Climate apartheid is a term due to Desmond Tutu, about how rich places that are vulnerable to climate change, like New York and London, can use their wealth to avoid the worst of its effects through retreat to higher grounds or even flood walls, while poor places cannot. Already 15 years ago, he argued that “Adaptation is becoming a euphemism for social injustice on a global scale” and “the only solution to climate change is urgent mitigation.”
And now people using the language of social justice and environmentalism push for such apartheid through attempts to make it harder for people to live in rich cities where people’s environmental footprints are much lower than in rich suburbs and rural areas. The exact grounds vary depending on the NIMBY. What I’ve seen most recently is a call for urban rewilding, leaving patches of city undeveloped on the theory that they could be used to reduce environmental footprint and increase biodiversity. Naturally, the exact opposite would follow, and the cities would become more exclusive, causing more people to instead live car-heavy, high-emission lifestyles while the denizens of city centers look down on them for living a longer distance to work than is comfortable to bike.
The impact of urban NIMBYism
NIMBYism in cities comprises advocacy, almost always at an intensely local level, to reduce the quantity of residential and commercial development. To that effect, NIMBYs employ a variety of strategies, some of which explicitly use environmental language and others of which do not:
They argue that open space that is to be redeveloped is a valuable neighborhood park. In Berlin, this is the Tempelhofer Feld saga, where a treeless parade within the Ring, much of which is paved as former airport runways, is held as a park and even a wildlife habitat (there are actual wooded parks nearby). In Tel Aviv, Kikar HaMedina was built with redevelopment in mind, but this stalled until recently, as the people living nearby liked it as open space, much larger than a neighborhood of that size would normally have.
They moralize about urban design. This is where NIMBYs in the Western world tell people that skyscrapers are inhuman and associate them with East Asia or Dubai, places that they have little trouble portraying as inferior, for racist reasons. Ironically, while the NIMBYs use Singapore and Hong Kong as bywords for the evils of tall buildings, Singapore gets high marks on international rankings for rewilding, on the strength of its preservation of a large tract of tropical rainforest while the rest of the city’s area is redeveloped at high intensity.
They moralize about the people who would move into the city. This is most common among people who identify their NIMBYism as anti-gentrification: they complain that apartment dwellers (or, in places that already have apartments, dwellers of high-rises) have inferior values, do not socialize in the neighborhood enough to their (the NIMBYs’) taste, do not care about the things the NIMBYs care about the most (such as those treeless parades). In the United States this often includes the assertion that gentrifying cities are growing whiter, which they are not even there, let alone in Europe, where every new building that local NIMBYs accuse of bringing gentrifiers has a larger share of non-European names on the mailboxes than is average for Berlin.
They call for less centralized cities, thus rejecting commercialization of city center and near-center neighborhoods. European city centers are remarkably low-rise for their size and wealth; American ones have single-family zoning within a short distance of city center. In either case, NIMBYs explicitly justify it by moralizing against office jobs and the concept of the commute.
Whatever the justification, the outcome is to reduce the quantity of housing built as well as the amount of commercial development in the center. The less housing is built, the higher the rents are. The marginal residents who are so affected are usually not the ones who socialize in-neighborhood, and so the ones who do go ahead and assume that just because nobody they know got a lower rent through new construction, nobody else did either.
But the issue of apartheid is not exactly about prices. It’s about city size and environmental footprint. At the end of the day, Berlin’s per capita CO2 emissions are, per a shoddy (and since retracted) report complaining that it should stop building subways, 5.38 t/year, where the German average is 9.15. A larger Berlin fulfills German climate goals, by putting more people on top of a large public transportation system none of whose components is anywhere near capacity (the S-Bahn trunks run 18 trains per hour and the U-Bahn ones run 12-15; capacity is 24-30 on an S-Bahn system and more than that on a separate subway). The same calculation works for New York, London, or Paris. Thus, even construction that uses traditional techniques with heavy concrete and its high emissions is still on net an emissions reduction if it’s in a city with high mass transit usage.
Rewilding as adaptation
I can’t find the original article I saw about rewilding that claimed it was necessary for climate adaptation in large cities (no word about mitigation). But I’ve found others, by larger organizations. For example, here is Citizen Zoo, which claims that its mission is for people to live near wildlife:
Rewilding people is just as important as rewilding places.
Across the world, we have lost our connection to nature. Humans are the primary drivers behind the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe we are seeing before our eyes. The only way to solve these issues is through a positive connection between people and nature. This can inform behavioural changes and a co-existence of humans and wildlife that benefit biodiversity.
The biggest drivers of climate change are people who live far from other people, who drive long distances, and whose detached houses have high winter heating needs. One of the justifications used by people who actively prefer such lifestyle, rather than merely not being able to afford a city like New York or London, is proximity to nature. The line about losing the connection to nature was historically used by British and American patricians to argue for dispersion of city residents in the late 19th century, creating modern suburbia as we know it. It was then used again by NIMBYs in the 1960s and 70s arguing that tall buildings were inhuman (apparently, the residents of Singapore, Taipei, and other cities where high-rises are normal don’t count).
