in YOE dollars, according to CARRD, and as a result it portrays a 25% overrun as a 100% overrun. But the interest is not the wrong numbers, but the invocation of Flyvbjerg again.

Nowhere does the article say anything about actual construction costs – it talks about overruns, but doesn’t compare base costs. It’s too bad; Flyvbjerg himself did a cost comparison for rapid transit, on the idea that the only way to reliably estimate costs ex ante is to look at similar projects’ ex post costs. His paper has some flaws – namely, the American projects he considers are older than the European projects, and there’s no systematic attempt at controlling for percentage of the line that’s underground, both resulting in underestimating the US-Europe cost difference – but the method is sound. Unfortunately, this paper is obscure, whereas his work on cost overruns is famous.

In the case of high-speed rail, it seems to me, from pure eyeballing, that there is a difference between countries in how much costs run over, and that this correlates strongly with high construction costs. German train projects, including the one example cited by the Economist, run over a lot. French and Spanish high-speed lines do not, and also cost much less.

Of course, this by itself doesn’t mean this correlation should keep holding: up until Barcelona Line 9, originally budgeted at €1.9 billion but now up to €6.5 billion, Spanish subway lines were built within budget. France has not yet had a factor-of-3 overrun on a major project, but it might in the future, and I’m not going to bet my life that it won’t. But what this does suggest is that looking at German overruns as if they’re typical rather than extremal cases is deeply misleading.

There’s an argument to be made that California’s inability to rein in the contractors will in fact lead to German cost overruns. California HSR’s projected costs look downright reasonable, whereas rapid transit projects in the state are unusually expensive. The proposed BART to San Jose tunnel is $4 billion for 8 km – very high by general subway standards, and unheard of for a subway in low-density suburbia. Going by Flyvbjerg’s own attempts to find ex ante cost estimates that are reliable, this could be used as evidence for future cost escalations; general overruns couldn’t, not without being more specific.

Quick Note: The Hong Kong MTR is Profitable

There’s a pervasive myth that the Hong Kong MTR is profitable only because the company’s real estate investments subsidize the train operations. For a trivial refutation, go to the MTR’s 2008 financial statement. Operating income was HK$13,995 million, which breaks down as $4,670 million from real estate development and $9,325 million from railway operations. Net income was $8,280 million; the statements do not break down depreciation, amortization, and interest charges according to whether they come from transportation or real estate, but the operating profits from transportation would’ve been enough to cover everything.

For a comparable link to Japanese private railroads, another source of the myth of development-subsidized transportation, see this article from JRTR.

National Low-Speed Rail Network Proposal

With all the focus on high-speed rail and urban transit, it’s easy to forget the low-speed rail that forms the backbone of every good national transit network. Switzerland, whose high-speed infrastructure consists of shared passenger and freight rail base tunnels, has a national rail ridership that puts the rest of Europe to shame. Japan may be famous for the Shinkansen, but the enormous low-speed networks surrounding Tokyo and Osaka are the two busiest in the world. Although intercity travel produces disproportionate revenues, most trips are local, even on mainline rail, and government rail planning should make sure to prioritize regional travel.

While the main intercity routes in the US should be eventually upgraded to high-speed rail, rather than rapid legacy rail, the low-speed network should dominate regional traffic as well as intercity gaps in the high-speed network. This means two traffic classes: regional and intercity. The intercity travel in question is for the most part short-distance – for examples, lines in Michigan fanning out of Detroit and not reaching any future high-speed lines to Chicago, lines in Georgia fanning out of Atlanta, and the portions of Amtrak California that won’t be replaced by HSR. The service level on the intercity lines should be a more modern version of the Regional, Keystone, and Empire South services; the service level on the regional lines should be the same as that of regional lines in Continental Europe.

The standards for the low-speed network should be based on the best industry practices. Because those lines are by definition not the highest-volume routes, it’s important to plan them with utmost care to keep costs under control. Federal assistance should aim to do the opposite of what FRA regulations do today. Instead of encouraging outdated practices, the federal government should on the contrary promulgate a set of good practices, based on what is done in Switzerland and other countries with good regional rail.

