Quick Note on Cities Where Transit Share is Increasing

In most large US cities, the transit mode share for commute trips is stagnant. If it’s increasing, it’s not by much – for example, Seattle is up from about 7% in the early 2000s to 8.7% in 2009. However, in Canada and Australia, there are multiple cities where the transit share has increased by 2-4 percentage points over the decade; all numbers are 1996-2006. Melbourne had the highest increase, from 13.1% to 17.7%. Car use declined by a little more than transit increased, at least in Canada. (Any information about similar increases or decreases in Europe and high-income East Asia will be appreciated.)

Even Melbourne’s performance is not going to be enough by itself to get car use to sustainable levels. Much more is needed: less distance traveled per car, less driving and more walking for non-work trips, and higher vehicle fuel economy, to name the three most important. But in four decades a city with Melbourne’s performance can raise transit use by 18 percentage points by 2050 and cut car use proportionately, and in conjunction with the other three points, it could make a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

Agency Turf Accidentally Leads to Good Results

The government had always made conflicting statements on security theater on trains. In a town hall last year, President Obama bragged that high-speed trains do not require the passengers to take their shoes off. On the other hand, later that year Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano talked about tightening security on trains.

A few months ago, as reported by Trains magazine, the TSA converged on Savannah’s Amtrak station and did a full security check to all passengers disembarking the train through the main station hall. (Unlike on the Northeast Corridor, Savannah offers easy access to the train straight from the parking lot, without needing to pass through the station.)

Amtrak’s response to the incident was severe. Amtrak’s police chief said he had not been informed and did not even believe the incident was real, and when it was confirmed, he barred the TSA from Amtrak property. Amtrak will continue to do security on its own.

Bear in mind, this is pure agency turf. Amtrak cares little about best practices for train security, which is to not have any. Any passenger in France and Germany, and any passenger in Japan who can cross the faregates, can walk on a high-speed train without security; Japanese and German bullet trains have never been bombed, and French ones have been only bombed once, and the attack killed so few people (2) that terrorists never tried again. In contrast, at the major stations on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak makes people queue single-file while checking tickets, in addition to staffing each train with multiple conductors to check tickets on board. Sometimes, boarding stands still while Amtrak police walk with trained dogs along the line of passengers; this happened to me at South Station two months ago.

However, this agency turf is in this case helpful to passengers. American railroad chiefs may be incompetent, but they are not evil. They do not wake up every morning thinking about new ways to harass passengers. Amtrak’s main loyalty is to its traditional way of doing things, and cares for neither outside reformers nor outside harassers.

The upshot is that for advocates of good transit, it creates openings for change. If such change can reliably be sold to people on the inside as doing things the normal way but with slight modification, then it can quickly become the new dogma in lieu of the traditions. Not everything can be so argued, but for some infrastructure projects as well as community-level questions, it can be a way to create a new consensus around good transit.

High-Speed Rail Operator Profit

I intended to write a post debunking the myth that high-speed lines do not pay for themselves, but Paulus Magnus has written one instead. He posts the revenue and net income figures for the mainland JRs, SNCF, DB, and RENFE. All but RENFE have positive net income, and even RENFE has positive EBIT.

The only thing I want to add is that there’s a myth going around that the Shinkansen isn’t really profitable because the government wiped its construction debt. While it’s true that the government wiped JNR’s debt, that debt was predominantly operating losses before restructuring; since JNR got few subsidies, it had to keep borrowing to cover its losses: see pages 46 and 88 on this PDF. Construction was only one eighth of the debt burden, and that part the JRs did have to pay. In other words, the government really just subsidize JNR’s operating losses from its inefficient pre-restructuring days.

Development-Oriented Transit

Occasionally, people faced with very high transit construction costs propose value capture, where some of the increase in land value coming from transit access is directed to the transit agency. Yonah Freemark has just brought up this issue again, in the context of Toronto’s failure to find private investors willing to put money for its extravagant suburban subways in exchange for greater land value.

Despite the list of examples of value capture used to fund transit, the idea remains a poor one. Jarrett Walker gives a list of consequences of value capture, one good (it ties transit success to density) and two bad (it is bad at serving existing density, and at social justice).

In New York, Second Avenue Subway and the 7 Extension are both very expensive, but the 7 Extension is getting funded by value capture whereas to construct Second Avenue Subway, backroom deals by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver were required. If anything, Jarrett’s first bad consequence is understated: politicians prioritize projects they can find private support for, especially reformists, and ignore transit lines that merely have very high ridership potential. At worst, it encourages collusion with developers and therefore corruption.

