Uncompetitive Transit

In general, government at all level should be encouraging a mode shift away from cars and toward trains, using legacy lines for regional service outside urban areas. Here is a canonical example of such a proposal, unfortunately completely unofficial, in Medford, Oregon. A key point is that transit needs to provide a competitive trip time, and connect people to where they want to go, or else there’s no point in running it.

Sometimes, it’s impossible given present infrastructure. One example of this, routinely mooted on California High-Speed Rail Blog, is a system connecting to Gilroy and feeding high-speed rail. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that the current FRA regulations and US rail practices have been completely gutted and replaced with Swiss or Japanese practice, and, more speculatively, that the legacy line can be made passenger-primary, despite Union Pacific ownership. The system would connect Gilroy, Santa Cruz, Salinas, and Monterey, using a now-abandoned right-of-way to get to downtown Monterey and legacy lines elsewhere.

The result can be seen on this map. There would be timed transfers at Castroville and Watsonville (running one-seat rides everywhere at acceptable frequency would require too many trains), and several additional intermediate stops, such as Marina, Seaside, Capitola, and Aromas. In terms of pure railroad operations, it could be a well-run system. Unfortunately, it could not be a successful one: the largest and densest city on the line, Salinas, is connected to the others in a very roundabout way. Salinas-Gilroy is 60 kilometers by rail and only 45 by road. Frequent curves would make it impossible to maintain a high average speed. Even a 55-minute trip time, allowing two trainsets to provide hourly service, would be ambitious, though possible with a wide stop spacing and good rolling stock; in contrast, driving takes 37 minutes according to Google Maps.

Monterey-Gilroy and Santa Cruz-Gilroy would be a little more competitive – they’re 50 and 54 minutes by car respectively. However, the markets are much smaller, especially in the case of Santa Cruz, where to get to any regional destination other than Gilroy, it’s faster to drive to San Jose. In addition, Santa Cruz-Gilroy is the hardest pair to get on a reliable clockface schedule: it’s 65 km, and the segment west of Watsonville is 34 with many curves, some of radius going down to about 220 meters, restricting speed even under optimistic performance assumptions to 75 km/h.

Since the congestion level in this part of California is not very high, cars could always beat the train, and for many trips so could buses. Therefore normal origin-and-destination travel would not produce much ridership on such a system. The worse trip time would be tolerable to some high-speed rail travelers if the transfer to high-speed rail were well-configured; however, high-speed travel alone does not generate enough ridership to justify an entirely new rail system, especially at an outlying station such as Gilroy. It would be the high-speed rail equivalent of an airport express.

There occasionally arise such cases, of lines that look good in principle but can’t be made competitive in practice. That is one example. A few more, not all seriously proposed by transit proponents: many international high-speed rail links in general, and some in particular, for example Minneapolis-Winnipeg (it would dominate the market, but the market is so small it’s not worth it). The only thing that can be done is spend scarce transit funding elsewhere. There are enough regional and intercity lines that could work well and no shortage of local transit supporters, some with political clout, who want them. Urban lines, which routinely get the short end of the stick in California in favor of low-performing outward extensions, would clamor for some of the money required to get a Santa Cruz-Monterey-Salinas-Gilroy system up to acceptable performance standards.

Housing Protest Ongoing in Tel Aviv

Over the last week or so, protesters have been occupying HaBima Square in central Tel Aviv with tents, demanding cheaper housing. Prices in Israel have been rising sharply over the last ten years, especially urban housing prices, and new urban construction is predominantly luxury. Populist politicians are already visiting the tents, talking up their own record on marginally related issues.

Some right-wingers, who identify everything coming out of Tel Aviv as left-wing, which locally means a dovish elite, are instead yelling at the protesters to “move to the periphery,” where housing is cheap. Israel has the opposite city/suburb dynamic as the US: the city center is generally richer and more expensive than the suburbs, and the richer suburbs of Tel Aviv – typically those in its favored quarter to the north – are not called periphery any more than the Upper East Side is called an inner city.

The problem with such a dynamic is that the periphery has no access to jobs. The roads are congested (and the extra driving costs would eat up the entire difference in rent); public transportation doesn’t run on weekends for religious reasons and consists of buses, which are very slow, and commuter trains, which aren’t very frequent and do not get people to most city destinations.

The housing problem, as one may expect, is predominantly political. While Tel Aviv’s wealth and access to jobs make it unusually desirable, there has not been any concerned attempt to create livable secondary urban centers. This post explains in more detail the issues; while it’s in Hebrew, you can still look at the pictures – in short, despite reforms, zoning still encourages construction like that in the first photo (a “development town,” i.e. a housing project, with about the same connotations as in the US) and discourages that in the second photo (Sheinkin Street, a once-bohemian, now-gentrified commercial artery).

