Eurostar Security Theater and French Station Size

Jon Worth has been doing a lot of good work lately pouring cold water on various press releases of new rail service in Europe. Yesterday he wrote a long post, reacting to some German rail discourse about the possibility of Eurostar service between London and Germany; he explained the difficulties of connecting Eurostar to new cities, discussing track and station capacity, signaling, and rolling stock.

Jon, whose background is in EU politics, wastes no time in identifying the ultimate problem: the UK demands passport controls, and this demand is unlikely to be waived in the near future due to concerns over Brexit and the need to have visible border control theater. In turn, the passport control and the accompanying security theater (not strictly required, but the UK insists for Channel Tunnel security) mean that boarding trains is a slow process since platforms must be kept sterile; thus, a Eurostar station requires dedicated platforms, and if it has significant rail traffic then it requires many of them, with low throughput per track. This particularly impacts the prospects of Eurostar service to Germany, because it would go via Belgium and Cologne, which has far from enough platforms for this operation.

What I’d like to add to this analysis is that Eurostar made a choice to engage in such controlled operations in the 1990s. The politics of Brexit can explain why there’s no reform that is acceptable to the British political system now; it cannot explain why this was chosen in the 1990s. The norm in Europe before Schengen was that border control officers would perform on-board checks while the train traveled between the last station in the origin country and the first station in the destination country; long nonstop trains between Paris and London or even Lille and London are ideal for such a system. Britain insists on the current system of border control before boarding because this way it can deny entry to people who otherwise would enjoy non-refoulement protections – but in the 2000s the politics in Britain was not significantly more anti-immigration than in, for example, Germany, or France.

Rather, the issue is that Britain insisted on some nebulous notion of separateness, and this interacted poorly with train station design in France compared with in Germany. Parisian train stations are huge, and have a large number of terminating tracks. Dedicating a few terminal tracks to sterile operations is possible at Gare du Nord, and would be possible at other Parisian terminals like Gare de Lyon if they pointed in the direction of a place that demanded them. SNCF has conceived of its operations, especially internationally, as airline-like, and this contributed to complacency about how the train stations are being treated like airports.

Germany developed different (and better) ways of conceiving of train operations. More to the point, Germany doesn’t really have Paris’s terminals with their surplus of tracks, except for Frankfurt and Munich. Cologne, the easiest place to get to London from, doesn’t have enough tracks for sterile operations. This is fine, because German domestic trains do not imitate airlines, even where there is room (instead, the surplus of tracks is used for timed connections between regional trains); this also cascades to international trains connecting to Germany, whether from countries that have more punctual rail networks like Switzerland or from countries that work by a completely different paradigm like Belgium or France.

And now Eurostar politically froze a system that was only workable at low throughput, at a handful of stations with more room for sterile operations than is typical. The system is still below its ridership projections from before opening; it was supposed to be part of a broader international rail network, but that never materialized, because of the burden of security theater, the high fares, and the indifference of Belgium to extending high-speed rail so that it would be useful for international travelers (the average speeds between Brussels-Midi and the German border are within the upper end of the range for upgraded classical lines, even though HSL 2 and 3 are new high-speed lines).

And now, with the knowledge of the 2010s, it’s clear that any future expansion of Eurostar requires forgoing the airline-like paradigm that led SNCF to stagnation in the same decade. This clashes with British political theater now, but there’s no other way forward.

And this even affects domestic British rail planning. London planners are fixated on Paris as their main comparison. This way, they are certain trains must turn slowly at city terminals, requiring additional tracks at Euston and other stations that are or until recently were part of High Speed 2, at a total cost of several billion pounds. In Germany and the Netherlands (at Utrecht) trains can move faster, down to turns of seven to eight minutes on German regional trains and four to five minutes on intercity trains pinching at terminal stations like Frankfurt. But planners in large cities look down on smaller cities; it’s no different from how planners in New York assume that because New York is bigger than Stockholm, Second Avenue Subway’s stations have higher ridership than the stations of Citybanan (in fact, Citybanan’s two stations, located in city center, are significantly busier).

This way, a particular feature of historic Parisian stations – they have a lot of tracks – got turned into something that every city’s train station is assumed to have. It means Eurostar can’t operate into other stations, because there is no surplus of platforms allowing segregating service to the UK away from all other traffic; it also means that planners in the UK that are trying to engineer stations assume British stations must be overbuilt to Parisian specs.

Small Metros Aren’t Lean, They’re Underbuilt

Reece Martin does very good vlogs on public transportation, and has begun text-blogging more regularly, which I appreciate greatly. But a post of his from six days ago, talking about lean metros, misses a key aspect of short metro systems. He compares old legacy systems like Paris or New York or Berlin’s with newer ones, like Hong Kong’s, and points out that the newer ones are rather short relative to city size, saying that it’s a leaner, lower-cost way of doing things. But in fact, the reason we see such short metros relative to city size is not efficiency, but underbuilding, leading to overcrowding.

What’s a lean metro?

Reece divides leanness into two kinds. The first is the ability of some cities to build driverless metros with very short trains at very high frequencies, to save money on station construction. He gives the examples of Copenhagen and Vancouver. This is particularly common in Italy: Milan Metro Lines 4 and 5 have 50 meter long trains, the Turin Metro has 55 meter long trains, the Brescia Metro has 40 meter long trains. With this setup and with the generally low construction costs of Italy, even Brescia can afford a metro, in a city proper of 200,000 with a built-up urban area of 673,000 (and rising) as of 2011.

The second kind of leanness is just building fewer lines. He talks about Toronto’s system, with two main trunk lines, one branch line with a transfer to a main line, and a total of 70 km of length. He also brings up Hong Kong, which has, counting both proper metro lines and the two inherited commuter lines, around 212 route-km, with very high ridership. This can be supported through transit-oriented development, for which Hong Kong is famous. It can also come from strong bus-rail connections as in Toronto: a blog post from last decade that I can no longer find points out that York Mills has what looks like 14,000 weekday boardings on pre-corona numbers, despite low-density land use immediately surrounding it, because of the strong connecting buses on the Toronto grid, favorably comparing it with American metros like Washington’s.