This is similar to what the various good roads bureaus did in the early 20th century, creating a unified set of standards. That said, the roads movement should only be an inspiration in the vaguest sense, since in reality US road building was much heavier on concrete than necessary and lighter on organization, leading up to the overbuilt Interstate network. This means that, whereas federal-aid highways are required to meet minimum standards for width and speed, federal-aid low-speed rail should be required to meet minimum standards for schedule and fare integration with local transit, signaling, and punctuality. The German motto, organization before electronics before concrete, rings truer here than for other kinds of transit investment, and agencies that ignore it should not receive funding for concrete before they complete the cheaper fixes.

Scandinavia is of especial importance as a rolemodel, because the lower density of its metro areas forces its regional trains to be faster, as they ought to be in the US. Combined with the wider loading gauge, it means that Swedish and Norwegian orders should be one of the sources of early American rolling stock. The lower speeds of Continental Europe (excluding Scandinavia) are not sufficient for more sprawling American urban areas. Instead, regional trains should have a top speed of about 160 km/h or just a little less, except on branch lines. A good example for the service quality to aim for is the Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog plans for trains from San Francisco to San Jose: local trains, stopping about once per 3.5 km, average 59 km/h, and express trains average 85 km/h.

While some regional lines in the US already average 60 km/h or even more, the cost is a very sparse station spacing, such that walking to stations is infeasible, even if the station areas are walkable, which they usually aren’t. For example, the Providence Line from Providence to Boston averages 58 km/h, with one daily late-night train with less schedule padding and another that skips stops achieving 65 km/h; however, the average interstation is 6.8 km, and requires skipping or closing down entirely several urban stations (Forest Hills, Ruggles, Readville, Pawtucket).

Instead of current practices, I would recommend a program of federal standardization based on the idea that transit should be able to compete with driving and provide meaningful transportation at all times of day. Federal action means that a few best practices could be violated: most prominently, rolling stock doesn’t have to be completely off-the-shelf if the federal government can induce transit agencies to combine and buy in bulk. However, the most important of the general best practices – perfect schedule and fare integration, allowing seamless intermodal transfers regardless of which agency operates the vehicles – are as important as ever. This leads to the following set of suggestions, in addition to the aforementioned set of best practices:

1. The main lines, both regional and intercity, should be electrified, with 25 kV 60 Hz.

2. Trains’ design speed should generically be 160 km/h, or a little lower on unelectrified branch lines and regional lines with frequent stops, though the track speed could be lower if increasing it is not worth the extra cost. Acceleration should be high, to allow average speed to remain high even with a few more stops. The ideal train should look like an M-7 with bigger doors from the outside and have the performance of a FLIRT. On unelectrified lines, good choices include the diesel Talent, GTW, Desiro, and Coradia. Bilevel trains are useful only in narrow circumstances in which passenger volumes are very high and the higher dwell times coming from the double-deck configurations are not a major problem; with a few exceptions such as the MI 2N used on the RER, this is practically never the case.

3. Subsidies should still be acceptable for regional services, though relative to passenger volumes they should be lower than they are in the US today; they should not be acceptable for the intercity network, though weak lines within a network could be subsidized by stronger lines they connect to.

4. In urban areas, regional service should function as urban transit and not just as peak-period commuter rail from the suburbs to the city center; therefore, there should be frequent stops in the city, replacing the longer-distance functions of American light rail lines. In-city fares should be identical to those of local urban buses and rail.

5. Regional trains should have just one operator, with the fare enforced with random fare inspections; intercity trains, which have lower traffic, can have one operator and one conductor.

6. There shouldn’t be any distinction between regional, intercity, and high-speed rail stations. High-speed rail should be able to seamlessly run through to lower-speed territory when necessary – for example, surplus Northeast Corridor trains that do not need to go to Boston should serve Jamaica at least (with catenary strung over the LIRR Main Line), and possibly even Mineola, Hicksville, and Ronkonkoma.

7. Construction projects should prioritize lines that serve markets that cars can’t, e.g. travel that passes through CBDs or parallels roads that are not freeways.

8. Signaling should be either ERTMS or ATC. Unless the two systems can be made to talk with each other, the federal government should invite delegations from the vendors, pick one, and mandate it. (And unless Hitachi can provide a convincing explanation for why its vendor-locked system is better, the pick should be ERTMS, which has eight vendors.) It can squeeze amazing capacity out of two tracks and, when enabled, provides absolute crash protection.