Although Tel Aviv’s car ownership is not very high – about 60% of households own a car – parking is mandated in most new developments. Existing parking facilities are overstretched; pricing parking is a political non-starter. And despite the high demand for non-luxury housing, city regulations make it difficult to build smaller apartments: according to the blog linked above, it is difficult to get approval for apartments under 120 square meters, or to subdivide large apartments.

As in New York and other cities with a housing shortage, the resulting land shortage is leading developers to concentrate on the luxury market. In the last decade, developers have built huge skyscrapers surrounded by empty land along and near Namir Road, a wide arterial throughfare that the government is trying to turn into the new CBD and that the first line of the Tel Aviv subway is planned to pass under. Due to the building height, the density of such developments is fairly high, but in reality not much higher than the surrounding neighborhoods. Akirov Towers have a density of about 125 apartments per hectare, counting to the midlines of the streets adjacent to the development; the residential parts of the Old North, built almost uniformly to the fourth floor, average about 250 residents per hectare, and my own calculations suggest about 100 apartments per hectare.

A cohort of reformers, from both left and right, propose better public transit as a solution. People would be able to live in the periphery and commute to city jobs. The main efforts in the region are new commuter lines and the subway. The subway has been proposed and canceled so many times that nobody I have talked to seems to believe it will ever open. The commuter lines are not electrified and run against a capacity constraint in central Tel Aviv, where there is room only for three tracks; in addition, the service level is far short of an S-Bahn or RER, and is on a par with the higher-grade lines in North America, for example the LIRR. Typically the people advocating for such issues, even in government, are secular and would favor operating public transportation on the Sabbath, but no action or serious legislation has emerged yet, despite a fair amount of grassroots activism.

Less commonly proposed is development in the gaps in urbanization. As is readily seen on Google Earth, there is empty space directly adjacent to the urban area both to the north and south of Tel Aviv, interposing between adjacent municipalities. I am told that there was a plan to develop the empty space to the north, but it was torpedoed by a local desire to keep the municipalities strictly separate. (For clarification, those are both wealthy favored quarter suburbs – I believe Herzliya and Ra’anana, but I no longer remember.)

Also not commonly mentioned is the issue of political will. The protesters do not view their cause as one strictly about housing. A commenter on another blog quotes the following text from one of the tents:

I’m not here because of housing prices. I see them as a symptom of a systemic problem – a country that loses its democratic character in favor of a corrupt system of government based on connections, lobbyists, and property owners….

After a few days here, I’m discovering amazing things. People are completely forgetting about the elements that usually divide them, share their opinions, and listen to each other. Housing prices look like a drop in a sea of inequities. The problem is systemic. The apartments are a symptom.

…

We are still in the initial phase, where everyone talks to his heart’s content – but this is how you build cross-sectional solidarity.

If we continue to deal only with housing, at best we’ll solve just one point, important as it is, and in a year we won’t be able to afford food or studies. I worry we’ll miss the Israeli Spring and settle for a few flowers in our vase.

The Israeli government is no stranger to rapid growth. The settlements’ population went up 50% between 1999 and 2006. In terms of urban-rural politics, Israel has still not gotten to the stage that cities are an object of romanticism, and keeps pouring money into contested regions in order to create facts on the ground. The era of Mapai, the predecessor of today’s Labor Party, saw disinvestment in cities in favor of kibbutzim and development towns in peripheral regions; today, there’s some investment in luxury towers in the newly-built CBDs, but the political system is still anti-urban, just with a different focus.

Tel Aviv’s housing prices are putting it between a rock and a hard place. The status quo is intolerable; so is massive urban renewal, raising density marginally and pricing out the middle class, which unlike in American cities has remained mostly intact. The political consensus, to the degree it exists, is not to do anything. Good urban design and laxer zoning rules could mitigate some of those problems, but they’re too politically unpalatable right now. So, unless they indeed settle for a symbolic reform, the protesters will stay.

Quick Note on Food Transportation

It’s a commonplace among some environmentalists that an oil- or carbon-constrained world is one where it’s prohibitively expensive to ship food long distances, and therefore people should eat local. For example, James Kunstler argues that cities will shrink and people will return to locally grown agriculture. For the benefit of society, let me debunk this fantasy with some hard numbers.

Suppose the price of diesel rises by $20 per gallon – $5.25 per liter. This is somewhat higher than the E3 Network‘s 95th-percentile estimate for the economically correct carbon tax in 2050, and twice as high as the estimate for 2010. It could come about due to an apocalyptic oil shock, though such a world and a world with a very high carbon tax are mutually exclusive. Today’s Class I freight trains are capable of moving about 450 short tons of freight one mile on one gallon of diesel – about 170 ton-km per liter. (Large cargo ships are about equally efficient, so this holds equally well over oceans.)

