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.

Construction Costs, Third World Edition

It’s a commonplace that building things is cheap in third-world countries, with low wages, few labor and environmental controls, and lax regulations. The reality is quite different. The difference disappears once one makes sure to do a PPP adjustment; poor countries’ currencies are persistently undervalued relative to their PPP exchange rate, and often also relative to true market value, and this could lead to a distortion in cost structure.

Recall that in Continental Europe, a fully-underground subway line costs anywhere between $110 million and $250 million per km, removing one outlier at each end from my list. Spanish construction costs are generally much lower than the European average, with commuter tunnels coming in well under $100 million/km.

In Delhi, the Metro’s construction costs are very high. The next phase involves 108 km, of which 41 are underground and the rest elevated, and is scheduled to cost 30,000 crores. At current exchange rates this is $6.7 billion, but at the PPP rate it’s $17.6 billion, i.e. $163 million per kilometer. Such a cost is normal by European standards for a fully-underground line; it’s not normal for a line that’s majority-elevated. It is almost as expensive as mostly-above ground extensions of American lines, for example the Silver Line in Washington.

In Beijing, the subway construction costs are also higher than one would expect given low wages, but only about as high as those of Europe. Fully-underground lines are about $150 million per km: these include Line 8 Phase 2 ($2.5 billion/17 km), Line 6 Phase 1 ($4.9 billion/30 km), and Line 14 Phase 1 ($4.5 billion/30 km); the first two are confirmed to be fully underground, and while I can’t find a claim in either direction for the last, all lines it intersects are fully underground. Chinese high-speed rail costs are quite similar to European costs as well: the lines rated at 350 km/h are between $19 and 50 million per km; there’s little tunneling on most lines, but long viaducts, e.g. the $42 million/km Beijing-Shanghai HSR line is 1.2% in tunnel and 86.5% elevated.

In Baghdad, the under-construction above-ground metro line, built by Alstom, is costing $1.5 billion for 22–25 km. With a PPP adjustment, this goes up to $83-94 million/km, depending on whose report of the line’s length one believes. It’s better than India, but not especially good.

Turkey is proving itself to be the Spain of the developing world. Its construction costs are often high per kilometer, but only because Istanbul’s geography is such that lines have to cross under major bodies of water, in seismic terrain. Marmaray, a commuter rail tunnel connecting the European and Asian halves of the city, cost $3.5 billion for 13.6 km of tunnel; while the overall cost, $333 million/km after PPP conversion, is high, it must be weighed against the extreme complexity of the project. The extension of the Istanbul Metro’s M2 line going under the Golden Horn rather than the Bosporus, is $148 million/km, again with PPP conversion. In contrast, the fully underground first phase of M4 is, if I understand the reference, and that’s a big if, $40 million per km (add all three cost amounts, then convert to US dollars); when a line goes underground rather than underwater, Istanbul builds it as cheaply as Madrid. Mainline rail construction in Turkey is also inexpensive: Turkey plans to build 14,000 km of rail, with a substantial portion permitting 250 km/h speeds, for $45 billion; that’s $4 million per km.

Iranian construction costs are low as well. Tehran Metro Line 3, as usual after PPP conversion, is $61 million per km; it is two-thirds underground.

Although there are no third-world lines that have breached $500 million per km, as several first-world lines have, this is probably entirely due to the fact that India, with the highest construction costs, builds its subways mostly above ground. A fully underground Delhi Metro line will probably cost as much as one in Tokyo, despite Delhi’s much less densely built existing network.

The pattern we see here is, first, that the one country on the list following the English legal and political tradition also has English construction costs. And, second, third-world countries do not build rail more cheaply than first-world countries, after adjusting for living costs but not wages; in other words, they spend more of their income on building those lines.

While labor costs in China are lower than in Europe, so is the productivity of labor. If everything in China cost across the board less than in the first world, it would be as rich as the first world; the reason it’s not as rich is precisely that labor doesn’t go as far as in more industrialized countries. China’s rapid growth should be thought of as a process of catching up to what the developed world learned over two hundred years of industrialization that has made it so much more efficient now than it was in 1800.

MBTA-HSR Compatibility

There is going to be major investment in the Northeast Corridor, and several possibilities, including Amtrak’s NEC Master Plan, call for running trains at higher frequency and somewhat higher speeds than today on the Providence Line, and assumes electrification of commuter service. Since the line is already being used by the MBTA, which according to Amtrak is limiting the number of intercity train slots for capacity reasons, this calls for a good measure of schedule integration, based on the principle of organization before electronics before concrete.

Amtrak’s Master Plan calls for three-tracking the entire Providence Line south to Attleboro (one viaduct excepted) instead, at a cost of $464 million – $80 million in Phase 1, $384 million in Phase 2 – in addition to money spent on unnecessary expansion at South Station. Such a cost is excessive, suggesting that better MBTA-HSR compatibility is required. Full-fat HSR programs go even further and avoid the Providence Line in favor of a greenfield alignment or an I-90 alignment, instead of making use of the existing high-speed track in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To reduce costs, a better plan would four-track short segments for passing sidings, and time the overtakes. The principle is similar to that of the blended Peninsula plan in California, in the version proposed by Clem Tillier.

In many ways, for example the metro area populations involved and the current ridership level, the Providence Line is similar to the Caltrain line. The main difference is that the Providence Line has fewer stops and therefore can expect higher average speeds. In addition, the Providence Line is straighter and passes through less developed areas, so that even today Acela trains plow it at 240 km/h, and about 330 km/h is possible with true high-speed trains and higher superelevation.