Small station metros

I don’t want to criticize the Italian trend too much, but I do want to separate it from the other systems Reece calls lean. The issue with the style of construction used in Brescia is that it’s really good, if your city is the size of Brescia. Small-station, partly cut-and-cover driverless metros should be in the toolkit of metro areas of about a million people, in order to save money. Other tools should be heavily relying on legacy commuter lines (as in Zurich) and using trams if they’re available (as in Bratislava or Brno), and likely combining all three solutions when feasible (in fact Zurich has a large tramway network in addition to the S-Bahn).

In a larger city, such light metro lines are only useful in a very restricted set of circumstances. Singapore has short trains on the Circle Line – but the Circle Line has not been cheap to build, and its last section has been extraordinarily expensive. On a radial line, it’s a nonstarter. A large city needs the very high throughput of a driverless metro but also larger trains; those can be medium-length trains, like the 90 meter trains of Paris Métro Line 1, or longer, like the 138 meter long trains of the now-driverless legacy lines in Singapore, or the 200 meter long platforms of the Shinbundang Line in Seoul. If the line is too short, the city may find it needs to build another just for relief, as the area that was once thought peripheral develops.

Short metros

If a metro system is short, even if its trains are long, it’s not generally a sign of efficient construction in the city. It’s a sign of underbuilding and overcrowding.

Hong Kong has very high crowding levels, even with a system length that, counted properly, is not that unreasonable: the MTR’s total route-length is almost the same as that of the Paris Métro, which has 227 km, and its ridership is, on pre-corona numbers, slightly higher, 1.7 billion a year compared with 1.5 billion. Now, to be clear, Paris has very high ridership for the system’s size. I suspect the reason I’ve never seen overcrowding on the Métro is that the nature of Parisian job concentration is such that the lines that get overcrowded are ones connecting the suburbs with the city, that is, the RER and M13, rather than predominantly intra-city lines like M1. But the situation in Hong Kong is overall less one of leanness and more one of not being to expand as fast as it would like due to extreme construction costs, which are a strong contender for the world’s second worst, after New York’s. (Toronto is an even stronger contender.)

Then there are the developing-world metros that are just far too short for their city size. Hong Kong is a city of 7 million with a little more than 200 km of metro and commuter rail. Cairo is a metro area of 22 million with 100 km of metro. Cairene construction costs are high, but when, depending on how much one trusts dead links from 10 years ago, the city has the world’s highest rail ridership per km, it needs a lot more; that Cairo has 100 km of metro rather than 800 like Shanghai, a similar-size city in a country that, during its peak expansion, was about as rich as Egypt, is not about leanness but about the Egyptian government’s spending priorities.

For a middle-income country that wants to get out of the middle-income trap that Egypt is stuck in (or Brazil, home to the almost as underbuilt São Paulo Metro), China is a decent benchmark. So is Paris – France is rich but also, precisely because it’s rich, rather motorized by any developing country standards, leading to a modal split of about 43% public transit, 43% cars for work trips in Ile-de-France. Using these benchmarks, your city should have on the order of 30 km of metro and new commuter rail per million residents. If you have 4.5 like Cairo, it’s not efficiency, it’s total disinterest in the living standards of the urban population.

Cost-Plus Contracting is Good

Because I write a lot about government waste, I get to interact with people who complain a lot about government waste, which exposes me to a range of views, some more reasonable than others. The less reasonable views themselves range from unhinged rants to things that sound like they could be true, that may even be true for parts of contracting other than public transportation or infrastructure megaprojects. It’s one of the latter views that I wish to talk about here. It’s all too common, in my experience, for people who complain about government waste in the United States to speak ill of cost-plus contracting, which they claim (incorrectly but plausibly) is a form of a waste and even (much less plausibly) fraud, in which contractors get paid regardless of how poor the job is. In truth, the only good way to build infrastructure megaprojects is with itemized contracts and with generous public-sector assumption of risk; this isn’t called cost-plus in the literature but itemization, but is close enough that from the perspective of citizen-activists it should be viewed as a cost-plus variant.

Itemization versus fixed-price contracting

Contracts can, broadly, be either itemized or fixed-price, the latter also known as lump-sum. A fixed-price contract has a single cost line for the entire project; an itemized contract instead prices each section, and certain elements that are agreed to be outside the contractor’s control, like materials, are adjusted automatically if prices on the world market change.

There are also mixed models. For example, in Stockholm, some contracts are fixed-price, some itemized, and others use an intermediate system called fixed price with adjustable quantities, in which some elements are itemized but others are not. Turkish construction contracts itemize about 65% of the costs in detail, covering the civil infrastructure, and then take each of the main sub-items of the other 35% (at the detail level of ventilation, power design, sewage, etc.) as a fixed-price contract.

In Southern Europe and Turkey, the items are public, published transparently by the government, as an anti-corruption measure. These are detailed, and take different costs of living into account, and thus in Italy the prices, published by the state, may differ by region. If the itemized prices are unrealistic, then the contractors are allowed to demand more, but those itemized lists help ground the contract.

This system far outperforms fixed-price contracts. We have standard references on this, namely Ryan (1, 2) and Bolotnyy-Vasserman, finding that itemization for power plants (in Ryan) or road maintenance (in Bolotnyy-Vasserman) leads to reduced overall costs, by about 20%. The reasons are that fixed-price contracting leads to increased friction in change orders, and that, relatedly, fixed-price contracting imposes risk on the private contractor, leading to higher bids for compensation. For this reason, all low-construction cost environments we’ve investigated itemize, to a significant extent. The Nordic countries are moving from itemized to fixed-price contracting under the influence of British practices and the requests of large international firms that are used to doing business in English-speaking countries or in other high-cost countries, and as they do so, their costs are moving from low to medium, in addition to other bad reforms.

So why do people think itemization is bad?

The big multinationals are just used to fixed-price contracts. In New York (where it’s usually not big multinationals), an additional issue is that the contractors prefer to be paid upfront, due to delays in payment under itemization. But more commonly, the contractors just don’t like having to give exact specifications, and are used to environments where they don’t and don’t notice how the costs in those places are much higher than in places that don’t govern in English.

But government contractors are hardly a popular figure among people who complain about government waste. So what gives?