Let’s now look at rice, a very cheap retail food item that can’t be grown in every climate and is thus vulnerable to an increase in price that’s essentially constant per unit of weight. Under the above assumptions, shipping rice from Arkansas to New York, a distance of about 2,000 km, would require an extra $60 per ton. The actual retail price of rice in the US is around $1,700 per ton, so the oil shock would raise the price of transporting rice long-distance about 3.5%. First- and last-mile transportation at both ends uses trucks and would become much more expensive, but this would be equally true of long-distance food shipping and locally grown food.

This actually overstates the supposed problem of shipping food across regions, because high fuel prices lead to both higher efficiency and lower consumption. In 2009 BNSF said it would take $10 billion to electrify its mainline network, including purchasing dual-mode locomotives, and pegged the breakeven point for such a venture at $4/gallon gas. A carbon tax would also cause the source of such electricity to shift to greener sources than coal.

While locavores insist on shaving off the small, small portion of their carbon footprint coming from food transportation, many ignore the much larger issue of what they eat. Not all – the environmental movement is full of vegetarians – but the attitude that buying local is more helpful to the environment than avoiding red meat is sufficiently widespread that it’s important to note that the opposite is the truth.

Everyone should read the study linked in the above paragraph. Even when accounting for the full transportation cycle of food, including fertilizer and other materials, transportation is a small percentage of food emissions. Ruminant animals emit large quantities of methane; large mammals hog feed and thus require more fertilizer and energy to grow; manure adds more emissions of nitrous oxides and methane. As a result, red meat consumed in the US emits 22.1 kg-equivalent of CO2 per kg. The average carbon cost posited by E3 – $400 per ton, one fifth the apocalyptic amount used in the rice transportation calculation – would tax red meat $9 per kg, $4 per pound, roughly doubling its retail price.

Short-Term Versus Long-Term Transit Problems

Yonah has a post about the predicament facing US transit agencies in bad times. The standard sources of operating subsidy – state and local government support, dedicated taxes – are cyclical, and although federal funds could in principle bridge the gap as Keynesian stimulus, the current mood in Congress and the White House is one of austerity. In addition, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica’s proposed transportation bill slashes funding to both highways and transit by a third, though Rail Subcommittee Chair Bill Shuster claims large potential savings from streamlining the environmental review process.

In principle, in case the savings don’t materialize, and funding is indeed cut agencies will have to choose between fare hikes and service cuts. In practice, it’s important to distinguish between short-run and long-run budget issues. The short-run problems are fueled entirely by the poor economy. The federal government doesn’t subsidize operations at any case (and the one transit expansion program that’s even mildly good, Los Angeles’s 30/10 plan, would actually move forward under Mica’s plan); despite that, agencies did not have funding shortfalls in 2007.

A related issue is that the US may default on its debt in two weeks, but if it does then everything will suffer rather than just transit, and it’s fantasy to think that fare increases and service cuts would help. In case the US doesn’t default – which is reasonable to plan for, for roughly the same reason US government debt is considered the safest in the world – the short-run problems are not particularly pressing. It depends on the region, of course, but overall, the US economy today is not worse than it was in 2009 or 2010.

Another essentially short-term problem is political: Tea Party politicians make it harder to form a pro-transit consensus (see e.g. here and here), and unexpectedly cut funding to transit projects. In light of the low popularity of such politicians, and the rewriting of federal political power (either completely Democratic or completely Republican) that is expected after the 2012 election, this should also be treated as ephemeral.

In contrast, I encourage everyone to go to the comments to the above-linked post on The Transport Politic, and browse through the proposed solutions. Those include bus stop consolidation, labor force efficiency improvements, consolidation of competing lines across agencies, bus-only lanes to reduce travel time, focusing service on serviceable inner-urban areas, construction cost cuts. In other words, they are all about long-run improvements. I would add two more – namely, the FRA, and stations located in unwalkable areas – but the principle is the same.

The difference is that most long-run problems should be addressed through a prolonged process of new consensus formation. The FRA can be gutted relatively quickly, but everything else requires public consultation and agency reorganization, both of which take time. The rationalizations that could be done quickly and in the guise of a general service cut were already done in 2009; further short-term changes would have to be actual cuts. Long-term changes can’t be done at the drop of a hat.

In addition, anything involving layoffs requires some cooperation from the employees, which requires the agency to find the workers job placement, as JNR/JR did in the 1980s. In Japan, it took almost an entire decade, and that was in an unusually good economy. The US can try to do this a little faster by pursuing rapid growth in transit – diverting the increased labor efficiency into more operating hours rather than reduced operating costs – but this would only mildly soften the blow, unless there were a stellar state of pro-transit consensus allowing for an unusually fast transit growth, which itself would have to be done over the long run. The only other alternative is to engage in the layoffs certain corporations and consultants have been infamous for, which is not guaranteed to produce good results; on the contrary, it would make the employees hate the agency, leading to a dysfunctional corporate culture, in which the line employees with expertise have no reason to share it with management.