In Switzerland, trains run as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible. In this context, this means running just fast enough to meet a good clockface schedule. Boston-Providence travel time on the MBTA today is about 1:10; for a good takt, this should be cut to about 55 minutes, allowing hourly service with two trainsets and half-hourly service with four.

For the purposes of schedule symmetry and avoiding switching moves at high speed, passing segments should have four tracks rather than three when possible. Costs should be controlled by making those passing segments much shorter than the three-tracking Amtrak proposes.

Finally, the timetables proposed here are based on the following performance assumptions: regional trains have a top speed of 160 km/h, accelerate like a FLIRT (45 seconds acceleration plus deceleration penalty), have an equivalent cant of 300 mm, and dwell at stations for 30 seconds. Intercity trains accelerate like an idealized N700-I, have an equivalent cant of 375 mm, and dwell for 60 seconds. The equivalent cant is by and large unimportant; the acceleration and dwell times for regional trains are. The approach into and out of South Station has a speed limit of 70 km/h through the 90-degree curve toward Back Bay, and 100 km/h to south of the curve at Back Bay; intercity trains are limited to 200 km/h south to Readville and 250 km/h south to the Canton viaduct, and, at the southern end, 225 km/h west of the curve in Attleboro and, curves permitting, 200 km/h in Rhode Island. Regional trains turn in 5 minutes, or 4 at a minimum, and intercity trains turn in 10 minutes at a minimum. Signaling allows a headway of 2 minutes at a speed of 200 km/h and 3 minutes at higher speed, but if a regional train starts from a siding stop, it can follow a high-speed train more tightly initially, say 1 minute, still far higher than a safe stopping distance, since the spacing rapidly increases over time. Grades are ignored; the Providence Line is flat enough that they’re not an issue. Timetables should be padded 7% from the technical time.

With the above assumptions, the technical time for regional trains is 38 minutes with the present stopping pattern, which yields 41 minutes with padding; this compares with 46 minutes for the fastest Acela. Clearly, if Acela service levels remain similar to what they are today – which includes the Master Plan, which calls for a 10% reduction in Boston-New York travel time (see page 40 on the PDF linked above) – there’s no need for passing segments. To raise travel time to 55 minutes, trains should make more frequent stops, and/or run to T. F. Green Airport always. Although the speed profile of regional and intercity trains would be different, the average speed would be the same, and given that the corridor has a small number of trains per hour of each type, this mismatch is no cause for concern. The $464 million Amtrak is proposing would then be a complete waste, and the federal government should spend any money toward this goal on electrifying more MBTA lines and funding EMUs.

However, in a scenario involving a significantly improved intercity service, the best technical time for nonstop Boston-Providence service with a top speed of 300 km/h decreases to about 19 minutes (20.5 with pad), and this makes overtakes necessary. A slowdown to 250 km/h only adds about one minute of travel time, so the operating pattern is almost identical.

If 15-minute service, both regional and high-speed, is desired, then regional trains can be about 11 minutes slower between successive passing segments, since 11 = 15-3-1 or 15-2-2. A single mid-line overtake is theoretically possible: 41-20.5 = 20.5 < 2*11. However, such an overtake would have to be exactly at the midline, and, in addition, there could be merge conflicts at Providence, whose station tracks include two on the mainline and two on one side of the mainline as opposed to one on each side.

It’s still possible, but tight, to have a single overtake at Sharon. The immediate station vicinity would be four-tracked; this is no trouble, since the area around the station is undeveloped and reasonably flat. In addition, there’s more than enough time in the Providence area, making the merge conflict a lesser problem. However, this is very tight near Boston South, beyond signaling capability unless four-tracking extends a few kilometers further north. One way to counter this problem is to slow high-speed trains by making them all stop at Back Bay and/or Route 128, adding precious minutes to the schedule but reducing the speed difference. Conversely, the current weekday pattern of Providence Line trains skipping Ruggles could be made permanent. There is no room for infill stops; the overtake would only add 4 minutes to regional train travel time, so there’s time to run further to the airport at 160 km/h, and even make an extra stop at Cranston.

Another possibility is to have two overtakes, taking advantage of existing four-tracking around Attleboro. The capital costs are similar; it would require four-tracking around Route 128, possibly extending north to Readville if an on-the-fly overtake is desired. The operating complexity is much higher, since there’s one more opportunity for a late train to mess up the entire schedule. However, there is plenty of slack south of Attleboro and north of Route 128 allowing for additional stops. Under this option, the train loses 4 minutes waiting at Attleboro and about 2.5 at Readville, since the overtake is not completely on-the-fly, raising travel time to 47.5 minutes. There’s no time for airport trains, not on the same takt. However, there’s space in the schedule for 5-6 infill stops in addition to Readville; Forest Hills, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and perhaps one more in each of Boston and Providence closer to city center.

In principle, it’s possible to extend this analysis to 10-minute service, with three overtake segments, at Route 128, Sharon, and Attleboro. In practice, this is operationally cumbersome, and the operating profits coming from filling six full-length high-speed trains from New York to Boston ought to be able to pay for four-tracking the entire line, even the viaduct.

Not included in this analysis are the branches. Those are not a worry since north of Readville there are three tracks, and frequencies on the other lines are low. The Stoughton Line is a bigger problem; however, with the three tracks through Boston, it could still be shoehorned. Electrifying it should not be difficult due to its short length, though the proposed Taunton extension would make it harder.

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.