I suspect that this is about the sight of the government assuming risk for something a private contractor does. The sight of a contractor complaining about a problem that the government then has to pay extra for is repulsive to the general public, which assumes that something shady is going on, regardless of whether it is. This leads to political pressure to insulate the public sector from unexpected changes.

The problem is that there is no way to fully insulate the public sector. Once the megaproject has been decided, the political cost for the government of walking away is larger than the economic penalties for the concessionaire. In practice, every attempt to privatize risk will get contractors to bid higher, while still not protecting the public from the risk of large cost overruns. Turkey is somewhat exceptional in this, but it still itemizes, and the way it enforces the maximum 20% cost overrun is by having so many contractors that it’s easy to blacklist malefactors; this is not available in richer countries with fewer, larger firms.

Janno Lieber Lies to New York About Costs and Regulations

After being criticized about the excessive size of subway stations designed on his watch, MTA head Janno Lieber fired back defending the agency’s costs. In a conversation with the Manhattan Institute, he said about us, “They’re not wrong that the stations are where the MTA stations add cost. But they are wrong about how they compare us – the cost per mile is misleading” (see discussion on social media here). Then he blamed labor and the fire code. Blaming labor is a small but real part of the story; this is common among the white-collar managers Eric and I have talked to, and deserves a separate explanation for why this concern is overblown. But the issue of the fire code is fraud, all the way.

I’ve previously seen some journalists and advocates who write about American construction costs talk about fire safety, which is mentioned occasionally as a reason designs cannot be changed. It’s not at all what’s going on, for two separate reasons, each of which, alone, should be grounds to dismiss Lieber and ensure he never works for the state again.

The first reason is that the fire safety regulation in the United States for train stations, NFPA 130, has been exported to a number of other countries, none of which has American costs or the specific American tradition of overbuilding stations. China uses NFPA 130. So does Turkey. Spain uses a modification. We can look at their designs and see that they do not build oversize stations. I’ve seen an environmental impact analysis in Shanghai, with the help of a Chinese student studying this issue who explained the main planning concerns there. I could write an entire blog post about China (not a 10,000-word case report, of course), but suffice is to say, if the train is projected to be 160 m long, the station dig will be that plus a few meters – and Chinese stations have mezzanines as I understand it. Spanish and Turkish stations have little overage as well; building a dig twice as long as the station’s platforms to house back-of-the-house spaces is unique to most (not all) of the Anglosphere, as design consultants copy bad ideas from one another.

Even the claim that NFPA 130 requires full-length mezzanines is suspect. It requires stations to be built so that passengers can evacuate in four minutes in emergency conditions, rising to six minutes counting stragglers (technically, the throughput needs to be enough to evacuate in four minutes, but with latency it can go up to six). The four minute requirement can be satisfied on the lettered lines of the subway in New York with no mezzanines and just an access point at each end of the platform, but it’s close and there’s a case for another access point in the middle; no full-length mezzanine is required either way. If the stations are any shorter, as on the numbered lines or in other North American cities, two escalators and a wide staircase at the end of each platform are more than enough, and yet the extensive overage is common in those smaller systems too (for example, in Vancouver, the Broadway extension is planned with 128 m long digs for 75 m trains, per p. 9 here).

“Fire safety” is used as an excuse by people with neither engineering background nor respect for anything quantitative or technical. Lieber is such a person: his background is in law and he seems incurious about technical issues (and this is also true of his successor at MTA Capital Construction, public policy grad Jamie Torres-Springer).

Perhaps due to this lazy incuriosity, Lieber didn’t notice that the MTA has extensive influence on the text of NFPA 130, bringing us to the second reason his claim is fraudulent. NFPA 130 is not to blame – again, it’s the same code as in a number of low- and medium-cost countries – but Nilo Cobau explains that the NFPA process is such that big agencies have considerable input, since there aren’t many places in the US that build subways. Nolan Hicks pointed out in the same thread, all linked in the lede paragraph, that the MTA has a voting member and two alternates on the board that determines NFPA 130 and hasn’t requested changes – and that Montreal, subject to the same codes, built a station with little overage (he says 160 m digs for 150 m platforms).

The handwaving of a fire code that isn’t even different from that of cheaper places is there for one purpose only: to deflect blame. It was a struggle to get Lieber and other New York leaders to even admit they have high costs, so now they try to make it the fault of anyone but themselves: fire safety regulations, organized labor, what have you.

Labor is a real issue, unlike fire safety, but it’s overblown by managers who look down on line workers and have generally never been line workers. Lieber graduated law school, was hired by USDOT at either junior-appointed or mid-level civil servant role, I can’t tell which, and then did managerial jobs; his successor as head of MTA Construction and Development, Jamie Torres-Springer, graduated public policy. These aren’t people who worked themselves up from doing engineering, architecture, planning, or ethnographic work; add the general hostility American white-collar workers have toward blue-collar workers, and soon people in that milieu come to believe that just because their top 5%er wages are much higher than they could earn anywhere else in the world, the sandhogs also earn much more than they could anywhere else in the world, when in truth New York sandhog and Stockholm miner wages and benefits are very close.

Occasionally the point that it’s not wages but labor productivity seeps in. There, at last, we see a real problem with labor. Eric and I found that about a third of the sandhogs on Second Avenue Subway didn’t really need to be there. Further cuts could be achieved through the use of more labor-efficient techniques, which the MTA is uninterested in implementing. The rest of the American labor premium comes from excessive staffing of white-collar supervisors, including representatives from each utility, which insists that the MTA pay for the privilege of having such representatives tell them what they can and cannot do in lieu of mapping the utilities and sending over the blueprints. All included, labor was around 50% of the cost of Second Avenue Subway, where the norm in Italy, Turkey, and Sweden is around 25% (note how higher-wage Sweden is the same as lower-wage Italy and much lower-wage Turkey); excessive labor costs contributed a factor of 1.5 premium to the project, but the other factor of 6 came from excessive station size, deep mining of stations (which thankfully will not happen at 106th and 116th Street; it will at 125th but that’s unavoidable), lack of system standardization, and a litany of project delivery problems that are generally getting worse with every iteration. Lieber personally takes credit for some of the privatization of planning to design-build consultancies, though to be fair to him, the project delivery problems predate him, he just made things slightly worse.