Jarrett misses one additional problem: nobody expects developers who build near highways to contribute to highway construction costs, and until they do, to tax developments near transit is to give developers an incentive to build near highways. Transit agencies should either reform themselves to become profitable or seek a reliable source of tax subsidy, but they should not tax people who do the right thing and build compact, transit-oriented development.

There’s a common misconception that in Japan and Hong Kong, both famous for the integration of rail construction and development, development is used to subsidize transit. Reality is the other way around: in most cases, Japanese private railroads use development to raise transit ridership, and although the real estate dealings are often higher-margin, the rail transportation is profitable by itself without exception. The Hong Kong MTR, too, is profitable on transportation alone, but keeps engaging in development to raise profit margins and provide patronage for the trains.

Many cities do in fact follow the model of Hong Kong and the private railroads of Japan, but entirely in the public sector. They upzone around transit stations, reduce or eliminate parking minimums, and restrain or avoid expanding auto capacity. This was done intensively in Calgary and Vancouver, which in recent years have been North America’s leaders in both efficient transit construction and transit modal share increase.

Note that this is still to a large extent development-oriented transit, and still creates problems with politicians who overfocus on greenfield TOD, but not to the same extent as value capture. Vancouver is seriously planning a rapid transit line to UBC, the main neglected urban line, just later than it should have. In contrast, New York is sidelining future phases of Second Avenue Sagas entirely; even PlaNYC only incorporates the first two of four phases, which are too far advanced to ignore.

Toronto could not follow the positive example of Vancouver and Calgary; there was too much NIMBYism along the routes proposed. This same problem also plagued the proposal for land value capture. The problem is that Toronto’s bad government is so suburban-focused it really believes in building transit to low-density suburban regions, and at the same time in enhancing auto accessibility (Mayor Rob Ford demagogued about a war on cars in his campaign).

In this sense, land value capture, and in general development-oriented transit, should be viewed as a failure of consensus for good transit, regardless of whether this consensus allows transit to be profitable or to be stably subsidized. At its best, for example in the Vancouver suburbs, development-oriented transit is a political price to be paid for suburban support for high-ridership urban lines. More commonly, as frequently happens with value capture, it sidelines the high-ridership lines completely. And at its worst, as is happening with the 7 extension, it’s a transfer of wealth from the public to private developers in the hopes of future tax revenues.

Quick Note: Midwest HSR Study

I’m usually skeptical of industry-funded studies about the value of megaprojects, but despite the involvement of Siemens I recommend reading the 2011 Economic Study for Midwest high-speed rail.

Building up on previous ideas for the 110 mph Midwest high-speed rail and on SNCF’s proposal, the study goes through all the nitty-gritty details that are often missing from publications geared toward investors and urban boosters. The technical report addresses questions about alignment, transfer convenience, integration with commuter rail, and FRA regulations. It discusses such issues as how to build a tunnel for Metra providing useful regional rail service, why the FRA is likely to let lightweight high-speed trains operate in the US, or whether to route trains through Eau Claire along I-94 or through La Crosse and Rochester on a greenfield alignment.

The proposed cost of the project is $83.6 billion, in 2010 dollars (compare $69 billion in SNCF’s proposal, or $117 billion in year of construction in Amtrak’s one third as long Northeast Corridor proposal). It works out to $35 million per kilometer, which isn’t outrageous but still a little higher than normal for flat terrain; the total contingency in the proposal’s budget is 35% of the base, which is higher than the norm, which is 25%. Construction costs on the French LGV Est‘s second phase are $24 million per km, and those on Belgium’s HSL 3 were $29 million per km.

Pedestrian Observations from Providence in Summer

I’d only visited Providence once, for two hours in the dead of winter, and found the downtown/mall area dreary. I just visited twice again to look at apartments, and saw much better. Providence’s downtown is still dominated by single-use office buildings and was dead on Sunday, but the East Side neighborhoods I saw near Brown are walkable.

To see what I’m talking about, look at photos like this, this, this, this, and this. The streets are about the same width you’d expect of suburban side streets: the roadways are 6-7 meters on the narrowest streets, and 9-10 meters on slightly wider residential streets. The buildings are detached and look similar to those in the older postwar suburbs, though in fact many are historic and date back to the 1800s or even the late 1700s.

