Quick Note: Safe Streets, Safe Cities

Everyone should go read Jan Gehl’s post on Streetsblog about good urban design, excerpted from his book Cities for People. I have nothing to add, except to underline one part that’s often underrated among urbanists: the role of parked cars as buffer between moving cars and pedestrians or cyclists. Compare this photo with this photo, and ask yourself where the cyclist is better protected.

I generally tend to be very supportive of Manhattan’s design. The streets may be wider than elsewhere, but that translated mostly to increased pedestrian space. Manhattan’s 18-meter side streets have 1-2 driving lanes and a parking lane on each side; so do the 12-meter side streets in Tel Aviv, the difference being that in Tel Aviv cars park with two wheels on the sidewalk. As long as there’s an adequate street wall and the buildings are not set back from the street, it isn’t a real problem. As Gehl notes, there are many ways to make cities livable short of the ideal of Venice, in which cars begin where the city ends.

Urbanism, Gentrification, and Romanticism

Yonah is bringing up neoliberalism as one reason American cities, in his case study Detroit, are building new showcase light rail lines while at the same time neglecting bus service. Quoting a study showing the same in Chicago, he explains that this creates an uneasy tension between transit advocacy and development for the sake of the elite.

Actually, I am not surprised, not because of neoliberalism, but because of the trend toward new urban romanticism in gentrification. The best way to understand gentrification today – and the construction of greenfield light rail lines is every bit as connected to gentrification as highway construction was to suburbanization – as the mirror image of suburbanization from the middle of the 19th century onward. The political forces at play can be summarized in the following table:

Suburbanization Gentrification
1. Initial trends Industrialization, rapid urbanization Globalization, suburbanization
2. Social problems Overcrowding, slums, industrial pollution Sprawl, fractured communities, car pollution
3. Romanticized past Preindustrial rural life Traditional (19th-early 20th century) urbanism
4. Proposed elite solution Suburbs, cars, home ownership, separation of uses Urban neighborhoods, transit, condos, mixed uses
5. Solution for the existing urban form Urban renewal: the city is turned into modernist towers and playgrounds for the suburbs None yet identified, but proposals include demolition and ruralization, and redevelopment

The best reference for the political forces – as opposed to the urban forces – is Nations and Nationalism, by Ernst Gellner. Gellner argues that modern nationalist culture, including urban romanticism for rural life, is an inevitable byproduct of industrialization. Industrialization leads to unprecedented mobility and a large increase in the size of the economic unit, from the village to the entire nation. This requires some measure of cultural uniformity, which the core imposes on the provinces often with great violence: in the 19th and early 20th century, France imposed Parisian French on provinces that spoke different languages, spanking schoolchildren who said a word in Occitan or Breton.

Although the resulting national culture is made in the cities, it has to romanticize peasants, who live in the vast majority of the nation’s territory. Gellner does not mention this, but in Israel, one can see even more: the most romanticized people are those living in or near disputed territories (for example, Sderot), since they form the basis for territorial claims.

The result of this romanticism is that although the elites live in the cities, most people living in the cities are ignored in favor of ruralism; this is still present today but in weaker form, in “Real America” epithets used by small towns against the cities.

Going back to transportation, this interacted with the real problems in rapidly industrializing cities, such as slums; those slums not only were and looked polluted, but also were hotbeds of cultures other than the national culture, for example immigrant enclaves in the US and cockney culture in London. The decision to build the subway in New York was not just about transportation, but also about transforming urbanites into proper Americans. Indeed, suburbanization happened in every developed country except Singapore and Hong Kong, which escaped this trend not because they are dense or incompatible with cars (as noted in Paul Barter’s thesis, Singapore wasn’t very dense in the 1960s and 70s), but because they are city-states and never had this rural nationalism.

Later, national highway systems (initially only for rural and intercity roads, not urban roads) built the nation, and helped people escape the cities for suburbs that were nothing like traditional rural areas. Part of this difference was fully intended: the urban reformers of the 19th century knew damn well that the rural areas had poor access to jobs, and wanted the suburbs to combine the best of both. But the larger part was not: the suburbs were never truly bucolic, could not offer truly bucolic life except to the very rich, and suffer from the same problems of traffic and social dependence (on homeowners’ associations rather than landlords) as the cities.