A New York that wants to build will not have incompetent political appointees in charge. It will instead hire professionals with a track record of success; as no such people exist within the American infrastructure construction milieu, it should use its own size and prestige to find someone from a low-cost city to hire, who will speak English with an accent and know more engineering than American legal hermeneutics. And it will not reward people who defraud the public about the state of regulations just because they’re too lazy to know better.

The United States Learned Little from Obama-Era Rail Investment

A few days ago, the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced Bipartisan Infrastructure Law grants for intercity rail that are not part of the Northeast Corridor program. The total amount disbursed so far is $8.2 billion; more will come, but the slate of projects funded fills me with pessimism about the future of American intercity rail. The total amount of money at stake is a multiple of what the Obama-era stimulus offered, which included $8 billion for intercity rail. The current program has money to move things, but is repeating the mistakes of the Obama era, even as Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg clearly wants to make a difference. I expect the money to, in 10 years, be barely visible as intercity rail improvement – just enough that aggrieved defenders will point to some half-built line or to a line where the program reduced trip times by 15 minutes for billions of dollars, but not enough to make a difference to intercity rail demand.

What happened in the Obama era

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), better known as the Obama stimulus, included $8 billion for what was branded as high-speed rail. Obama and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood spoke favorably of European and East Asian high-speed rail at the time. And yet, the impetus to spread the money across multiple states’ programs meant that the sum was, by spending, around half for legacy rail projects euphemistically branded as higher-speed rail, a term that denotes “faster than the Amtrak average.” Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois happily applied that term to slow lines. The other half went to the Florida and California programs, which were genuinely high-speed rail. In Florida, the money was enough to build the first phase from Orlando to Tampa, together with a small state contribution.

Infamously, Governor Rick Scott rejected the money after he was elected in the 2010 midterms, and so did Governors Scott Walker (R-WI) and John Kasich (R-OH). The money was redistributed to states that wanted it, of which the largest sums went to California and Illinois. And yet, what California got was a fraction of the $10 billion that the High-Speed Rail Authority had been hoping for when it went to ballot in 2008; in turn, the cost overruns that were announced in 2011 meant that even the original hoped-for sum could not build a usable segment. The line has languished since, to the point that Governor Gavin Newsom said “let’s be real” regarding the prospects of finishing the line. Planning is continuing, and the mostly funded, under-construction segment connecting Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced is slated to open 2030-33 (in 2008 the promise was Los Angeles-San Francisco by 2020), but this is a fraction of what was promised by cost or utility; Newsom even defended the Bakersfield-Merced segment on the merits, saying that connecting three small, decentralized metro areas to one another with no onward service to Los Angeles or San Francisco would provide good value and taking umbrage at the notion that it was a “train to nowhere.”

In Illinois, the money went toward improving the Chicago-St. Louis line. However, Union Pacific owns the tracks and demanded, as a precondition of allowing faster trains, that the money be spent on increasing its own capacity, leading to double-tracking on a line that only run five trains a day in each direction; service opened earlier this year, cutting trip times from 5:20-5:35 in 2010 to 4:46-5:03 now, at a cost of $2 billion. This is a 457 km line; the cost per kilometer was not much less than that of the greenfield commuter line to Lahti, which has an hourly commuter train averaging 96 km/h from Helsinki and a sometimes hourly, sometimes bihourly intercity train averaging 120. In effect, UP extracted so much surplus that a small improvement to an existing line cost almost as much as a greenfield medium-speed line.

Lessons not learned

The failure of the ARRA to lead to any noticeable improvement in rail service can be attributed to a number of factors:

  1. The money was spread thinly to avoid favoring just one state, which was perceived as politically unacceptable (somehow, spending money on a flashy project with no results to show for it was perceived as politically acceptable).
  2. The federal government could only spend the money on projects that the states planned and asked for – there was no independent federal planning.
  3. There was inattention to best practices in legacy rail planning, such as clockface timetabling, higher cant deficiency (allowed by FRA regulation since 2010), etc.; while the high-speed rail program aimed to imitate European and East Asian examples, the legacy program had little interest in doing so, even though successful legacy rail improvements in such countries as the UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands were available already.
  4. A dual mandate of both jobs and infrastructure, so that high costs were a positive to an interest group that the federal government and the states announced they wanted to support.
  5. California specifically was a series of unforced errors, including a politicized High-Speed Rail Authority board representing parochial rather than statewide interests, disinterest in developing any state capacity to plan things (the expression “state capacity” wouldn’t even enter common American political discourse until the late 2010s), early commitment, and, once the combo of cost overruns and insufficient money on hand meant the project had no hope of finishing in the political lifetime of anyone important, disinterest in expediting things.

I have not seen any indication that Buttigieg and his staff learned any of these lessons, and I have seen some indication that they have not.

For one, the dual mandate problem is if anything getting worse, with constant invocations of job creation even as unemployment is below 4% where in 2010 it was 10%, and with growing protectionism; the US has practically no internal market for modern rolling stock and the recent spate of protectionism is leading to surging costs, where until recently there was no American rolling stock cost premium. This is not an intercity rail problem but an infrastructure problem in general in the US, and every time a politician says “this will create jobs,” a surplus-extracting actor gets their wings.

Then, even though the NGO space has increasingly been figuring out some best practices for regional trains, there is still no integration of these practices into infrastructure planning. The allergy to electrification remains, and mainline rail agency officials keep making things up about rest-of-world practices and getting rewarded for it with funds. Despite wide recognition of the extent of surplus extraction by the Class I freight carriers, there is no attempt to steer funding toward lines that are already owned by passenger rail-focused public-sector carriers, like the Los Angeles-San Diego line, much of the Chicago-Detroit line, and the New York-Albany line.

The lack of independent federal planning is if anything getting worse, relative to circumstances. In the Obama era, the Northeast Corridor was put aside. Today, it is the centerpiece of the investment program; I’ve been told that Biden asks about it at briefings about transportation investment and views it as his personal legacy. Well, it could be, but that would require toothy federal planning, and this doesn’t really exist – instead, the investment program is a staple job of parochial interests. Based on this, I doubt that there’s been any progress in federal planning for intercity rail outside the Northeast.

