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.

24/7 Rapid Transit

It’s a commonplace in New York that the New York City Subway is almost the only one that runs 24/7, and that the rest – PATH, PATCO, and two lines of the Chicago L – are small operations. The reason for this operating plan is that the main Manhattan trunklines have four tracks, making it feasible to shut down tracks for weekend and late-night maintenance and skip a few stations in one direction. Occasionally, even midday midweek service is disrupted. This leads to complaints from passengers who actually ride transit in the off-peak, as well as various politicians, and exhortations from political defenders of the MTA that it’s a necessary byproduct of 24/7 operation.

In fact, there’s one additional system not mentioned above: the Copenhagen Metro, which began 24/7 operation in 2009. Although around-the-clock operation on weekends is common in some European cities, such as Berlin, Copenhagen took the extra step to run 24/7 reliably. It has only two tracks, like some lines in New York, but made sure it would be possible to single-track at night for maintenance. Late-night headways in Copenhagen are 20 minutes, like in New York, and this gives enough time to reduce long segments to a single track and run wrong-way service. Copenhagen’s trains are automated and this helps with wrong-way signaling, but it’s not a prerequisite and wrong-way operation is already done late at night on the subway in New York.

What this means is that there’s a technical solution to the problem of late-night and weekend service disruptions: make sure that there are crossovers placed at regular intervals to allow 20-minute service on single track. Installing switches requires extra capital construction money, but is orders of magnitude cheaper than building extra tunnels, and would make late-night maintenance much easier. Headways are such that a switch would be required every 7 or 8 minutes, which means every 2.5-5 km. At some places, crossovers already exist at that density, for example at all four tunnels from Queens to Manhattan, and all that’s required is schedule modification.

The result would still not be as satisfactory as in Copenhagen, ironically because of the multi-track trunklines. Under the slow-fast-fast-slow system used in New York, as well as most other four-track lines, it’s impossible for a local train to cross over to the opposite track without fouling the express tracks. This would create serious problems even on the three-track lines in Queens and the Bronx, since extra switching moves would be required, shortening the acceptable crossover spacing. It would still be possible, say with crossovers 6-7 minutes apart, but the maintenance requirements would be higher.

On the four-track mainlines, I don’t see any solution that unequivocally improves on the status quo. It’s possible to have the same crossovers, but at even tighter spacing, and without any express traffic. Weekend express traffic could possibly still be retained, but not late-night express trains, and late-night frequency would be reduced to 20 minutes even on combined lines, for example the local 1/2 in Manhattan.

What this means for future trunklines is that, if four-tracking is required for capacity or for express service, it should not run as was built in New York a hundred years ago. Instead, the slow tracks should be in the middle, and the fast tracks on the outside; this allows more operational flexibility as well as short-turning local trains, at the cost of making it harder to build infill stations. While the subway short-turns some local trains, for example the C at 168th and at Euclid, this requires flying junctions, which contributed to the IND’s excessive cost.

Maximum flexibility could be obtained by building every station with two island platforms, as if it were an express station, and having express trains skip low-traffic stations. This way, two tracks could be shut down for maintenance along the entire line with no ill effect on reliability, except that retaining express service would required timed overtakes. The problem is of course the much higher cost of such a line, especially if it is underground.

For underground lines, there’s very rarely a reason to four-track. Washington may complain about lack of flexibility and express service, but modern subway lines with good rolling stock and wide curves can achieve acceptable average speed even with medium stop spacing. The Copenhagen Metro averages 40 km/h, a speed previously reserved for systems with very long (~1.6 km) interstations such as the Moscow Metro, even though its stop spacing is just 1 km. Capacity is the only serious drawback of two-track lines, but if it is so pressing then the city should built two separate two-track lines, which with tunnel boring machines cost about the same as one four-track line.

Quick Note: Are HSR Transfers Acceptable?

When SNCF built the first TGV line, it did not have funding to complete the full line from Paris to Lyon. Instead, it built two thirds of the line’s length, with the remaining third done on legacy track at reduced speed. The travel time was 4 hours; when the full line was completed a few years later, it was reduced to 2. The one-seat ride remains the TGV’s current operating model, to the point that one unelectrified branch got direct service with a diesel locomotive attached to the trains at the end, and was only electrified recently.

In Japan, transfers are more common, because of the different track gauges. At the outer ends of the Shinkansen, it is common for people to transfer to a legacy express train at the northern end of the line, though on two branches JR East built two Mini-Shinkansen lines, regauging or dual-gauging legacy track to make TGV-style through-running possible. In Germany, the entire system is built on transfers, typically timed between two high-speed trains.