It’s critical to avoid confusing short-run and long-run political problems, because their solutions are fundamentally different. In the short run, good transit advocates need to defeat Tea Party legislators and fellow travelers, fight for emergency fixes in the state legislatures such as New York’s transit lockbox, and allow for small fare hikes or service cuts if necessary. Consensus formation has nothing to do with it, and is in fact counterproductive when the other party is explicitly uninterested in consensus.

It’s in the long run that the familiar scourges of this blog become more important. Bottom-up consensus formation, starting from the community level, can be done even now, but it can’t be expected to yield results for the next few years. Once the Tea Party disappears as a political force – most likely 2012 or at the latest 2014 – good transit advocates should look for general good-government approaches, including attempts to revise zoning codes, reform contracting processes to reduce construction costs, and so on; while this can be done early as well, it again should take some time to take effect. Consensus in the long run is critical: it’s important to move away from the state of transportation politics since 2008, in which mode wars have become a partisan issue, and toward a state in which the partisan debates are about whether to improve transit through the application of liberal or conservative ideology. No matter what happens in the next two years, good transit advocates should be planning for the state of transportation funding debates ten years from now to look dramatically different.

Thoughts on Carmageddon

I’m not talking about the controversial computer game of my childhood, but about the closure of the 405 in Los Angeles for 53 hours. The predicted massive traffic jams failed to materialize, just like every time there’s a closure due to construction, an accident, or an earthquake. The reason is that traffic engineers and planners, the media, and even airlines talk up the possibility of gridlock so much that people choose to stay home or use other modes of transportation. The Huffington Post’s warning that the closure could actually increase carbon emissions because people would take longer detours or cause more traffic jams failed to materialize.

Although normally the induced demand phenomenon is more in the long term than in the short term, if the closure is known to take a very short time, then people can make short-term behavioral changes. They’re not going to move closer to where they work or agitate for better public transit, but they’re going to move non-essential trips to another day, carpool or take transit or bike just the one time, or even sleep one night at the office. Indeed,

Dennis S. Mileti, a sociologist, has spent his career analyzing human behavior around natural and man-made disasters. He advises everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to hazmat workers on how to deliver effective warnings that make people pay attention without panicking and guide them to take precautions and other appropriate actions.

In this case, he said, the message got through because of the blanket of media coverage.

“The public doesn’t change its behavior on its own,” Mileti said. “It behaves on the perceptions formed by the information people are provided.”

Ironically, transit strikes do lead to worse traffic, even in Los Angeles. It’s not because transit is more significant to the population of Southern California than the 405; although more people ride transit in Greater Los Angeles than take the 405 across Sepulveda Pass – about 1.2 million per weekday vs. 500,000 – the transit ridership is much more dispersed, and is dominated by people who can’t afford to drive alone. Instead, the issue is one of media forewarning. Strikes are sudden, and even when they’re threatened, the media focus is never about mitigating the extra traffic, not even in New York.

Potentially, this may be one reason why in the long term, building more roads creates induced demand, and demolishing them causes demand to disappear. Highway openings are widely advertised: politicians love ribbon cutting ceremonies, and the media runs stories about developers and drivers complaining about traffic on parallel roads. Highway closures are more sudden – the two test cases, the Embarcadero Freeway and the West Side Highway, were caused by disaster – but afterward the media coverage and the short-term spike in traffic teach the public that those highways do not exist, leading the traffic to vanish.

Of course, reduced demand isn’t just trips vanishing into thin air. Some trips do get diverted to low-traffic side streets. Others get diverted to mass transit, just as the original construction of the Interstates destroyed transit ridership in the US. Slate has an article about how Carmageddon is teaching the locals that mass transit exists in the first place; it’s possible that it’s going to lead to a long-term increase in ridership, just like short-term spikes in gas prices.

This does not mean long-term road use is going to decline – in fact, it’s going to increase because of the added capacity on the 405. Although the construction of rail transit leads to a reduction in traffic (P.S. if you follow the link, bear in mind its pollution estimates are really low, coming from among other things only counting global warming damage to the US), this assumes business as usual. The main lesson here is not about transit, but about what Los Angeles can expect to happen if an earthquake forces the 405 to be permanently closed, just like the Embarcadero. Although drivers and many business groups are guaranteed to warn about traffic, in reality if such a disaster happens, high traffic will not happen, not in the long run.

Update: as Herbie notes in the comments, St. Louis closed a segment of I-64 for two years, and not only did predicted congestion barely materialize, but also the economic impact of the closure according to business surveys was zero.