I contend that the exact same social trends are happening today, but with cities instead of rural areas. Urbanization happened sufficiently long ago that there’s an entire movement idealizing traditional cities. Real America is no longer just Hope and Crawford, but also Chicago’s South Side.

Under the new paradigm, People who railed against urban renewal, such as Jane Jacobs, become objects of romanticism by disaffected suburbanites, As Sharon Zukin notes in The Naked City, the authentic working-class culture of the West Village that Jacobs loved so much is long gone, but people still cling to its urban design and therefore the neighborhood is still in demand. The now-old working class is every bit an object of admiration today as the peasant class was in 1900.

The current trend for urban revitalization is easy to miss, since it’s only starting. It’s comparable to suburbanization in 1910, not 1955. But New York has had a building boom in the last 10 years, and has been growing faster than its suburbs since 1990 (see ACS data for 2009 here, and census data for 1990 and 2000 here). Since 2000 San Francisco has outgrown its suburbs as well, and in many less gentrified cities, such as Philadelphia, the core has had a population explosion even if the surrounding areas declined. What is more, the growing cores tend to be high-income, fueled by condos rather than low-income housing; this has happened in tandem with the suburbanization of poverty.

Since the current trend is as based on elite needs (in this case, globalization) as the previous trend of suburbanization, it’s not surprising that the infrastructure that comes with it is based on serving the elite: expensive airport connectors, development-oriented transit, bike lanes only for the rich, high-speed rail connecting revitalized urban centers, and generally deprecation of urban infrastructure used by existing residents who aren’t elite. Of course, it does not mean greenfield transit, airport connectors, bike lanes, and high-speed rail are not useful; transit advocates often support them independently of development potential. But it means that the elites like those projects independently of public benefits, and are thus likely to build boondoggles. Yonah himself has noted that,

Those who engage in [transit promotion] simultaneously argue for the social welfare benefits of providing affordable mobility for as many people as possible while also suggesting that good public transportation can play an essential role in city-building — essentially for the elite. After all, one of the primary arguments made for investing in new transit capital projects is that their long-term benefits include raising the property values of the land parcels near stations.

This creates an uneasy pro-transit coalition in many places where development and real estate interests align their lobbying with that of representatives of the poor to argue for the construction of new transit lines (usually rail), under the assumption that projects will benefit each group.

This produces an identity crisis for transit. For whom is it developed? Can its social mobility goals be reconciled with the interests of capitalists in the urban space?

There is not much to do about the trend for gentrification – like the trend for suburbanization, it can be partially managed, but not attacked. However, in the realm of transit, transit activists should be vigilant and prevent becoming useful idiots for developers and urban boosters. The elites can be powerful allies for change if they support the right kind, but it’s imperative to make sure they work for us instead of the reverse.

Update: a similar point was made six weeks ago by Linda Baker of Portland Urbanista, only she was more concise.

Boston South Station’s Supposed Capacity Limit

I don’t have much to add to Yonah Freemark’s post about Boston’s proposed Fairmount Line infill; as Yonah correctly notes, this is a good idea in principle, but in practice it also requires operational integration, especially unified fares. The current federal aid system gives agencies a large incentive to install concrete, some incentive to install electronics, and none to improve organization.

What I want to discuss in this post is the myth that Boston’s South Station has capacity problems, a myth almost as pernicious as the same myth about New York’s Penn Station. While South Station can’t immediately solve all of its capacity problems with through-running (P.S. note the cost estimates for 2.4 km of tunnel in Boston are $3-9 billion), it still has enough tracks for service increase. Thus the 20-minute frequency limit mentioned in the comments to Yonah’s post is not as binding as the MBTA may think.

South Station has 13 tracks. These naturally separate into a group of 4-5 to the east and a group of 8-9 to the west. The eastern tracks are fed by a four-track bridge serving the Fairmount Line, the Old Colony Lines, and the Greenbush Line. The western tracks curve 90 degrees (with radius, I believe, 250 meters, limiting approach speeds) west and become a four-track line reaching Back Bay, and fanning out to the Worcester, Providence, Needham, and Franklin Lines;  the Providence Line also hosts Northeast Corridor intercity trains, while the Worcester Line hosts a single daily Amtrak train.