9. High punctuality is non-negotiable, especially when timed transfers or overtakes are involved. Trains should be able to stick to their clockface schedule and passengers should be able to rely on transfers even with short connections. Here is a list of ways to maintain punctuality. The ultimate goal is Japan, where, barring suicides and natural disasters, late trains are almost unheard of.

Those requirements are deliberately meant to be as scalable as possible. Although the rolling stock I’m implying is very ambitious for small-scale operations, the advantage of the high top speed is that such operations could piggyback on larger orders by the main established agencies, which could make great use of the extra speed and acceleration and get a more rationalized schedule as a result. The point is to give agencies pricing power coming from pooling together to order multiple thousands of more-or-less identical EMUs.

Although the investment described here is much more intensive than anything done in the US up to now, the true cost is not high. Restoring regional branch lines should be doable for a million dollars per kilometer, bulk electrification of main lines can be done for not much more and has been done on $3 million/km on the NEC, and mainline ETCS installation costs $1–1.5 million/km. It’s comparable to the per-km cost of the diesel-only, single-track, low-platform, commuter-only Lackawanna Cutoff, and if past results are any guide would lead to a sharp increase in transit ridership, measured in hundreds rather than tens of percent.

The ultimate goal of low-speed rail is to make it convenient to use regional transit. With speeds comparable to those of driving, local fares comparable to those of buses, and a frequent, memorable clockface schedule, transit would be a realistic option for many more people in the US than it is now. Every trip should be serviceable by transit, or else people will find it more convenient to buy a car for their irreplaceable car trips and then drive it for other trips. SBB claims that 32.7% of Swiss travel to work is on mass transit; this is higher than the figure for Greater New York, and about seven times the figure for the US.

Some of this is, to quote James Kunstler, Bill Lind, and other supporters of transit who look backward to the industrial era, merely restoring what the US had in the 1920s and 30s, before cars made all but the most traffic-intensive rail travel unprofitable. But the operating practices I’m proposing are modern, in line with today’s labor and capital costs and with innovations in countries that have kept improving their rail systems. Modern low-speed rail shares many characteristics with old local trains, but it’s fundamentally something that’s never really existed in North America. It’s about time to try it.

EMUs Versus Locomotives

I keep getting pushback from Amtrak defenders about my article about its locomotive order. I think I addressed most points, but one that I didn’t that keeps coming up is whether electric multiple units are really better for train service than locomotives hauling unpowered cars. The answer is in Amtrak’s case an unambiguous yes, but it requires more argument.

Ordinarily, the cost tradeoff between multiple units and locomotives is that unpowered cars are less expensive and lower-maintenance than EMUs while locomotives are much more expensive and higher-maintenance. EMUs have definite advantage in performance; they accelerate faster, and, when the consists are short their energy consumption is much lower, since most modern locomotives are optimized for longer freight trains. Because the advantage is the most pronounced for short consists, Amtrak asked Vermont to buy US Railcar’s FRA-compliant DMUs for the Vermonter train, replacing the current diesel loco-hauled setup; Vermont itself puts the breakeven point between DMUs and locos at 4-5 cars, but the DMUs in question have just one vendor and are extraordinarily expensive by global standards.

Conversely, locomotives require much more track maintenance than EMUs, because of their higher axle load. Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle load, so the less even the weight distribution is, the higher the road wear is. Track wear does not satisfy such a neat formula; all old comments of mine stating the contrary should be ignored. However, for freight traffic such a formula does hold, and locomotives have axle loads comparable to those of freight trains. One could also observe that in Japan, railroads make every effort to keep axle load low, and therefore avoid articulated bogies; furthermore, almost all Shinkansen axles are powered to keep weight distribution even, whereas European high-speed EMUs only power about half the axles (Siemens’ Velaro has a maximum axle load of 17 t, and an average load of 14 t).

Generally, the trend in countries with well-run passenger rail systems is away from locomotives and toward EMUs. The exceptions come from three cases:

1. Some technologies, most notably the Talgo tilting wheels, can’t be used with powered bogies. The same is true of the tilting TGV test train.

2. Some railroads ignore track maintenance costs and focus on train maintenance. This includes SNCF, since the tracks are the responsibility of RFF.

3. Cultural inertia may make railroads too used to separate power cars. This again includes SNCF, which needed power cars for the TGV because of the technological limitations of the 1970s and 80s, requiring very large transformers.