And finally, the money is still being spread too thinly. California is getting $3.1 billion, which is close to but not quite enough to complete Bakersfield-Merced, whose cost is in year-of-expenditure dollars at this point $34 billion for a 275 km system in the easiest geography it could possibly have. Another $3 billion is slated to go to Brightline West, a private scheme to run high-speed trains from Rancho Cucamonga in exurban Los Angeles, about 65 km from city center, to a greenfield site 4 km south of the Las Vegas Strip; the overall cost of the line is projected at $12 billion over a distance of 350 km. It’s likely that this split is worse than either giving all $6 billion to California or giving all of it to Brightline West. But as I am going to point out in the following section, it’s worse than giving the money to places that are not the Western United States.

The frustrating thing is that, just as I am told that Biden deeply cares about the Northeast Corridor, Buttigieg has been quoted as saying that he cares about developing at least one high-speed rail line, as a legacy that he can point to and say “I did that.” Buttigieg is a papabile for the 2028 presidential primary, and is young enough he can delay running for many cycles if he feels 2028 is not the right time, to the point that “I built that” will strengthen his political prospects even if he has to wait until opening in the 2030s. And yet, the money committed will not build high-speed rail. It might build a demonstration segment in California, but a Bakersfield-Fresno line and even a Bakersfield-Merced one with additional funds would scream “white elephant” to the general public.

Is it salvagable?

Yes.

There are, as I understand it, $21.8 billion in uncommitted funds.

What the $21.8 billion is required to achieve is a) a complete high-speed line, b) not touching the Northeast Corridor (which is funded separately and also poorly), c) connecting cities of sufficient size that passenger ridership would make people say “this is a worthy government investment” rather than “this is a bridge to nowhere on steroids.” Even a complete Los Angeles-Las Vegas line is not guaranteed to be it, and Brightline West is saving money by dumping passengers tens of kilometers along congested roads from Downtown Los Angeles.

Given adequate cost control, Chicago-Detroit/Cleveland is viable. It’s around 370 km Chicago-Toledo, 100 km Toledo-Detroit, 180 km Toledo-Cleveland, depending on alignments chosen; $21.8 billion can build it at the same cost projected for Brightline West, in easier topography. If money is almost but not quite enough, then either Cleveland or Detroit can be dropped, which would make the system substantially less valuable but still create some demand for completing the system (Michigan could fund Toledo-Detroit with state money, for example).

But this means that all or nearly all of the remaining funds need to go into that one basket, and Buttigieg needs to gamble that it works. This requires federal coordination – none of the four states on the line has the ability to plan it by itself, and two of them, Indiana and Ohio, are actively hostile. It’s politically fine as a geographic split as it is – that part of the Midwest is sacralized in American political discourse due to its industrial history, which history has also supplied it with large cities that could fill trains to Chicago and even to one another; politicians can more safely call Los Angeles “not real America” than they can Detroit and Cleveland.

But so far, the way the Northeast Corridor money and the recently-announced $8.2 billion for non-Northeast Corridor service have been spent fills me with confidence that this will not be done. The program is salvageable, but I don’t think it will be salvaged. There’s just no interest in having the federal government do this by itself as far as I can see, and the state programs are either horrifically expensive (California) or too compromised (Midwest, Southeast, Pacific Northwest).

So what I expect will happen is more spreading of the money to lines averaging 100 km/h or less, plus maybe some incomplete grants to marginal high-speed lines (Atlanta-Charlotte is a contender, but would get little traffic until it connects to the Northeast Corridor and would cost nearly the entire remaining pot). Every government source will insist that this is high-speed rail. Some parts will be built and end up failing to achieve much, like Chicago-St. Louis. Every person who is not already bought in will learn that the government is inefficient and it’s better to cut taxes instead, as is already done in Massachusetts. Americans will keep making excuses for why it’s just not possible to have what European and a growing list of Asian countries have, or perhaps why there’s no point in it since if it were good it would have been invented by the American private sector.

The MTA Sticks to Its Oversize Stations

In our construction costs report, we highlighted the vast size of the station digs for Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 as one of the primary reasons for the project’s extreme costs. The project’s three new stations cost about three times as much as they should have, even keeping all other issues equal: 96th Street’s dig is about three times as long as necessary based on the trains’ length, and 72nd and 86th Street’s are about twice as long but the stations were mined rather than built cut-and-cover, raising their costs to match that of 96th each. In most comparable cases we’ve found, including Paris, Istanbul, Rome, Stockholm, and (to some extent) Berlin, station digs are barely longer than the minimum necessary for the train platform.

MTA Construction and Development has chosen to keep building oversize stations for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, a project that despite being for the most part easier than the already-open Phase 1, is projected to cost slightly more per kilometer. Nolan Hicks at the New York Post just published a profile diagram:

The enormous size of 125th Street Station is not going to be a grand civic space. As the diagram indicates, the length of the dig past the platforms will not be accessible to passengers. Instead, it will be used for staff and mechanical rooms. Each department wants its own dedicated space, and at no point has MTA leadership told them no.

Worse, this is the station that has to be mined, since it goes under the Lexington Avenue Line. A high-cost construction technique here is unavoidable, which means that the value of avoiding extra costs is higher than at a shallow cut-and-cover dig like those of 106th and 116th Streets. Hence, the $1 billion hard cost of a single station. This is an understandable cost for a commuter rail station mined under a city center, with four tracks and long trains; on a subway, even one with trains the length of those of the New York City Subway, it is not excusable.

When we researched the case report on Phase 1, one of the things we were told is that the reason for the large size of the stations is that within the MTA, New York City Transit is the prestige agency and gets to call the shots; Capital Construction, now Construction and Development, is smaller and lacks the power to tell NYCT no, and from NYCT’s perspective, giving each department its own break rooms is free money from outside. One of the potential solutions we considered was changing the organizational chart of the agency so that C&D would be grouped with general public works and infrastructure agencies and not with NYCT.

But now the head of the MTA is Janno Lieber, who came from C&D. He knows about our report. So does C&D head Jamie Torres-Springer. When one of Torres-Springer’s staffers said a year ago that of course Second Avenue Subway needs more circulation space than Citybanan in Stockholm, since it has higher ridership (in fact, in 2019 the ridership at each of the two Citybana stations, e.g. pp. 39 and 41, was higher than at each of the three Second Avenue Subway stations), the Stockholm reference wasn’t random. They no longer make that false claim. But they stick to the conclusion that is based on this and similar false claims – namely, that it’s normal to build underground urban rail stations with digs that are twice as long as the platform.