For all intents and purposes, the two sets of tracks should be treated separately, for the following reasons. First, any train, any track is good to have as a contingency, but should not be done regularly, in order to make service as predictable as practical. Second and more importantly, the capacity of a terminal is far higher when the trains are completely interchangeable, as they are to the east. If slight schedule irregularities create conflicting terminal moves, the run can be done from any track.

In the simplest case, that of a two-track line hitting a two-track terminal with (short) tail tracks, the turning capacity can approach 30 trains per hour, the same as that of a running line; see for example the schedule, satellite view, and station map of the Chuo Rapid Line. This is uncommon, but many other commuter lines in Japan turn 12-15 tph on two tracks.

The four-track eastern segment of South Station can be split without revenue conflicts into two western tracks serving Fairmount and two serving the other lines, and such capacities become realistic. Since total peak traffic on the Old Colony and Greenbush Lines is currently 6 tph, and total peak traffic on the Fairmount Line is 2 tph (should be 6 tph for good urban service), capacity there is a non-issue. Although there are no tail tracks at South Station, all platform tracks except the easternmost are long enough that they could attach to platforms a few tens of meters longer than an eight-car commuter train, which with modern rolling stock should suffice.

The western tracks pose a bigger problem, for two reasons. First, the trains are not perfectly interchangeable, and do not separate neatly into two two-track lines running alongside each other. Second, Amtrak should be planning on 400-meter trains, and although the platforms could be lengthened to accommodate them, tail tracks become impossible, forcing even slower approach speeds than required by the curve.

Regardless, South Station has enough capacity even for trains serving Back Bay. With completely non-interchangeable intercity trains and dwells that are long by regional rail standards, the Tohoku Shinkansen turns a peak of 14 tph using four station tracks at Tokyo. While the Tohoku Shinkansen does not have the sharp turn of South Station, the MBTA can turn trains faster (trains already turn in about 5 minutes at the outbound terminals), and all services but one use the same equipment. So the capacity for South Station West is at a minimum 28 tph; current peak traffic excluding Amtrak is 12 tph.

It goes without saying that the operating assumption I’m using is that service is run well, better than is currently possible under the FRA-regulated regime. Among the FRA’s sins is brake tests at every terminal, forcing longer dwell times than are routine in Japan, France, and other countries with a much safer rail record than the US, to say nothing of American rapid transit (which outside Washington D.C. is very safe). While all of the above examples of high turn capacity use EMUs with high acceleration and deceleration, the separation between maximum capacity and current MBTA traffic is high enough that large service increases are possible without either more concrete or more electronics; with better electronics, even more increases are feasible.

I am going to return to this issue, specifically the Providence Line, because one way to save some money on Northeast Corridor improvements is to speed up the Providence Line, using existing electrification and new rolling stock; this would permit the line to remain two-tracked with one mid-line four-track passing segment around Sharon, obviating the need for Amtrak’s proposed third track, even with large increases in ridership.

City Schools

In Tel Aviv, people may move to the suburbs for a variety of reasons – the impossibility of finding parking in the city and the high housing prices are two popular complaints – but not school quality. There are great public schools right in the city, including some non- or barely selective schools; the metro area-wide magnet classes for gifted children are located in the city and in some of its inner suburbs.

As one might expect, Tel Aviv is a high-income city: on a list of municipalities in Israel ranked by income, Tel Aviv is rated 8 out of 10 (higher is richer), where the only places rating 9 and 10 are a few exclusive gated communities and a single major suburb, Ramat HaSharon. Tel Aviv’s richer suburbs, to its north, are rated 8 as well; there is nothing to gain income-wise from moving, except perhaps that Tel Aviv is more diverse and has both super-rich areas and poorer areas while the suburbs are uniformly upper middle-class. As far as I can tell, it has always been the case – like France, Israel has a long history of housing the poor in the outskirts rather than in the inner city; this is not a recent case of gentrification.