In the specific case of Amtrak and the Northeast Corridor, not only are reasons 1-2 not an issue, but also the cost question favors EMUs. Look again at Vermont’s report, which seriously posits unpowered coaches costing up to $5.5 million each, more than a standard off-the-shelf EuroSprinter loco; Amtrak’s recent order is much cheaper, at $2.2 million per car, but still comparable to the FRA-compliant M7 EMU and not much less per meter of car length (and more per car) than the Coradia Nordic EMUs used in Sweden or the FLIRTs used in Finland.

In comments elsewhere, I’ve heard that one reason to keep the locomotives is that they can be detached and replaced with diesels on through-trains to unelectrified territory. This is pure cultural inertia; EMUs, and even power cars that are permanently coupled to unpowered coaches, can be attached to a diesel locomotive, as the TGV did to reach Sables d’Olonne. More cynically, the cost of Amtrak’s locomotives is $466 million, which, at Northeast Corridor electrification cost (about $3 million/km), could electrify 155 km of route, almost all the way from Washington to Richmond. At the cost of electrifying the line to Sables d’Olonne (about $1.2 million/km), it could electrify nearly 400 km. Amtrak’s insistence on locomotives is reducing flexibility here rather than increasing it.

But in general, the move toward EMUs is not about flexibility; railroads around the world deprecate it and have semi-permanently coupled trains. It comes from the fact that, outside Amtrak’s uniquely bad experience with Metroliner EMUs, they work better. I’ve already mentioned higher acceleration. In addition, all else being equal, they’re more flexible, and can be scaled to any length: the M7s are married pairs. I’ve seen commenters that claim the exact opposite, by looking only at EMUs with articulated bogies; those have nothing to do with the question at hand (the TGV has articulated bogies, too), and indicate that the operator cares about other things more than about flexible length, for example a walk-through train or reducing the number of bogies.

Another problem with locomotives, besides inferior performance, is limited capacity. A single-deck 200-meter long AGV has 466-510 seats, compared with about 350 for a single-deck TGV and 545 for a double-deck TGV. SNCF is still eschewing the AGV because its capacity limit is so great it needs double-deck trains, but Alstom is developing a train with standard, unarticulated bogies that it claims can reach 600 seats with one deck.

Although Amtrak does not have the capacity problems of the LGV Sud-Est, it too is capacity-constrained, in another way. The limiting factor to Amtrak’s capacity is the lack of cars; as a result, buying EMUs instead of locomotives and coaches would add more capacity per dollar spent. It’s brutal, but true. Even the slightly more expensive Nordic EMUs would be an improvement; they’re still cheaper than coaches plus a single locomotive for all train lengths up to 14 cars (if the loco is an Amtrak Cities Sprinter) or 9 cars (if it’s a TRAXX or Prima).

In reality, the reason Amtrak uses locomotives is entirely cultural inertia. It was burned with the Metroliners, and thinks that unpowered cars last longer because, well, they have to. The reality that the M7, or the average European EMU, lasts 40 years, the same as Amtrak’s coaches; however, that idea was not invented by Amtrak, and is therefore out. It thinks that unpowered coaches are cheaper, while buying coaches that cost the same as EMUs. And so on. This is yet another bad US rail practice, hindering rail revival by making it too expensive and reducing performance.

California HSR: Where Now?

California is going ahead with construction of the Central Valley segment, and has just publicly released an email saying it will solicit bids in 3 months, totaling about $6 billion from Bakersfield to just south of Merced, a distance of about 200-210 kilometers. The alignment bypasses some small towns but not all, avoiding some of the scope creep that happened in the years leading up to the Business Plan, which required more elevated segments; however, some towns will still require many grade separations and viaducts, and so will Fresno and Bakersfield.

The HSR Authority has just released environmental impact reports for the Bakersfield-Fresno and Fresno-Merced that point out to higher costs: the sum of the two cheapest alternatives is $10 billion, in 2010 dollars, for 300 km; although the cost per km is not much higher, the Fresno-Bakersfield segment is much more expensive, whereas the extra bits included in the EIR but not the bid request are the cheapest.