I mention this because the California HSR activists are talking about the possibility of transfers as an initial phase. Some politicians occasionally hint about forced transfers at San Jose, even though it is relatively easy (in fact, planned) to electrify Caltrain and run trains through to San Francisco, but more intriguing is Clem Tillier and Richard Mlynarik’s proposal about running to Livermore first:

This is predicated on prioritizing the San Francisco to Los Angeles connection. It has nothing to do with Sacramento or the East Bay… those are just the cherry on top. Focus on the cake, not the cherry.

LA – Livermore HSR 2:06
Transfer in Livermore 0:10
Livermore – SF Embarcadero BART 0:57
TOTAL SF-LA via Altamont/Livermore BART 3:13

LA – Gilroy HSR 1:57
Transfer in Gilroy 0:10
Gilroy – SF 4th & King by Caltrain 2:00
TOTAL SF-LA via Pacheco/Gilroy Caltrain 4:07

It’s simply not a contest. Even for San Jose, LA – SJ downtown times would be approximately equivalent via Livermore BART once BART to SJ is built. So let me reiterate: No other alternative, least of all Pacheco, provides such a “Phase Zero” access to SF.

The one possible problem: Livermore’s quality of service will be low after BART goes there. From their 1982 opening until 1985, the Tohoku and Joetsu Shinkansen only served Omiya, located 30 km north of central Tokyo; however, Omiya was already connected to Tokyo by multiple high-capacity rapid transit lines, and an additional line was built at the same time as mitigation for the line’s construction impacts.

Quick Note: Road Boondoggles

With all the focus on poorly done transit investment on this blog, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the primary source of US transportation waste is still roads. Consider for example the following projects proposed in Southern California, not all funded:

– $1 billion fully funded for adding one carpool lane in one direction for 10 miles to the 405 through Sepulveda Pass; since the 405 will have to be closed for two days, this is locally dubbed Carmageddon. This is about $60 million per unidirectional lane-km, which is to my knowledge a record for above-ground highways.

– $3 billion proposed for 4.5 miles of twin tunnels to complete a gap in the 710, of which $780 million is funded by Measure R, which generally funded transit projects. The cost, $400 million per km, is not high by global tunnel standards, but compared with the opportunity cost of building transit in the area, it’s enormous.

– $4.1 billion for widening the 5 from 8 lanes to 12-14 for 27 miles, not yet funded. It’s about $18 million per unidirectional lane-km, a figure that’s cropped up elsewhere in the US and should be compared with about $15-80 million per double track-km for light rail, which has about eight or ten times the capacity per unidirectional track or lane.

Those projects are cheaper than the Big Dig or the Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, but also provide much less – two are routine widenings, and one is a minor tunnel. The point is that even small upgrades to road capacity cost as much as a major transit project.

The US road network has been a money sink going back to the first federal-aid highway act, in 1917. The reference here is 20th Century Sprawl, by Owen Gutfreund, who describes how motorist lobbies complained about license fees, fuel taxes, and other fees since the 1910s, and created road lockboxes for the revenue generated. Even though gas taxes were treated differently from cigarette and alcohol taxes, which do not go toward funding tobacco and distilleries, they were still not enough to pay for roads. In fact the only paid for about half the cost of highways, and there was a huge subsidy from gas tax-ineligible urban roads to the national and state roads.

The situation today is hardly different. Although proportionally there’s much less cross-subsidy than in the 1930s, due to the growth of suburbs connected by Interstates or other gas tax-eligible numbered roads, roads’ financial performance is still low. Under the fiction that local streets are paid by the tooth fairy, US roads are $75 billion a year in the hole: as of 2008, all gas tax and toll receipts are $122 billion, including the portion diverted to non-highway purposes, whereas total receipts to be spent on gas tax-eligible highways are $197 billion, including $4.3 billion spent on collection expenses. That’s 62% cost recovery.

It gets worse when one does a total lifecycle cost analysis and does not deed all local gas tax money to state highways: in Texas, the best-performing highways have 50% cost recovery, and most have much less. In Maryland, one transit advocate computed a 20% cost recovery for state highways, based on an analysis that treats most of the gas tax as just a sales tax on gasoline; but even if one considers the gas tax to be a user fee for roads, the extra money only raises cost recovery to 32%. Even tollways frequently lose money when interest on capital is included, and in one case even when interest is not included.

In other words, the entirety of the US road program is one giant money hole, of proportions that far exceed even the worst transit projects. I talk less about it because the best industry practice is to toll the roads and build far less of them rather than to control costs; there’s a good way to build a subway, but not to build 14-lane freeways.