Against this light, what Aaron Renn is writing about city schools is unsurprising. As American cities are getting relatively richer due to gentrification, their quality of public services, including schools, is improving, due to both more money and middle-class civic tradition. This process is incomplete and slow: because American cities’ recent history is of ghettoized squalor rather than gated opulence, many city schools are substandard and suffer from neglect, underfunding, and corruption, and this itself is a turnoff for prospective urban residents.

In effect, the areas that are already rich attract the rich and middle class; this should not surprise anyone. Corruption can be bought away with enough money, and underfunding is not an issue. New York’s suburbs lead the nation in school funding, which requires property taxes, and as a result, the six counties with the highest property taxes in the US are New York City suburbs; ironically, one of the reasons people move back to New York, which according to the ACS data is outgrowing the rest of its metro area, is that its property taxes are lower.

Urban activist Jonathan Kozol even wrote a book blaming discrepancies in school funding on inner-city school underperformance. His statistics, as of the early 2000s, showed about $11,000 per student in funding in New York, and $22,000 in its richest suburbs. Since then, Bloomberg has hiked school funding to nearly $18,000 per student, while the suburbs have not increased much, going up to $24,000 in Great Neck and $26,000 in Manhasset, two districts cited by Kozol for high spending.

Services are always good for the rich. In homogeneous high-income communities, there is no need for private security, private schools, and other excesses typical of the wealthy in poor areas. Instead, high housing prices act as a replacement for gates – and, incidentally restrictive zoning forcing housing prices up is a major component. Thus, public services are of high quality, even in areas that love nothing more than to yell at urban liberals for wasting money on schools.

Although the upper and middle classes are often still afraid to stay in the city with children past age six, this is declining. While the Israeli middle class can skip on the low-income suburbs and instead move to high-income ones, the American middle class can’t move into a city without dealing with poor people. When they do, it creates friction, as always happens when people suddenly have to deal with those who are different – for example, in New York, it involves separate schools, some good and some not, located in the same building.

The defining question for urban consensus governance is how to make sure the friction ends up resolving itself well, with good public services extending to regions that are not rich. Merely requiring integration of services does not solve much; the problem is more systemic. In Hawaii, the state’s status as a single school district led to school underperformance, and, as such conservative writers on urban issues as Michael Lewyn point out, school integration in American cities led the white middle class to escape to segregated suburbs and private schools, which offered a gated education experience. Clearly, changing governance boundaries without social change does not solve social problems much.

Quick Note: Moving, and Mode Choice

I am moving from New York to Providence today – at least, I’m moving most of my stuff. (I’m going to stay in New York for a few weeks longer.) And not only is it going to be by car, but also the car rental itinerary is such that as many trips as possible will be done by car and not by bus.

The reason, obviously, is not a personal preference for driving. It’s that, even in New York, many trips are more convenient by car than on transit, and the reason transit maintains a reasonable mode share is that the trips are still doable by transit, so people don’t get cars just for them. I’m not going to get a car just for airport travel, but if I already have a car for another reason, I’m going to use it for picking up a friend who’s arriving and helping me move. (In one direction only – she can drive, I can’t.)

The lesson here for transit planners is that they need to make it easy to live without a car, and not just to provide service for the few trips cars can’t do. Moving 300 kilometers by transit is possible, but too cumbersome and expensive. Within urban areas one can do better with taxis and car-sharing, which is why Cap’n Transit has been writing a series about good taxi service and why the Urbanophile has syndicated an article about taxis as public transportation.

Urbanism and Restaurants (Hoisted from Comments)

There’s a brief but fascinating discussion on Market Urbanism between Scott Johnson (who comments here and on many other blogs as EngineerScotty) and Stephen Smith about the difference between formal eating in American suburbia and traditional cities.

My own experience is that, for all the supposed expense of New York, food here is remarkably cheap relative to the quality available. The quality of deli subs, which cost between $3 and $8 depending on size and how upscale the place wants to look, is much higher than the equivalent available on Subway. Similarly, the richer neighborhoods support many full-service supermarket chains, which tend to offer similar fare to Whole Foods but at lower prices. The expensive restaurants remain expensive, but there are plenty of good midscale ethnic restaurants offering comparable prices to and better food than their equivalents in smaller cities.