There is some additional room for value engineering, especially in Fresno, where the currently preferred alternative calls for viaducts, but the potential for cost saving is not that great, especially relative to the $6 billion estimate; projects run over budget much more frequently than they come under. The main interest here is not the cost overrun: the current stage, the bidding, is the one most prone to overruns, and no matter what, we will know in three months what the projected cost is. The interest is the breakdown of costs, which, as expected, are primarily infrastructure and tracks, including grading and grade separations. The cost overruns come from scope creep, with more elevated segments than originally expected (but, due to value engineering, less than expected in 2009).

At any case, there is money to proceed, at least from Bakersfield to Fresno – there is $6.3 billion available, half from federal spending (which has been spared in the latest austerity plan) and half from Proposition 1A’s matching funds. There is another almost $6 billion locked in Prop 1A, but it has to be matched 50:50. Matching funds will almost certainly materialize, if not from the federal government then from foreign governments anxious to pay California to buy their products (for example, Japan’s ambassador to the US offered half the money, and Japan expects China and Korea to offer funding as well). It should be enough to build an initial operable segment, though probably not to build from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The question is then how to prioritize. The gold standard here should be building all the way from Sylmar to San Jose and electrifying the legacy lines at the two ends. At the Bay Area end, the Caltrain FRA waiver ensures this wouldn’t cause regulatory problems, and while it would limit initial capacity, it would not increase travel time by more than a few minutes. At the Los Angeles Basin end, it would require Metrolink or HSR to seek a waiver, along the lines Caltrain has already gotten; the speed reduction, while still not very large, would be larger, because the travel time simulations assume higher operating speed in the LA Basin, and there will be fewer speed limits due to curves.

Unfortunately, while cutting the initial segment to San Jose-Sylmar will save a large number of billions of dollars in urban grade separations, it may not save enough, though it’s fairly close if one believes the 2009 Business Plan numbers. If California has half the money from foreign sources, then matched with Prop 1A and existing federal money, it has a total of $24 billion, which is not enough. The question then boils down to where to go first from the Central Valley – south or north. North would involve going over Pacheco Pass to San Jose (or, better yet, over Altamont Pass to Livermore and thence Redwood City). South would involve going south to Sylmar, either through Palmdale or directly through Tejon Pass, which carries I-5; although Palmdale is the preferred alternative, the HSR Authority is looking at Tejon again. For a slide show using the existing preferred options, see here. Either alone should be doable with the money available under such a circumstance, which is about $18 billion.

I claim that the southern option is the better one – in fact, that LA-Bakersfield is more important than Bakersfield-Fresno. The reason is, first, a pure numbers game: LA is much larger than anything else in California. And second, Tejon is where the existing legacy transit options are the worst: Amtrak can’t go between Palmdale and Bakersfield at all because the Tehachapi Loop is at capacity, ensuring that a mixed legacy-high speed operation in the mold of the initial TGV runs is not possible even under reformed FRA regulations.

Northern options suffer from different problems. The Pacheco option’s problem is that it uses Pacheco, and is therefore inadequate at linking the Bay Area to Sacramento. This means nothing further can be done until enough money materializes to connect to the Los Angeles Basin. The Altamont option’s problem is that the Phase 0 option connects to Livermore and requires a transfer; connecting to Redwood City is possible, but requires all of the most expensive elements of Altamont, especially crossing the Bay in the vicinity of the Dumbarton Bridge.

Once the southern option is selected, the question is how far to go. Bakersfield-Sylmar is expensive, and although it’s easily doable given 50% foreign funding, lower levels of funding may not suffice. Bakersfield-Palmdale is much easier, and could be done on existing Prop 1A money if it were not required a 50:50 match; however, Palmdale is not in the LA Basin, and the legacy rail line to LA is curvy and steep. Express Metrolink trains do Palmdale-LA in 1:28, versus 0:27 projected for HSR. Higher cant deficiency and acceleration with electrification could cut the travel time somewhat, but not enough to make HSR competitive for travel from LA to the Central Valley. Travel from LA to the Bay Area is another issue, but a situation in which it’s possible to build all the way to San Jose is one in which there’s money to build to Sylmar.