When I call for removing Lieber and Torres-Springer from their positions, publicly, and without a soft landing, this is what I mean. They waste money, and so far, they’ve been rewarded: Phase 2 has received a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) from the United States Department of Transportation, giving federal imprimatur to the transparently overly expensive design. When they retire, their successors will get to see that incompetence and multi-billion dollar waste is rewarded, and will aim to imitate that. If, in contrast, the governor does the right thing and replaces Lieber and Torres-Springer with people who are not incurious hacks – people who don’t come from the usual milieu of political appointments in the United States but have a track record of success (which, in construction, means not hiring someone from an English-speaking country) – then the message will be the exact opposite: do a good job or else.

Quick Note: New Neighborhoods are Residential

There’s a common trope about a new exurban subdivision with nothing but houses, and living in a new building in a relatively new urban neighborhood, I get it. Of course, where I live is dense and walkable – it’s literally in Berlin-Mitte – but it still feels underserved by retail and other neighborhood-scale amenities. But at the same time, those amenities are starting to catch up, following the new residences.

I’ve known since I moved here that the place is pessimally located relative to supermarkets. My previous apartment, in Neukölln, was on a residential street, across the corner from a Penny’s, and about 600 meters from the Aldi on the other side of the Ring and 700 from a Lidl that I went to maybe twice in the year I was there because I thought it was too far. My current place was around 800 meters from the nearest supermarket when I moved here in 2020; very recently a slightly closer Bio Company has opened, with not great selection. Other services seem undersupplied as well, like restaurants, which Cid and I have become acutely aware of as the temperature crossed -5 degrees in the wrong direction. For other stores, we typically have to go to Alexanderplatz or Kottbusser Tor.

I bring this up not to complain – I knew what I was getting into when I rented this place. Rather, I bring this up because I’m seeing this combination of not great neighborhood-scale services and gradual change bringing such services in. The gradual change doesn’t seem like a coincidence – the new things I’ve seen open here in the last 3.5 years are high-end, like the aforementioned Bio Company store, or some yuppie cafes, are exactly what you’d open to cater to people living in new buildings in Berlin.

And that brings me back to the common stereotype of new subdivisions. All they have is residential development. This is not just about exurbia, because I’m seeing this here, in the middle of the city. It’s not even just about capitalist development, because it can also be seen in top-down construction of new neighborhoods: the Million Program suburban housing projects around Stockholm were supposed to be work-live areas, like pre-Million Program Vällingby, but they turned into bedroom communities, because it was more desirable to locate commercial uses in city center or near key T-bana stations.

This is true even when the new development is not purely residential, which the development here isn’t. There are office buildings, including one being built right as we speak. But these, too, take time to bring in neighborhood-scale amenities, and those amenities, in turn, are specific to office workers, leading to a number of cafes that only open around lunch hours.

If anything, the fact that this is infill showcases how this is not so bad when a city develops through accretion of new buildings, in this case as new land becomes available (this is all in the exclusion zone near the Wall), but often also on the margin of the city as it gets a new subway line or as land near its periphery becomes valuable enough to develop. There are a lot of services a walk away; it’s not an especially short walk, but what I get within a 1 km radius is decent and what I get within 1.5 is very good to the point that we still discover new things within that radius of an apartment I’ve lived in for 3.5 years.

And in a way, the archetypical new suburban subdivision often has the same ability to access neighborhood-scale amenities early, just with a snag that they’re farther away than is desirable. It involves driving 10-15 minutes to the strip mall, but in new suburban subdivisions other than the tiny handful that are transit-oriented development, it’s assumed everyone has a car; why else would one even live there? (At the ones that are transit-oriented, early residents can take the train to places with more retail development, which a lot of people do even in mature neighborhoods for more specialized amenities.)

Quick Note: Anti-Green Identity Politics

In Northern Europe right now, there’s a growing backlash to perceived injury to people’s prosperity inflicted by the green movement. In Germany this is seen in campaigning this year by the opposition and even by FDP not against the senior party in government but against the Greens. In the UK, the (partial) cancellation of High Speed 2 involved not just cost concerns but also rhetoric complaining about a war on cars and shifting of high-speed rail money to building new motorway interchanges.

I bring this up for a few reasons. First, to point out a trend. And second, because the Berlin instantiation of the trend is a nice example of what I talked about a month ago about conspiracism.

The trend is that the Green Party in Germany is viewed as Public Enemy #1 by much of the center-right and the entire extreme right, the latter using the slogan “Hang the Greens” at some hate marches from the summer. This is obvious in state-level political campaigning: where in North-Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein the unpopularity of the Scholz cabinet over its weak response to the Ukraine war led to CDU-Green coalitions last year (the Greens at the time enjoying high popularity over their pro-Ukraine stance), elections this year have produced CDU-SPD coalitions in Berlin and Hesse, in both cases CDU choosing SPD as a governing partner after having explicitly campaigned against the Greens.

This is not really out of any serious critique of the Green Party or its policy. American neoliberals routinely try to steelman this as having something to do with the party’s opposition to nuclear power, but this doesn’t feature into any of the negative media coverage and barely into any CDU rhetoric. It went into full swing with the heat pump law, debated in early summer.

In Berlin the situation has been especially perverse lately. One of the points made by CDU in the election campaign was that the red-red-green coalition failed to expand city infrastructure as promised. It ran on more room for cars rather than pedestrianization, but also U-Bahn construction; when the coalition agreement was announced, Green political operatives and environmental organizations on Twitter were the most aghast at the prospects of a massive U-Bahn expansion proposed by BVG and redevelopment of Tempelhofer Feld.

And then this month the Berlin government, having not made progress on U-Bahn expansion, announced that it would trial a maglev line. There hasn’t been very good coverage of this in formal English-language media, but here and here are writeups. The proposal is, of course, total vaporware, as is the projected cost of 80 million € for a test line of five to seven kilometers.