Peak Driving

The Infrastructurist links to and summarizes a study in World Transport Policy and Practice by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy positing that driving in the US has hit a peak and is now in decline. The study’s contribution is not the trend, which has already been identified and described in previous research, e.g. by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, but some explanations for why it’s happening. Newman and Kenworthy are attributing the decline in driving to six causes:

1. The Marchetti Wall. People budget a constant amount of time for travel, about 60-90 minutes per day (Marchetti’s research suggests 60), and respond to faster travel by living farther from where they work or taking more trips. Research has confirmed this not only within developed countries, but also in rural Africa; for a lit review, read section 2.2 of Gary Barnes’ article on density.

The Marchetti Wall refers to the fact that today’s American cities have sprawled to the maximum range of this constant travel time at automobile speed; therefore, infill is required to add more density. Exurbanization is still happening – the fastest growth in US cities today is in the gentrified center and in the exurbs – but is often low-income, i.e. people are violating the wall’s limit because they can’t afford any better. This is also noted in a 2006 study by Steven Polzin predicting stagnant driving: commute times in the US have been inching up, which suggests current development trends are about to hit a wall.

2. Public transportation growth. Public transit ridership in the US bottomed in the early 1990s and has been increasing faster than population since; for one famous example, New York’s annual subway ridership went from 1 billion in 1990 to about 1.6 billion today.

Newman and Kenworthy posit further that since the empirical relationship between driving and transit ridership is exponential, small increases in transit ridership will produce large decreases in driving; I’m skeptical, since the causality seems to go the other way (very low transit use requires vast sprawl, raising the amount of driving), but the increase in transit traffic can still produce measurable decreases in driving.

3. The reversal of urban sprawl. Standard, unweighted densities of many US urban areas stopped declining or are even rising. Newman and Kenworthy don’t mention this, but some cities outgrow their suburbs – e.g. New York and San Francisco in the US (as usual, going by more accurate ACS data rather than the failed Census), as well as some European cities. Exurbs are still growing quickly, but those are a small proportion of population; they can’t account for much.

4. The aging of cities. As the population is getting older, people are driving less. A related trend, again one not mentioned in the study, is the reduction in the proportion of households with children, making the usual crime and school concerns of the American middle class less relevant. The study does mention empty nesters as a related trend, in point #5.

5. The growth of a culture of urbanism. This is an issue Litman touches on as well – young people are less enthusiastic about driving today than they were in the 1960s, and are getting licenses at lower rates. Newman and Kenworthy cite previous literature about the rise of urban coolness, what I would call the culture of urban romanticism; they compare the popularity of Friends in the 1990s with that of Father Knows Best in the 1940s and 50s.

6. Rising fuel prices. Those make driving more expensive (especially since fuel prices are visibly and directly proportional to the amount of driving, unlike more fixed costs of driving), and reduces the desirability of exurban housing. This is attested in previous studies in the 1970s. Although there’s a return to normal after fuel prices come down, the general consensus is that the oil prices of the future is going to be much higher than that of the 1990s, if perhaps not the $200 per barrel predicted by Matthew Simmons. In other words, the new normal is not the same as the old normal, and this is going to be reflected in reduced driving.

Rising fuel prices are probably the most important of the six. The reason is that even outside urban areas, it’s possible for an auto-oriented region to require much less driving than is standard in suburban America. Raise fuel prices to European levels, and the result could well look like France, where most people outside Greater Paris and Lyon drive, but the distances driven are shorter (13,000 km per car, vs. nearly 20,000 for cars and light trucks in the US), and the cars are much more fuel-efficient. Provincial France is not livable or urban – on the contrary, it resembles suburban America in many ways, complete with hypermarkets; the largest chain, Carrefour, is the second largest retailer in the world after Wal-Mart. Urbanism is for the rich, as is increasingly the trend in the US.

Newman and Kenworthy do not mention the social issues coming from this new urbanization, in which the cities are for the rich. But they do have pointed suggestions to planners for how to deal with a future in which fewer people drive: plan cities and engineer traffic for more pedestrian- and transit-friendliness, do not assume more road capacity will be needed, finance more urban construction, do not treat cars as a perfect proxy for economic growth. In short, do not continue to act as if the regime is still that what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA and vice versa; driving is entering decline, and cars are just one consumer good among many.

Carbon Costs May Be Far Higher Than Previously Thought

A pair of economists at Economics for Equity and the Environment (E3) have just released a study positing that the social cost of carbon is far higher than previous estimates, by up to an order of magnitude. The official estimate used by the US government is $21 per metric ton of CO2 as of 2010, and various estimates go up to about $100-200, e.g. the Swedish carbon tax is 101 Euros per ton, and James Hansen recommended $115 per ton. In contrast, the E3 study’s range, using newer estimates of damages, goes up to $900 per ton of CO2 as of 2010, escalating to $1,500 in 2050, when the discount rate is low and the price is based on a worst case scenario (95th percentile) rather than the average.