The alternative is to use Tejon and connect to the legacy line in Santa Clarita. It’s more expensive because Tejon is one big crossing whereas the Palmdale route involves two smaller crossings, one to Bakersfield and one to the LA Basin. It should still be affordable, though I have no detailed segment-by-segment breakdown of the Tejon route’s cost. The advantage is that Santa Clarita is much closer to Los Angeles than Palmdale, and the legacy Metrolink route to Palmdale is fairly straight south of Santa Clarita; even now, express trains travel to LA in 42 minutes, half an hour slower than full HSR buildout rather than an hour as with Palmdale, and there’s more potential for an increase in speed.

That said, the debate is most likely academic – Tejon vs. Palmdale is most likely going to be decided primarily on a revisited look at the costs, with other issues (LA County power brokers prefer Palmdale, Tejon is shorter) not much more than tiebreakers. In addition, a situation in which Prop 1A money could be released for the crossing is one in which matching funds have materialized, making the full Bakersfield-LA route realistic with the available money. The primary lesson is that there should be enough money to build a realistic initial operable segment, not going all the way from LA to San Francisco but still serving a fair number of intercity travelers.

Buy America is a Scam

Streetsblog’s interview with Amalgamated Transit Union President Larry Henley hits on the normal points regarding labor issues and transit, but one bit there deserves additional followup, regarding Buy America provisions:

Tanya Snyder: Some transit advocates are also critical of things like Buy America provisions because it costs transit agencies more money.

Larry Henley: This is the Wal-Mart question. This is whether or not we have a country at all anymore.

If the goal is to race to the bottom, to get the cheapest products, which means the cheapest labor, then we ought to be mindful that while we’re preserving the fiscal integrity of the MTA, we’re ruining the lives of American kids. We’re making it impossible for them to get a job. And if you look at the unemployment rates today, as staggering as they sound, it’s 9 percent overall, but for college educated kids it’s 4 percent. Which means that people who lack a college education no longer have a future in America. They just don’t.

…So that now, we have people in China and India and all across the world competing with American kids.

…This is about a moral crisis in America. And then they have the gall to come back and make all these arguments about American people being inefficient or American people not working hard enough and why shouldn’t they all be part time. But the central issue is that we have allowed corporations like Wal-Mart to wring every ounce of hope out of young Americans’ lives.

In the comments, Stephen Smith already justly mocked Henley for complaining about China and India when the major rolling stock and bus vendors are from peer developed countries, and Buy America’s most recent derailing of a light rail order was about imports from Spain, a country with 21% unemployment. But there’s much more at stake here.

Buy America’s purported role is to create American jobs. But let’s examine the costs. Amtrak’s Sprinter locomotives, compliant with both FRA regulations and Buy America, cost 30% more than the European locomotives they’re based on, and 50% more than competitor products built only for passenger trains rather than also for freight trains. A 30% premium works out to an extra cost of about $100 million, providing 250 jobs. Since the income earned by skilled workers is normally around $100,000 or less rather than $400,000, we can conclude most of the premium doesn’t go to workers. Or, for an even more egregious example, but without job numbers specified, look to SMART’s DMUs, at twice the cost of comparable European trains.

In other words, it’s a scam. Blocking parallel imports ensures only a select number of vendors can bid, driving up prices. Usually there’s a small sop to American labor, well-publicized in the media with photo-ops of people in hard hats – e.g. the 250 jobs heralded for the Sprinter order – but the bulk of the extra money goes elsewhere. It creates makework for consultants and lobbyists. It increases vendor profits, since fewer companies, typically the largest and most global ones, can bid. (This also goes for regulations: Caltrain applied for its FRA waiver in consultation with the biggest train manufacturers, potentially locking out Stadler and other small up-and-comers.)

When the number of vendors is very small, the result can be not just high cost, but also shoddy work. The reason the US has no legacy domestic rolling stock vendors is that two of the few that remained by the 1970s, protected by Buy America but servicing an ever-shrinking market, sold New York City Transit defective trains, the R44 and R46 orders; this was one of many mishaps facing the city in the 1970s. The subsequent lawsuits bankrupted the vendors. The R44 is still a lemon, though since refurbishment the R46 has performed well. In the 1980s, NYCT switched to global vendors instead; the next order, the R62, was not federally funded due to Reagan’s cuts, so NYCT went ahead and imported trains from Kobe, which worked fine.