And here again, environmental pastoralist organizations invoke the climate catastrophe as an argument to engage in policy that makes this catastrophe worse.
YIMBYism and biodiversity
Climate change is by far the biggest environmental problem in the world right now. But it’s not the only one; there are real issues of biodiversity that aren’t quite about climate but instead are about habitat loss. The radical environmentalist Chris Clarke (who I still owe a post to about YIMBYism and environmentalism) long fought against development of utility-scale solar power in the Mojave Desert in a sensitive area with endangered turtles; Chris would point out that global environmental activism about habitat loss centers forest biomes and tends to denigrate deserts as lifeless and thus does not pay attention to their own biodiversity hotspots.
The YIMBY take on this is that larger and denser cities come at the expense of suburban sprawl, which encroaches on ecologically sensitive areas. Not for nothing, developers who only build single-family housing like zoning rules that make it harder to redevelop in cities. In Oregon, many of them opposed the statewide YIMBY bill permitting more infill housing, on the accelerationist ground that infill housing would reduce rents and reduce the political pressure to expand the state’s urban growth boundaries and release new fringe land for new housing.
But this means throwing away all pretense of adaptation, or rewilding, or bringing people closer to what someone who thinks travel by bus or subway is less moral than travel by bike thinks nature is. I don’t know if tall buildings make rich cities more resilient to climate change or less (I suspect it’s neither), and frankly, I don’t care. India and Bangladesh should think about how to be more resilient; the US and Germany should think about how to reduce their emissions. What I do know is that tall buildings are a substitute for low-density suburbs where people drive everywhere, which, when built, are likely to be replacing either wildlands or farmland, depending on the region.
It’s an empirical observation that rail riders who are faced with a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if it’s near their home than near their destination. Reinhard Clever’s since-linkrotted work gives an example from Toronto, and American commuter rail rider behavior in general; I was discussing it from the earliest days of this blog. He points out that American and Canadian commuter rail riders drive long distances just to get to a cheaper or faster park-and-ride stations, but are reluctant to take the train if they have any transfer at the city center end.
This pattern is especially relevant as, due to continued job sprawl, American rail reformers keep looking for new markets for commuter rail to serve and set their eyes on commutes to the suburbs. Garrett Wollman is giving an example, in the context of the Agricultural Branch, a low-usage freight line linking to the Boston-Worcester commuter line that could be used for local passenger rail service. Garrett talks about the potential ridership of the line, counting people living near it and people working near it. And inadvertently, his post makes it clear why the pattern Clever saw in Toronto is as it is.
Residential and job sprawl
The issue at hand is that residential sprawl and job sprawl both require riders to spend some time connecting to the train. The more typical example of residential sprawl involves isotropic single-family density in a suburban region, with commuters driving to the train station to get on a train to city center; they could be parking there or being dropped off by family, but in either case, the interface to the train for them is in their own car.
Job sprawl is different. Garrett points out that there are 79,000 jobs within two miles of a potential station on the Ag Branch, within the range of corporate shuttles. With current development pattern, rail service on the branch could follow the best practices there are and I doubt it would get 5% of those workers as riders, for all of the following reasons:
The corporate shuttle is a bus, with all the discomfort that implies; it usually is also restricted in hours even more than traditional North American commuter rail – the frequency on the LIRR or even Caltrain is low off-peak but the trains do run all day, whereas corporate shuttles have a tendency to only run at peak. There is no own-car interface involved.
The traditional car-commuter train interface is to jobs in areas with traffic congestion and difficult parking. The jobs in the suburbs face neither constraint. Of note, Long Islanders working in Manhattan do transfer to the subway, because driving to the East Side to avoid the transfer from Penn Station is not a realistic option.
The traditional car-commuter train interface is to jobs in a city center served from all directions by commuter rail. In contrast, the jobs in the suburbs are only served by commuter rail along a single axis. There is a fair amount of reverse-peak ridership from San Francisco to Silicon Valley jobs or from New York to White Plains and Stamford jobs, even if at far lower rates than the traditional peak direction – but most people working at a suburban job center live in another suburb, own a car, and either commute in a different direction from that of the train or don’t live and work close enough to a station that the car-train-shuttle trip is faster than an all-car trip.
Those features are immutable without further changes in urban design. Then there are other features that interact with the current timetables and fares. North American commuter rail has so many features designed to appeal to the type of person who drives everywhere and uses the train as a shuttle extending their car-oriented lifestyle into the city – premium fares, heavy marketing as different from normal public transit, poor integration with said normal public transit – that interface with one’s own car is especially valuable, and interface with public transit is especially unvalued.
And yet, it’s clearly possible to make it work. How?
How Europe makes it work
Commuter trains in Europe (nobody calls them regional rail here – that term is reserved for hourly long-range trains) get a lot of off-peak ridership and are not at all used exclusively by 9-to-5 commuters who drive for all other purposes. Some of this is to suburban job centers. How does this work, besides timetables and other operating practices that American reformers recognize as superior to what’s available in the US and Canada?