One should bear in mind that the discount rate used to get the high numbers is 1.5%, in line with what was used by the economists at Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus to arrive at the conclusion that climate change mitigation was a waste of time. It’s not a radical estimate, although some commentators have wrongly confused it with zero discount rate; it’s in line with the long-term risk-free bond yields. Even using average rather than worst-case damages (but still averages coming from the newer, higher estimates) would give a carbon tax of $500 as of 2010, escalating to $800 by 2050.

The carbon content of gasoline is such that a $900/ton tax would be almost to $8 per gallon of gasoline, or $2 per liter. For diesel, make it $9 per gallon. Good transit advocates are engaging in fantasy if they think this, even together with other costs such as air pollution, would eliminate driving; however, it would severely curtail it, inducing people to take shorter trips, switch some trips to public transportation, and drive much more fuel-efficient cars. All three are necessary: not even in Switzerland has the transit revival gotten to the point of abolishing the car. However, the current US car mode share – 86% for work trips – is unsustainable and has to go down under any scenario with a high carbon tax.

More intriguing would be the effect on electricity consumption and generation. Current coal-fired plants in the US would see an average tax of about $0.89 per kWh; natural gas plants would be taxed $0.49 per kWh. Cities already have an advantage there – New York City claims 4,700 kWh of annual electricity consumption per capita, while the current US average is about 13,000. Obviously, in both cases, fossil-fired electricity consumption would crash, while solar and wind power would become a bargain, but it would be easier to do this in large cities. But again, urban revival has its limits; suburban houses would still exist, just with much more passive solar design and extensive solar panels.

Rumors of the Death of HSR Greatly Exaggerated

Aaron Renn has a post on New Geography pronouncing American high-speed rail dead. His reasoning: the stimulus spread the money around too much, Republican Governors rejected the HSR stimulus money, rail advocates have called 110 mph legacy lines high-speed rail, the FRA hobbles good passenger rail. All of those factors are true – though some cancel out, e.g. the 110 mph pretend-HSR lines in Wisconsin and Ohio were the first on the chopping block – but California HSR marches on.

Reading California HSR Blog gives an impression that the project is controversial, but in no real risk of disappearing. While some of the money from the canceled lines went to chaff, a lot went to California, which already has enough money to build a demonstration line in the Central Valley and is already looking at leveraging other money it will get to reach either Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Moreover, although the authority still carries over a lot of past incompetence, the current administration of Roelof van Ark is looking at alternatives to reduce costs, such as reducing the number and length of viaducts and even revisiting past alignment decisions. The adults are more firmly in charge today than a year and a half ago.

There’s still NIMBYism, particularly from Central Valley farmers and from suburbs on the San Francisco Peninsula, but the former is no big deal by the standards of what TGV construction has to go through, and the latter has simply led the authority to focus on connecting HSR track to Los Angeles first and use legacy track at slightly lower speed with much less local impact to get to San Francisco. Whether the project will ultimately have a useful starter line or remain a Bakersfield-Fresno-Merced shuttle depends on how much private funding it can attract, but Japan promised to fund 50% of the line, and the authority has had meetings with Spain and China. It’d be enough to do at least LA-Fresno, which is quite useful, if not as good as LA-Fresno-San Francisco.

Moreover, calling HSR dead on New Geography and saying it’s because Republican Governors rejected the money is ironic, in light of who owns the site. Aaron is interested in reform and efficiency; the same can’t be said of New Geography executive editor Joel Kotkin, an anti-urbanist so uninformed and desperate he blamed megacities for AIDS.

Kotkin may be just uninformed, but contributing editor Wendell Cox goes further: he and fellow Reason transportation hack Robert Poole wrote a report claiming, on flimsy evidence, that Florida’s high-speed rail line would have huge cost overruns and ridership shortfalls (a later report released by professional consultants said in fact the line would have been more profitable than expected). The report is a lie, and Rick Scott’s cancellation of the Florida HSR line, based on the report, involved additional lying to the court.

My explanation, hoisted from a comment I wrote on the subject on the Infrastructurist, responding to commenter Colin Prime:

1. The executive summary – i.e. what most people would read – says, “This report estimates that the cost to Florida taxpayers could be $3 billion more than currently projected.” As it turns out, in the body of the report in the section on Flyvbjerg the report says $0.54-2.7 billion, with $1.2 billion as the likeliest. None of these lower figures appears in the executive summary. That alone suggests massive deception.

2. In fact, Flyvbjerg either talks about megaprojects in general or focuses on urban rail. HSR projects don’t run over budget frequently, and when they do, it’s not by 100%. In Norway, a 50% cost overrun on the HSR line to the airport (coming from geological problems) was considered so unusual it triggered a government investigation.