This has to be understood, I think, in the context of the concept of openness to new technology (“Technologieoffenheit”), which is usually an FDP slogan but seems to describe what’s going on here as well. In the name of openness to new tech, FDP loves raising doubts about proven technology and assert that perhaps something new will solve all problems better. Hydrogen train experiments are part of it (naturally, they failed). Normally this constant FUD is something I associate with people who are out of power or who are perpetually junior partners to power, like FDP, or until recently the Greens. People in power prefer to do things, and CDU thinks it’s the natural party of government.

And yet, there isn’t really any advance in government in Berlin. The U8 extension to Märkisches Viertel is in the coalition agreement but isn’t moving; every few months there’s a story in the media in which politicians say it’s time to do it, but so far there are no advances in the design, to the point that even the end point of the line is uncertain. And now the government, with all of its anti-green fervor – fervor that given Berlin politics includes support for subway construction – is not so much formally canceling it as just neglecting it, looking at shiny new technologies that are not at all appropriate for urban rail just because they’re not regular subways or regular commuter trains, which don’t have that identity politics load here.

Curves in Fast Zones

I wrote nearly five years ago that the lowest-hanging fruit for speeding up trains are in the slowest sections. This remains true, but as I (and Devin Wilkins) turn crayon into a real proposal, it’s clear what the second-lowest hanging fruit is: curves in otherwise fast sections. Fixing such curves sometimes saves more than a minute each, for costs that are not usually onerous.

The reason for this is that curves in fast zones tend to occur on a particular kind of legacy line. The line was built to high standards in mostly flat terrain, and therefore has long straight sections, or sections with atypically gentle curves. Between these sections the curves were fast for the time; in the United States, high standards for the 19th century meant curves of radius 1,746 meters, at which point each 100′ (30.48 meters) of track distance correspond to one degree of change in azimuth; 30.48*180/pi = 1,746.38. For much more information about speed zones, read this post from four weeks ago first; I’m going to mention some terminology from there without further definitions.

These curves are never good enough for high-speed rail. The Tokaido Shinkansen was built with 2,500 meter curves, and requires exceptional superelevation and a moderate degree of tilting (called active suspension) to reach 285 km/h. This lateral acceleration, 2.5 m/s^2, can’t really be achieved on ordinary high-speed rolling stock, and the options for it always incur higher acquisition and operating costs, or buying sole-sourced Japanese technology at much higher prices than are available to Japan Railways. In practice, the highest number that can be acheived with multi-vendor technology is around 2.07 m/s^2, or at lower speed around 2.2; 1,746*2.07 = 3,614.22, which corresponds to 60.12 m/s, or 216 km/h.

If a single such curve appears between two long, straight sections, then the slowdown penalty for it is 23.6 seconds from a top speed of 300 km/h, 35.5 from a top speed of 320 km/h, or 67 seconds from a top speed of 360 km/h. The curve itself is not instantaneous but has a few seconds of cruising at the lower speed, and this adds a few seconds of penalty as well.

Case in point: the curve between Kingston and Wickford Junction in South County, Rhode Island is such a curve. The red line below denotes a 4 km radius curve, good for a little more than 320 km/h (360 with tilt), deviating from the black line of the existing curve.

The length of the existing curve is about 1.3 km, so to the above penalties, add 6 seconds if the top speed is 300 km/h, 7 if it’s 320, or 8.7 if it’s 360 (in which case the curve needs to be a bit wider unless tilting is used). If it’s not possible to build a wider curve than this, then from a top speed of 360 km/h, the 320 km/h slowdown adds 10 seconds of travel time, including a small penalty for the 1.3 km of the curve and a larger one for acceleration and deceleration; thus, widening the curve from the existing one to 4 km radius actually has a larger effect if the top speed on both sides is intended to be 360 and not 320 km/h.

The inside of this curve is not very developed. This is just about the lowest-density part of the Northeast Corridor. I-95 has four rather than six lanes here. Land acquisition for curve easement is considerably easier than in higher-density sprawl in New Jersey or Connecticut west of New Haven.

The same situation occurs north of Providence, on the Providence Line. There’s a succession of these 1,746 meter curves, sometimes slightly tighter, between Mansfield and Canton. The Canton Viaduct curve is unfixable, but the curves farther to the south are at-grade, with little in the way; there are five or six such curves (the sixth is just south of the viaduct and therefore less relevant) and fixing all of them together would save intercity trains around 1:15.

For context, 1.3 km of at-grade construction in South County with minimal land acquisition should not cost more than $50 million, even with the need to stage construction so that the new alignment can be rapidly connected to the old one during the switchover. Saving more than a minute for $50 million, or even saving 42 seconds for $50 million, is around 1.5 orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the Frederick Douglass Tunnel in Baltimore ($6 billion for 2.5 minutes); there aren’t a lot of places where it’s possible to save so much time at this little cost.

It creates a weird situation in which while the best place to invest in physical infrastructure is near urban stations to allow trains to approach at 50-80 km/h and not 15-25, the next best is to relieve 210 km/h speed zones that should be 300 km/h or more. It’s the curvy sections with long stretches of 120-160 km/h that are usually more difficult to fix.

Reverse- and Through-Commute Trends

I poked around some comparable data for commuting around New York for 2007 and 2019 the other day, using OnTheMap. The motivation is that I’d made two graphics of through-commutes in the region, one in 2017 (see link here, I can’t find the original article anymore) and one this year for the ETA report (see here, go to section 2B). The nicer second graphic was made by Kara Fischer, not by me, but also has about twice the volume of through-commutes, partly due to a switch in source to the more precise OnTheMap, partly due to growth. It’s the issue of growth I’d like to go over in this post.

In all cases, I’m going to compare data from 2007 and 2019. This is because these years were both business cycle peaks, and this is the best way to compare data from different years. The topline result is that commutes of all kinds are up – the US had economic growth in 2007-19 and New York participated in it – but cross-regional commutes grew much more than commutes to Manhattan. New Jersey especially grew as a residential place, thanks to its faster housing growth, to the point that by 2019, commute volumes from the state to Manhattan matched those of all east-of-Hudson suburbs combined. The analysis counts all jobs, including secondary jobs.

For the purposes of the tables below, Long Island comprises Nassau and Suffolk Counties, and Metro-North territory comprises Westchester, Putnam, and Duchess Counties and all of Connecticut.