The difference with the suburbs is that there are no setbacks, which means the buildings provide an adequate street wall. The building to building distance is about 12 meters at the narrowest and 18 at the widest. Many streets are planted, so the trees provide shade and make it pleasant to walk in the summer heat. The streets are reasonably car-friendly and most apartments I’ve seen come with parking, but they don’t let the parking interfere with a pleasant pedestrian experience.

It’s at the periphery of the neighborhood that you can see signs of the general auto-oriented nature of the area. South and west of campus, the two commercial streets are Wickenden and (South) Main. There are a few grocery stores and eating places on other streets, but those two have more commercial activity. Each alone is walkable, with reasonable traffic speeds, and a street wall. However, their intersection, located too close to the freeways that surround and divide the city, is not. Its signal timing is pedestrian-hostile, and instead of more intense corner commercial development, it has a parking lot, a gas station, and open space.

And downtown Providence is a completely different world from the East Side. The streets are in principle walkable, but many buildings are urban renewal projects, and the area is single-use office space apart from some condos right next to the train station. The commercial development has for the most part been collected into the Providence Place Mall or the historic streets close to Brown, such as Main. By the standards of the larger cities of the Northeast, or even New Haven, there’s very little there.

Comparative Rail Safety

Using Wikipedia’s list of rail crashes and its UIC-sourced list of rail passenger-km by country, one can compare different countries’ mainline passenger rail accident fatality rates. The US turns out to be the least safe among the regions I’ve checked, even worse than India; much-maligned China comes out first.

I constructed the list below by averaging accident rates going back to 1991, to smooth out fluctuations coming from low-frequency, high-impact disasters. Crashes involving only freight trains are ignored, and pedestrians and car and bus passengers struck by passenger trains are included. Bombings are excluded, but sabotage incidents leading to accidents are included.

China: 876.22 billion passenger-km/year, 317 deaths over 20 years. This is one death per 55.3 billion passenger-km.

Japan: the UIC claims 253.55 billion passenger-km/year, which only includes JR companies. Figures including private railroads and excluding subways range from 360 to 395.9 billion passenger-km; I believe the higher number since it is slightly less dated. Over 20 years there have been 154 deaths, so this is one death per 51.4 billion passenger-km. Including subways would put Japan on a par with China.

EU-27: 386.24 billion passenger-km/year (presumably mainline only), 603 mainline deaths over 20 years. This does not include 155 deaths from a fire on a funicular. This is one death per 12.8 billion passenger-km, or 1 per 10.2 billion if the funicular fire is included. This varies a lot by country: the safest European countries, such as France and the Netherlands, are on a par with China and Japan, but the EU average is pulled down by Germany (due to Eschede) and the periphery.

South Korea: 31.3 billion passenger-km/year, 93 deaths over 20 years. This is one death per 6.7 billion passenger-km. Here the mainline-only rule is a problem because a) the Seoul subway is even more integrated with commuter rail than the Tokyo subway, and b) a subway fire in Daegu killed 198 people.

India: 838.03 billion passenger-km/year, 2,556 deaths over 20 years. This is one death per 6.6 billion passenger-km.

US: 27.26 billion passenger-km/year (both Amtrak and commuter rail), 159 deaths over 20 years. Note the rate is more than twice that of China per capita, let alone per rail passenger. This is one death per 3.4 billion passenger-km.

For comparison, the US road network has 33,000 accident deaths and 7.35 trillion passenger-km per year, which is one death per 220 million passenger-km.

On a closing note, China not only has the safest passenger trains, but also by far the busiest tracks. Freight density beats that of the US and Russia and passenger density beats that of any European country.

On Privatization

My post identifying the FRA as American passenger rail’s biggest nemesis drew a lot of links due to the relevance to Rep. Mica’s proposal to privatize the Northeast Corridor. So it is time to step back and ask in general which problems privatization could solve, and which problems are facing American rail travel apart from the FRA. The operating assumption here is that capitalism is not a magical thing that always works, but rather a system that solves some problems created by competing economic systems while creating others.

First, privatization can be done in two separate ways. In Japan, or in the US before 1971, railroads comprise both infrastructure and operations. They run their own trains on their own tracks, and negotiate bilateral trackage rights agreements when they need to access other companies’ tracks. They compete for passengers, but cooperate when necessary; for example, many Shinkansen trains run through the territory of both JR Central and JR West, but the change of drivers only takes a minute.