3. Here’s the report on California [the projected per-km cost of the Central Valley segment is much higher than that of the Florida line]: “The California segment is not being built to full high-speed rail standards, because of a legal requirement that the line be usable by conventional Amtrak services if the Los Angeles to San Francisco project is not completed. The line would be upgraded to full high-speed rail standards when and if the much longer route is completed.”

This is technically known as “a lie.” Making the line Amtrak-usable is actually a cost raiser rather than a cost saver, because Amtrak trains are heavier and therefore elevated structures would have to be beefed up. Otherwise the line is built to HSR standards in terms of the expensive bits, i.e. track geometry and physical infrastructure; the only component that may not be included in California in this round is electrification, which is a fraction of the total cost of HSR ($3 million per mile kilometer at Acela costs).

4. In general, of the 11 factors cited for California-Florida differences, the ones on which Florida would be more expensive than California are all small things like stations and electricity; the big items involve physical infrastructure, and there Florida would be cheaper.

5. To support the assertion that HSR can suffer from a ridership shortfall, the report mentions Eurostar and THSR. Unmentioned are the many TGV lines that exceeded projections. The report also makes a spurious comparison to the Acela; it even doubles-down on the Acela comparison, and uses a false comparison to make the Florida line look slow. Florida’s travel time is compared not with end-to-end travel time on the average fast train (an average of 80 mph on the Acela NY-DC, and 140 mph on the Sanyo Shinkansen) but with the fastest intermediate segment on the fastest train of the day, connecting two small cities (100 and 170, respectively). On top of it, the Acela is priced for premium travel, with coach travel provided by the 66 mph Regional.

6. To add insult to injury, Cox and Poole dismiss Florida’s tourism as such: “The metropolitan areas in both markets [NEC and Florida] have substantial tourist volumes.” In reality, the tourist volumes in Florida relative to the metro area size are much larger than in the Northeast, and the Florida line directly serves tourist attractions (airport to Disneyland) whereas the Acela does not (minimal airport service, premium brand).

Given the above issues the study, I’d say calling it a lie is fair.

High-speed rail has challenges, many correctly identified by Aaron. The FRA is an obstacle (though the people most interested in changing it tend to be good transit activists); spreading the money around was a problem. But right-wing populists who can’t govern soon become unpopular, and are thus an ephemeral phenomenon. Rick Scott’s approval rate is 27%, John Kasich‘s is 35%, Scott Walker‘s is 37%. And it’s deeply troubling to go on a website and say that high-speed rail is dead when one of the reasons it’s dead is shoddy or dishonest work done by another contributor to the same website.

Fortunately, in California, the real obstacle is so far not a huge deal (California is planning to run on dedicated tracks, or at least on tracks shared only with commuter trains), and the ephemeral obstacle lost the gubernatorial election. Money is a problem and so is incompetence, but the incompetence seems to be waning, albeit slowly, and the money is likely to materialize. Don’t count HSR out yet.

Airport Access vs. City Access

New York’s MTA and Port Authority have just released slides from a meeting discussing alternatives for transit access to LaGuardia. While the airport is the nearest to Midtown Manhattan by road and thus the option of choice for many business travelers, its transit options consist of local buses within Queens or to Upper Manhattan, and as a result its passengers are the least likely to use transit: about 10%, vs. 15% for JFK and 17% for Newark. Transit to the airport has been on and off the agenda for quite some time, with the most recent attempt, a Giuliani-era proposal to extend the Astoria Line, torpedoed due to community opposition to elevated trains.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have little positive to say about transit geared toward airport travelers. Business travelers are much better at demanding airport transit than using it. However, LaGuardia’s location is such that it could serve as a useful outer-end anchor for multiple lines providing transit to underserved areas. One is north-south service in Queens east of the Astoria Line, for example along Junction Boulevard; there’s already a bus that goes on Junction, but it’s slow and infrequent, and the lines do not combine into a single trunk except on airport grounds. Another is east-west service along 125th Street, which is replete with traffic and supports higher combined frequency on the four lines serving it than any other bus corridor in the city. Yet another is any service to East Elmhurst, which is a very dense neighborhood far from the subway.

The alternatives analysis seems biased in favor of Select Bus Service, i.e. not quite BRT, but such a question can just as well be asked of any mode of transportation, up to and including subways. However, even if the proposal is to physically separate the bus lanes, much good can be done on those corridors, independently of airport traffic. Because BRT can be done open rather than closed, the airport travel market could in principle even be served by a few direct buses from 1st/2nd Avenues through the Triboro Bridge, or perhaps over the Queensboro if the city adds physically separate lanes on Northern or Queens Boulevard. Those business travelers who are willing to use airport transit put a premium on direct service to the CBD: circumferential lines such as those proposed here would do more good for ordinary city residents than for air travelers.