Part of this is that housing prices are to a large extent an opposing force to many other expenses (especially commuting – housing plus transportation cost as a percentage of income is nearly constant nationwide). Small and shared housing leads to a culture of eating out by itself, which encourages restaurants by itself. Even the non-touristy, but still upscale, parts of the French Riviera have a good restaurant scene, though for much higher prices than New York.

The cost of living in New York, or similar dense urban cores, depends on your lifestyle. If you feel like you must own a car, and believe in the suburban American ideal of nice, large homes, then the cost of living is brutal. The BLS and ACS estimates of New York’s living costs are not too bad – 36% higher than the national average according to the BLS (with rents 57% higher), or 28% higher for rent alone according to the ACS. But the corporate-focused ACCRA index thinks New York’s three largest boroughs range from 57% to 118% more expensive. Conversely, if you’re a student or a young couple or an immigrant or a poor person, your cost of living is much lower, because you don’t need a car.

Good cheap food is available wherever inequality is high within a small area; it means there’s disposable income to spend on food but workers’ wages are low. Singapore, the land of $2 food court lunches, is a good example. The US overall is a high-inequality country, but the suburbs tend to be homogeneous within their class. Within large cities, rich and poor live closer together, and, more importantly, the cost of living for the producers of midscale ethnic food is low (which means nominal wages don’t have to be as high) and so is the cost of living for many non-car-owning young couples and other consumers of midscale ethnic food. In this particular social class, New York is unusually rich.

The suburbs have different income and class dynamics, to say nothing of the fact that density is too low to support niche restaurants. Scott explains:

In much of US culture, there is an implicit expectation that “proper” members of society ought to be capable of hosting formal gatherings in their homes.  I’m not discussing friends and family crowding around the kitchen table; I’m talking about formal occasions, including the hosting of business meetings, political events, and other occasions where professional acquaintances (as opposed to relatives and personal friends), are invited to the home, and served in a “professional” manner.  (And likewise, many holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, typically involve a feast at the end of the day; one which is by tradition prepared and served at home, and often involves a large number of guests).  As a result of this, many US homes, especially the larger ones, have hundreds of square feet nominally dedicated to formal entertaining:  our homes have things like “dining rooms” and “living rooms” and the ubiquitous 0.1 bath, all of which exist to permit a semi-public space in which the dirty laundry (literally, in some cases) of family life do not intrude (and likewise, where guests at formal gatherings can be contained, and kept out of the private parts of the home).  These things are often redundant with other rooms in the house intended for the family’s own use–kitchen tables, “family rooms”, etc.–and contain redundant sets of furnishings (table and chairs, sofas, lighting).  And our homes also come with oversized kitchens where large feasts can be prepared and large quantities of dishes can be cleaned and stored, should it be necessary.  This cultural expectation even affects land use; it seems our suburban neighborhoods are designed to accommodate the possibility that on any given night, someone might have 10 or more car-driving guests at their home, all of whom need a place to park.

In many other cultures, the idea of formal entertainment in the home is considered ridiculous (at least unless one is extremely wealthy).  If one needs to formally entertain clients or host large gatherings, one charters a restaurant for the purpose.  This is especially true for gatherings outside family or social circles; inviting business clients into the home is considered highly inappropriate.  (One other cultural difference–many other cultures have far less attachment to “home cooking” than is found in the US, and view professionally-prepared cuisine to be superior to that whipped up in a home kitchen.  Of course, in many parts of the US, the local dining scene is limited to fast food, greasy spoon diners, and chain restaurants of dubious quality; in that environment, a home-cooked meal may well be the preferred gastronomic choice).  In these cultures, there is no need for individual dwelling units to come equipped with miniature banquet facilities; which permits greater levels of density.  And greater levels of density permit a more robust restaurant scene, that can handle the formal entertainment needs of the populace.

Stephen then adds:

That is indeed interesting, but I think that the culture is a result of the anti-density regulators rather than a cause. But that’s interesting what you say about restaurants – I never thought about it that way, but it’s definitely true that when I lived in Romania, only my stepdad’s very close business partners – basically, his close friends – would come into the house. In fact, though our apartment and late house were more than big enough to host people for formal dinners (as opposed to small family dinners), the only time I remember having people over was when my mom hosted an American Thanksgiving! I guess that’s proof that you need to develop the culture over a period of time, and that Europeans don’t just switch to the American way of hosting people when they get bigger apartments/houses.