The other way to privatize, favored in Europe and by Mica, is to split track ownership and operations, on the model of airports (not owned by airlines) and highways (not owned by truckers). Tracks remain public, operations are contracted out to the highest bidder. Regional services in Europe require subsidies, so the highest bidder in this context is the one asking for the smallest subsidy. Depending on which country it is and whether the service is regional or intercity, the public entity controlling the track may fix the schedules and fares in order to guarantee seamless compatibility between different operators.

Both ways have subcategories – for example, in the first method, the government could provide zero subsidies (Hong Kong), minor subsidies for capital construction (Shinkansen construction in Japan, the electrification of the Northeast Corridor south of New York in the 1930s), or ongoing subsidies for operations (Metra, some US commuter lines until the 1970s or 80s). In the second method, the operators can be all private as in Britain, or they could be a mixture of private and state-owned as in France and Germany.

The competition in Japan and the US works, when the railroads have power. There is not much cooperation apart from bilateral agreements and trackage rights. Thus, while Tokyo’s Suica and PASMO are top-notch smartcard implementations, they are poor examples of fare integration; people can swipe the same card on any company’s lines, but transferring from one company to the other requires paying for a separate ticket. For travel between two different metropolitan areas’ companies, smartcards are compatible only based on bilateral agreements, even though all smartcards in Japan use the same FeliCa technology.

When the railroads are not in power, disaster can happen. This is not easily seen in Japan, where the largest cities have not undergone urban renewal or transit decline, but in the US, agency turf means competing for a shrinking customer base and making the customer experience worse.

Therefore, straight Japanese-style privatization requires modifications to ensure timetable and fare integration, and compatible rolling stock. Here, ironically, FRA regulations provided something positive, paving the way to make the Bombardier Bilevel Car a standard commuter rail coach, which different North American cities can lease from one another when necessary; this indicates that what is necessary is better regulations modeled after those of the UIC or Japan rather than a free-for-all.

The other issue with privatization is that one of its primary features, the pruning of marginal branch lines, can become a bug. Focusing on core products has led railroads to neglect markets perceived as marginal rather than try to improve them. Both France and Germany have neglected regional travel in order to look more profitable; although SNCF and DB are state-owned, they act like private companies. In Berlin the resulting deferred maintenance led to a total meltdown, in which three-quarters of the S-Bahn stock had to be recalled on a day’s notice; while German trains are for the most part all compatible, the Berlin S-Bahn is an exception because it was electrified earlier and uses a different voltage from the rest of Germany.

Even in Japan, this is visible once one notes that for JR East and West, the core products are both the Shinkansen and the Tokyo and Osaka commuter networks. All the rest on those networks is lumped together under “Other lines,” so that JR East’s reports do not distinguish the Sendai and Niigata commuter lines from legacy intercity lines. It’s perhaps telling that the fastest non-Shinkansen train in Japan is in Hokkaido, where tilting DMUs on curvy single track with a top speed of 130 km/h average 100 km/h between Sapporo and Hakodate.

Note that the regulations here are mostly irrelevant, except where they involve cooperation between different private companies. Bad regulations can exist both under a private system (e.g. the US before 1971) and under a public one (e.g. the US today); the same is true of good regulations.

We should now step back and look at what enabled the success of the breakup of Japan National Railways, and the subsequent sale of its three constituents serving Honshu to private investors. Restructuring slashed the labor force, improved the quality of management, shut down lightly used lines, and erased the debt that JNR has accumulated to cover operating losses (for it was not subsidized, unlike Western money-losing railroads). It was done slowly, and the government helped find jobs for the displaced workers, which was easy since at the time Japan’s economy was booming. Subsequently, safety and punctuality increased.

The problems privatization solved, then, include operational inefficiency, political meddling forcing the operation of marginal lines, and labor problems. JNR not only was overstaffed, but also was represented by four separate unions, split along political rather than professional lines, ranging from centrist to communist. In the years before privatization, this was mitigated by reforms to both management and labor.

The experience of the positives of JNR privatization further shows that instead of shock therapy or PPPs, a slow reforming approach is required. The best practice is to do this slowly, like in Japan, and postpone the final decision until substantial changes have been made. A government that is too incompetent to run things by itself is also too incompetent to ensure privatization works for the public rather than just for cronies; at least some increase in the quality of government is required if privatization has any hope of success.

Little Things That Matter: Stoplight Phasing

In Manhattan, most intersections have two stoplight phases: one permitting all north-south traffic, and one permitting all east-west traffic. Each phase lasts about 45 seconds, ensuring that pedestrians can cross even the widest avenues in one go with time to spare.