In a world in which New York’s construction costs are normal rather than very high, it would be possible to speculate about subway extensions. Although city officials have favored an extension of the Astoria Line, there are better ways to serve that segment of Queens, providing north-south service to East Elmhurst and perhaps additional east-west service north of the Flushing Line. My preference is something like this: a shuttle under Junction intersecting all existing and possible future radial subways, and a continuation of Second Avenue Subway along 125th Street. Although it has a gap in service from Harlem to the airport, Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 has a natural tie-in to 125th, making the airport less important as an anchor than it is for surface transit; and even with a subway, 125th may well have enough remaining bus traffic to justify physically separated median bus lanes.

Although the possibility of subway extension is remote given current construction costs, an SBS extension is likely. It’s affordable at current costs and willingness to pay, and provides lines on a map that political leaders can point to and say “I did it.” In addition, boosters and business leaders tend to like airport expansions, and those are sometimes useful for the city.

Although New York currently prefers closed to open BRT, it’s still possible that airport access will indeed be used as an excuse to improve city transit with circumferential SBS routes in Queens and Harlem. It’s unlikely much good will come of it – note how the slides talk about “service to the airport and Western Queens” instead of “service to Western Queens and the airport” – but it’s feasible.

The Mother of All Interest Conflicts

Best industry practice for cutting transportation capital costs, found in Madrid, is to separate design from construction and keep the project management in-house. The FTA’s practice is different:

Parsons Brinckerhoff said Wednesday it has been awarded a contract by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to develop and document a transit asset management framework and implementation guide that will support the FTA’s State of Good Repair and Asset Management Programs.

The FTA estimates there is a nationwide backlog of $50 billion to $80 billion in deferred maintenance and replacement needs, the vast majority of which are rail-related.

PB is going to decide what projects are necessary and how to build them, and will also be able to bid on design and construction. Naturally, the numbers it will come up with are going to be favorable to its private interest; the common interest is not profitable for the company.

This is especially egregious in state of good repair (SOGR) money, which is often a series of rent-seeking scams. Agencies do not impartially judge how much money they need for maintenance and then ask for it. Instead, they massage the numbers based on whether the political mood is such that they could get more or less money. In 2005, the Amtrak board fired President David Gunn for insisting on competing SOGR before attempting to move to profitability; by 2009, when the stimulus provided plenty of money, Amtrak suddenly remembered it had deferred maintenance and came up with the $10 billion NEC Master Plan, essentially SOGR plus a few small upgrades.

A few agencies, such as New York City Transit, treat SOGR seriously (this was thanks to Richard Ravitch and David Gunn) and push for it even when the politicians want something different; most just use it as an excuse to justify high capital costs without anything to show for it. Look again at Amtrak, which even as it cries poverty about SOGR is trying to portray its finances as very good, for example listing a farebox recovery ratio that, unlike the practice at peer national railroads, excludes depreciation and interest. Heads Amtrak is profitable and competent and should get what it wants, tails it has a backlog of deferred maintenance and needs more money.

This is more a political than technical problem, but normal political advocacy is not going to help. Politicians can get credit for massive overhauls or new infrastructure involving ribbon cuttings; they won’t get credit for adding to the design and management budget, no matter how much money it will save in the long run.

Therefore, politicians who care more about being seen as fiscally conservative than about saving money force agencies to cut their in-house expertise. Instead, agencies outsource everything to consultants; this can work sometimes, but the people who would oversee them have been cut, so that there’s nobody in charge who’s loyal to the interests of the agency or the public. As a result, nobody in the US knows anything about good practices for rail infrastructure construction except people with the mother of all conflicts of interest, and nobody knows anything about rolling stock except New York City Transit, which designs rolling stock in-house or buys designs and prototypes separately from revenue equipment.

The agencies have bought into this system, since they share in the overly expensive designs and must defend them. Madrid doesn’t separate design from construction just because of interest conflict issues; the reason stated by Madrid Metro CEO Manuel Melis Maynar is that changes are unavoidable, and a construction crew uninvolved with the original design would be less stubborn about sticking to the blueprint. Since such separation does not exist in the US, and on the contrary the people currently in charge are used to the system so much that they bring up design/build contracts as an improvement, agency inertia is directed toward making the agency even less competent.

California HSR is perhaps the worst example of this. The HSR Authority consists of nine politicians, overseeing a skeletal crew of professionals (I believe there are only six engineers/planners). Unsurprisingly, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) Peer Review Group wrote a peer-review report accusing the HSRA of having no expertise in project management or even in negotiating a good PPP so that the private sector could do it. Even more unsurprisingly, hiring more staff to bolster an agency that’s currently incompetent is risky and nobody wants to be responsible for either potential delays or spending good money after bad, despite the possibility of large cost savings in the medium and long runs.