There is another way, but, as with most other issues facing transportation, it requires importing ideas from other developed countries. The idea in question is that parallel imports are not a bad thing, either for the economy or for workers. The US and Canada import cars from each other; neither is any worse for it. To a much smaller extent due to trade barriers and different sets of regulations, North America imports cars from Europe and Japan – and the attempts to fight it have not resulted in a union revival, but in the proliferation of non-union plants in low-wage states.

Parallel imports are not an anti-worker or anti-union tactic. The Swiss Socialist Party is for them, and, far from a neo-liberal sop, it also supports linking trade to human rights and workers’ rights and has a general roster of policy positions that most Daily Kos contributors would love to see the Democratic Party endorse.

The majority of trade is within the developed world. To the extent Buy America is supposed to protect American workers from low-wage countries, it has failed; NYCT’s Buy America-compliant R160 trains were partially manufactured in Brazil to save money. The main function of Buy America is to protect companies that do business in the US from competition, period. At that it has done a very good job; it’s just not good for the public, which has to pay for it.

Providence’s Underused BRT

Providence’s best-kept transit secret is its BRT tunnel. Converted from a trolley tunnel in 1948, when the trolleys were replaced by buses, it’s a bus-only tunnel connecting Thayer Street in College Hill on the east with Main Street on the eastern edge of downtown on the west, smoothing out the steep grades of the neighborhood. On the surface, the slope from Main to Benefit, the next street to the east, is 15%; in the tunnel, it’s only about 5%. It’s decades older than the systems generally considered the primogenitors of BRT, such as Curitiba’s. It functions as normal open BRT, with six bus lines sharing the tunnel and branching out on the surface.

Whereas other cities do everything within their power to emphasize their BRT lines, sometimes even drawing them on maps as if they were rail lines, Providence keeps its BRT tunnel hidden. Instead, it emphasizes two bus lines – one using the tunnel, one not – by painting them to look like streetcars and calling them trolleys. On the Rhode Island bus map the tunnel does not even appear, but instead the two fake trolleys are given their own inset; the downtown Providence map does show the tunnel, but makes it impossible to trace the bus routes and see which corridors they serve outside the tunnel.

This carries over to developer and landlord blurbs, which can be taken as indications for how much development transit induces. When I looked for apartments in Providence, several listings noted the apartment was close to the trolley; none said anything about a bus tunnel.

The bus tunnel is equally hidden on the surface of the city’s streets. On Main Street, signs direct the traveler to the train station; I have not seen any that even tell one a bus tunnel exists. The station entering the tunnel is prominent once one knows where the tunnel is, but it’s at a location that’s easy to miss – too far north to be the best route from College Hill or Fox Point to downtown, and on only one of several reasonable routes to the train station.

At the Thayer Street portal, the situation is reversed – it’s easy enough to find the tunnel, but there’s no indication that there’s a bus stop in front of the tunnel, much less a shelter for said bus stop – see some vague photos on my photostream. I found out about the existence of the bus stop only when I saw a bus actually stop there to discharge and board passengers. There’s a well-hidden bus schedule at the east portal of the tunnel, but it inexplicably only lists the eastbound schedule; the passenger is supposed to guess when the next bus will head into the tunnel.

Unsurprisingly, the buses aren’t very well-patronized. The combined frequency of the six lines is 12 buses per hour at the peak and 8.5 in the midday off-peak – reasonable for a single frequent line in a large city, albeit in this case the buses are not spaced evenly – but the buses do not look very crowded to me.

If Providence forwent the specially branded fake trolleys and instead adopted the emerging practice of a frequent network map, including letting people know that there’s a segment of busway that is grade-separated, it could see ridership on the bus tunnel increase dramatically. Thayer Street is a busy commercial street, with ample foot traffic until 10 or 11; while downtown is urban renewal hell, it still has retail at the mall that isn’t found anywhere else in the city, while making it easier to connect from the rest of the city to College Hill would let people commute uphill more conveniently.

Categories

I’ve just added categories to this blog, due to what appears to be popular demand. I saw too many hits coming from people who Googled key phrases together with the name of this blog, which suggests the blog itself needs a better internal search; here it is. I’ll add more categories if there’s demand, especially cities or regions I revisit.

On another note, if anyone knows how to lift the comment moderation rule that holds up every comment with more than one link, please let me know. Since everyone’s first comment is held anyway, and so far I’ve had no spam sneak past the filter, this rule is redundant.