In Tel Aviv, the signalized intersections are almost never as in Manhattan. Even intersections of major streets with side streets will usually have three phases, and intersections of two major streets will usually have four, permitting conflict-free turns; turn conflicts with pedestrians exist on such intersections, but are uncommon.

From the traffic engineer’s perspective, Tel Aviv intersections are better – they’re supposed to be safer and smoother for the driver, with none of the snarl that happens when a car driving on Upper Broadway tries to turn left. They’re also hell for anyone not in a car, since waits are much longer, and to compensate for the larger number of phases each phase is shorter. This discourages enough pedestrians as to reduce the number of pedestrians for cars to hit, creating an illusion of even more safety.

If there’s enough car traffic, then streets with complex stoplight phasing are uncrossable 75% of the time. But if the street is median-divided, this is even worse, because the traffic engineers try to optimize car traffic, which means the pedestrian green on the two halves of the street is unsynchronized. At some intersections, one direction of a crossing is pessimized for the pedestrian: that is, after crossing one half of the street, the pedestrian will have to wait nearly a full cycle to cross the other half.

There are emerging calls for complete streets, which include such important features of walkability as wide sidewalks and frequent crosswalks. But the frequency of the crosswalks is only partial consolation if the stoplights are optimized for high car speed rather than high walking speed. For a healthy, young individual, the difference between not having to wait at intersections and having to wait a minute and a half every 300 meters is the difference between walking at 6 km/h and walking at 4 km/h. Traffic engineers do not tolerate phasing that slows down cars by 33%, and should not tolerate phasing that so slows down pedestrians.

The above does not apply as much to low-traffic areas such as Downtown Athens, Georgia, because there are sufficiently few cars that locals ignore pedestrian stoplights anyway. But in a large city with many cars such as Tel Aviv, it’s difficult to cross safely on red. As a result, streets that are no wider than a Manhattan avenue can take multiple minutes to cross, and one such street, Ibn Gabirol, divides the neighborhood it passes through in a way that 42nd and Broadway never do.

Ibn Gabirol and similar streets are not suburban arterials. They’re not like Athens’ Baxter Street. They have a street wall, very wide sidewalks, and mixed uses, just like Manhattan avenues. They also have enough foot and car traffic that they don’t feel desolate. They feel very walkable, as long as you stay on one side; it’s when you try to cross that their auto-oriented nature becomes apparent.

Quick Note on High-Speed Rail and Flying

I have just come back home from my conference in Athens, GA. Total door-to-door travel time, from the hotel to my apartment: just under 8 hours. The road distance from Athens to New York is about 1,300 km, so the average speed is barely higher than that of the East Coast Main Line between London and York, and lower than that of modern high-speed rail even including connections at both ends.

The main factor raising travel time so much was getting to the airport in Atlanta. Athens-Atlanta is served by arterial roads with some grade separation, but not Interstates; the total travel time is about an hour and a half, and another 15 minutes to the airport. Add shuttle van schedule padding, much uncertainty about security, and very long legacy airline boarding times, and door-to-departure was 4 hours.

This lack of Interstate connection is part of what makes this a realistic option for rail. I do not know specifics about the freight railroad connecting Atlanta and Athens except that it’s owned by CSX and only moderately curvy, but if it were reactivated as modern intercity rail, it would be successful. It’s 111 km from Athens to Downtown Atlanta; 1:22 city-to-city (3 trains provide hourly service) making multiple stops along the way would be unambitious, and 1:22 Athens-to-Atlanta-to-the-airport would be feasible. UGA students traveling home or to Atlanta would flock to it.

Every time I fly domestically even somewhat beyond the optimal range for high-speed rail, I temporarily stop caring about cost-effectiveness and want fast trains, now. With this caveat, let me note that New York-Atlanta in 5 hours is ambitious, but possible. For me, it would mean the Atlanta-Athens line could get me home in about 7 hours door-to-door, by either train or plane. And if the preferred route from Charlotte to Atlanta detoured to the south to serve Athens, it would cut away the connection time and make the entire run take about 5.5 hours.

Of course, it requires either overcoming a lot of agency inertia or spending huge sums of money to build high-speed rail just down to Washington; building to Atlanta requires both. Even if the US could bring costs down to French or Belgian levels, Washington-Atlanta would cost nearly $30 billion. But once built, the line would be competitive even for trips that do not make use of Atlanta’s meager existing connecting transit. The value may end up higher than the cost of construction. And connecting transit on modernized legacy track should not be technically difficult to add.