What do you think – is it primarily an income dynamic, as I believe; an urban design and density dynamic, as Stephen believes; or a cultural question, as Scott believes?

Update: Stephen in the comments links to an article about a study showing that supermarket food is cheaper in New York than in the rest of the US as well. This has been my experience as well. Part of it is more competition, but another part comes from a method alluded to at the end of the article: since there are so many full-service supermarket chains, different stores discount different items at each time (that’s the circular the article mentions) as well as sell different items at slightly below average prices. It’s perfect price discrimination from the supermarkets’ perspective.

Staten Island’s Closed BRT Disaster

After having constructed something like bus rapid transit in the Bronx and Manhattan, the MTA is moving forward with its plan to have a line in each borough and has made a proposal for Staten Island Select Bus Service. Buses would run from the Staten Island Mall to Hylan Boulevard, the main corridor serving the South Shore, and thence to Brooklyn over the Verrazano Bridge to connect to the subway. As Ben Kabak reports, this is intended to resuscitate the idea of SBS after the cancellation of the 34th Street Transitway.

To see why this is such a bad plan, let us look at Staten Island’s existing bus map. The S79 follows the route proposed by the MTA and would become an SBS line under this proposal. But there are nine other lines on Hylan: the S78, which goes to St. George and connects to the Ferry, and eight express routes, which cross to Brooklyn and use expressways to get to Manhattan. The S78 has about two thirds the annual ridership of the S79; the eight express routes have between them about 30% more ridership than the S79.

The problem with MTA-style BRT is that it’s inherently closed, because it bundles lane separation with innovations that should be applied everywhere, such as proof of payment. Although buses could run partly in mixed traffic and partly in dedicated lanes, as they should, the fare collection systems and incompatible, and the MTA has ruled out off-board fare collection on non-SBS routes. Recall from the MTA’s smartcard report that:

Local and express buses will continue to have a farebox unit
o Accept contactless cards as primary payment method
o Accept coins (nickels, dimes and quarters) as secondary method
…
o Bus operator must be able to confirm fare paid by all means of payment

In other words, the best industry practice is ruled out, and the attempts at fixing it within the MTA’s rules only make things worse. On First and Second Avenues, where local and select buses use the same bus lanes, the stations are separate, reducing the effective frequency of buses on the corridor. On Hylan, which is a much lower-traffic and therefore lower-frequency route than First/Second, this is devastating to frequency on the shared trunk line. If the inspectors keep forcing buses to sit still during inspections, as they have on the Bx12 and M15 SBS routes, then reliability will drop as well.

The configuration of Hylan is such that open BRT, used in cities from Berlin to Brisbane, would be perfect for the corridor, if the fare collection were done right. The entirety of the Hylan corridor (except perhaps in the far south of Staten Island) as well as the approaches to the Verrazano Bridge would get dedicated lanes, and buses would be free to use parts of the infrastructure as needed. People with express bus passes who don’t mind taking a local or SBS pass for the trip could even board and transfer.

Because under open BRT dedicated lanes would not involve special branding, it would be easy to extend this to congested portions of Staten Island’s two other batches of relatively busy buses: the S53, which runs from the North Shore to the Verrazano and Bay Ridge, and the S44/S46/S48, which run on parallel streets from the North Shore to St. George. The S53 would be especially important, as it runs orthogonally to the borough’s rail infrastructure, and does not compete either with the Staten Island Railway or with a future North Shore service on the existing railroad corridor.

Once you count the need to pay first-world wages to more drivers, BRT infrastructure is not cheaper than rail for equal capacity, unless traffic is very low. The advantage of BRT is that it can branch out and run in mixed traffic. Closed BRT, as the MTA is proposing, is the worst of both worlds – high operating costs, no branching – and with the splitting of frequency for riders who stay on Hylan, it may not even be much of an improvement over local buses. It deserves no support from good transit advocates.

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.