2007 data

From\ToManhattanBrooklynQueensBronxStaten IslandLong IslandMetro-NorthNew Jersey
Manhattan449,30830,71622,02817,7461,97417,57420,28129,031
Brooklyn385,943299,05676,49916,1219,28840,84717,17525,887
Queens328,78589,982216,98819,2274,350107,63421,73718,555
Bronx184,59435,99429,81897,3972,33720,20041,31615,467
Staten Island59,57230,2417,2232,32649,6797,5143,65517,919
Long Island163,98845,12177,33712,7245,103926,91232,80612,557
Metro-North124,95212,60614,22824,1311,96229,3441,897,39215,413
New Jersey245,37323,45517,49611,0228,10917,46022,0733,523,860

2019 data

From\ToManhattanBrooklynQueensBronxStaten IslandLong IslandMetro-NorthNew Jersey
Manhattan570,32156,01944,06331,9474,00020,67822,14635,243
Brooklyn486,757429,234119,58826,19217,07343,41018,30133,119
Queens384,186134,063308,90336,3397,640121,19425,21622,863
Bronx224,58362,37758,124135,2884,36426,17245,34717,387
Staten Island59,77840,99413,9715,21856,9539,8773,51019,442
Long Island191,23959,241102,93923,2468,132971,19340,13014,724
Metro-North153,48221,28323,49837,1473,17940,5861,874,61820,819
New Jersey345,55140,39729,52317,46714,13423,43929,7553,614,386

Growth

From\ToManhattanBrooklynQueensBronxStaten IslandLong IslandMetro-NorthNew Jersey
Manhattan26.93%82.38%100.03%80.02%102.63%17.66%9.20%21.40%
Brooklyn26.12%43.53%56.33%62.47%83.82%6.27%6.56%27.94%
Queens16.85%48.99%42.36%89.00%75.63%12.60%16.00%23.22%
Bronx21.66%73.30%94.93%38.90%86.74%29.56%9.76%12.41%
Staten Island0.35%35.56%93.42%124.33%14.64%31.45%-3.97%8.50%
Long Island16.62%31.29%33.10%82.69%59.36%4.78%22.33%17.26%
Metro-North22.83%68.83%65.15%53.94%62.03%38.31%-1.20%35.07%
New Jersey40.83%72.23%68.74%58.47%74.30%34.24%34.80%2.57%

Some patterns

Commutes to Manhattan are up 24.37% over the entire period. This is actually higher than the rise in all commutes in the table combined, because of the weight of intra-suburban commutes (internal to New Jersey, Metro-North territory, or Long Island), which stagnated over this period. However, the rise in all commutes that are not to Manhattan and are also not internal to one of the three suburban zones is much greater, 41.11%.

This 41.11% growth was uneven over this period. Every group of commuters to the suburbs did worse than this. On net, commutes to New Jersey, Metro-North territory, and Long Island, each excluding internal commutes, grew 21.34%, 15.95%, and 18.62%, all underperforming commutes to Manhattan. Some subgroups did somewhat better – commutes from New Jersey and Metro-North to the rest of suburbia grew healthily (they’re the top four among the cells describing commutes to the suburbs) – but overall, this isn’t really about suburban job growth, which lagged in this period.

In contrast, commutes to the Outer Boroughs grew at a collective rate of 50.31%. All four intra-borough numbers (five if we include Manhattan) did worse than this; rather, people commuted between Outer Boroughs at skyrocketing rates in this period, and many suburbanites started commuting to the Outer Boroughs too. Among these, the cis-Manhattan commutes – Long Island to Brooklyn and Queens, and Metro-North territory to the Bronx – grew less rapidly (31.29%, 33.1%, 53.94% respectively), while the trans-Manhattan commutes grew very rapidly, New Jersey-Brooklyn growing 72.23%.

New Jersey had especially high growth rates as an origin. Not counting intra-state commutes, commutes as an origin grew 45% (Long Island: 25.75%; Metro-North territory: 34.75%), due to the relatively high rate of housing construction in the state. By 2019, commutes from New Jersey to Manhattan grew to be about equal in volumes to commutes from the two east-of-Hudson suburban regions combined.

Overall, trans-Hudson through-commutes – those between New Jersey and anywhere in the table except Manhattan and Staten Island – grew from 179,385 to 249,493, 39% in total, with New Jersey growing much faster as an origin than a destination for such commutes (53.63% vs. 23.93%); through-commutes between the Bronx or Metro-North territory and Brooklyn grew 56.48%, reaching 128,153 people, with Brooklyn growing 72.13% as a destination for such commutes and 33.63% as an origin.

What this means for commuter rail

Increasingly, through-running isn’t about unlocking new markets, although I think that better through-service is bound to increase the size of the overall commute volume. Rather, it’s about serving commutes that exist, or at least did on the eve of the pandemic. About half of the through-commutes are to Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Queens; the other half are to the suburbs (largely to New Jersey).

The comparison must be with reverse-commutes. Those are also traditionally ignored by commuter rail, but Metro-North made a serious effort to accommodate the high-end ones from the city to edge cities including White Plains, Greenwich, and Stamford, where consequently transit commuters outearn drivers in workplace geography. The LIRR, which long ran its Main Line one-way at rush hour to maintain express service on the two-track line, sold the third track project as opening new reverse-commutes. But none of these markets is growing much, and the only cis-Manhattan one that’s large is Queens to Long Island, which has an extremely diffuse job geography. In contrast, the larger and faster-growing through-markets are ignored.

Short (cis-Manhattan) trips are growing healthily too. They are eclipsed by some through-commutes, but Long Island to Queens and Brooklyn and Metro-North territory to the Bronx all grew very fast, and at least for the first two, the work destinations are fairly clustered near the LIRR (but the Bronx jobs are not at all clustered near Metro-North).

The fast job growth in all four Outer Boroughs means that it’s better to think of commuter rail as linking the suburbs with the city than just linking the suburbs with Penn Station or Grand Central. There isn’t much suburban job growth, but New Jersey has residential growth (the other two suburban regions don’t), and the city has job growth, with increasing complexity as more job centers emerge outside Manhattan and as people travel between them and not just to Manhattan.