The primary answer is near-center jobs. Paris and La Défense have, between them, about 37% of the total jobs of Ile-de-France. Within the same land area, 100 km^2, both New York and Boston have a similar proportion of the jobs in their respective metro areas, about 35% each, as does San Francisco within the smaller definition of the metro area, excluding Silicon Valley. Ile-de-France’s work trip modal split is about 43%, metro New York’s is 33%, metro San Francisco’s is 17%, metro Boston’s is 12%.
So where Boston specifically fails is not so much office park jobs, such as those on Route 128, but near-center jobs. Its urban and suburban transit networks do a poor job of getting people to job centers like Longwood, the airport, Cambridge, and the Seaport. The same is true of San Francisco. New York’s network does a better but still mediocre job at connecting to Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, and a rather bad job at connecting to inner-suburban New Jersey jobs, but so many of those 35% jobs in the central 100 km^2 are in fact in the central 23 km^2 of the Manhattan core, and nearly half are in the central 4 km^2 comprising Midtown, that the poor service to the other 77 km^2 can be overlooked.
As far as commuter rail is concerned, the main difference in ridership between the main European networks – the Paris RER, the Berlin S-Bahn, and so on – and the American ones is how useful they are for plain urban service. Nearly all Berlin S-Bahn traffic is within the city, not the suburbs; the RER’s workhorse stations are mostly in dense inner suburbs that in most other countries would have been amalgamated into the city already.
To the extent that this relates to American commuter rail reforms, it’s about coverage within the city: multiple city stations, good (free, frequent) connections to local urban rail, high frequency all day to encourage urban travel (a train within the city that runs every half an hour might as well not run).
Suburban ridership is better here as well, but this piggybacks on very strong urban service, giving strong service from the suburbs to the city. Suburb-to-suburb commutes are done largely by car – Ile-de-France’s modal split is 43%, not 80%; there are fewer of them than in most of the US, but not fewer than in New York, Boston, or San Francisco.
But, well, Paris’s modal split is noticeably higher than the job share within the city – a job share that does include drivers. What gives?
Suburban transit-oriented development
TOD in the suburbs can create a pleasant enough rail commute that the modal split is respectable, if nothing like what is seen for jobs in Paris or Manhattan. However, for this to work, planners must eliminate the expression “corporate shuttle” from their lexicon.
Instead, suburban job sites must be placed right on top of the train station, or within walking distance along streets that are decently walkable. I can’t think of good Berlin examples – Berlin maintains high modal split through a strong center – but I can think of several Parisian ones: Marne-la-Vallée (including Disneyland), Noisy, Evry, Cergy. Those were often built simultaneously with greenfield suburban lines that were then connected to the RER, rather than on top of preexisting commuter lines.
They look nothing like American job sprawl. Here, for example, is Cergy:
There are parking garages visible near the train stations, but also a massing of mid-rise residential and commercial buildings.
But speaking of residential, the issue is that employers looking for sites to locate to have no real reason to build offices on top of most suburban train stations – the likeliest highest and best usage is residential. In the case of American TOD, even the secondary-urban centers, like Worcester, probably have much more demand for residential than commercial TOD within walking distance of the train station – employers who are willing to pay near-train station premium rent might as well pay the higher premium of locating within the primary city, where the commuter shed is much larger.
In effect, the suburban TOD model does not counter the traditional monocentric urban layout. It instead extends it to a much larger scale. In this schema, the entirety of the city, and not just its central few square kilometers, is the monocenter, served by different lines with many stations on them. Berlin is ahead of the curve by virtue of its having multiple close-by centers as a Cold War legacy, but Paris is similar (its highest-intensity commercial TOD is in La Défense and in in-city sites like Bercy, on top of former railyards attached to Gare de Lyon).
At no point does this model include destination-end transfers in the suburbs. In the city, it does: a single line cannot cover all urban job sites; but the transfer is within the rapid transit system. But in the suburbs, the jobs that are serviceable by public transportation are within walking distance of the station. Shuttles may exist, but are secondary, and job sites that require them are and will always be auto-centric.
European high-speed rail networks end at national borders. There’s a good TGV network internal to France, and a good ICE network internal to Germany, but crossing borders is always onerous. Thalys trains between France and Belgium are atypically expensive, and the other cross-border lines always have slow zones such that average speeds are never high. For example, Paris-Frankfurt, the topic of this post, is fast on the French side but not on the German side, so that trains take 3:49 on most connections to do 584 kilometers. Against the poor service offered across borders in Europe, the Green advocate Jon Worth has called for improvements in service on existing lines, favoring regional and interregional connections. But now there’s a petition circulating around the EU calling for a Union-wide high-speed rail program connecting all capitals (I presume excluding island ones like Valletta). The petition is atypical for EU-level policy, in that it is written in plain language and talks about the benefits of high-speed rail rather than about obscure EU institutions that nobody outsides the Brussels bubble knows or cares about; I urge EU citizens to sign, to force the EU to take this infrastructure issue more seriously.
Infrastructure problems and operating problems
Not a single cross-border connection in Europe has both infrastructure and service that are as good as what is provided on the strongest domestic networks. I wrote about how the TGV provides good domestic service, overperforming models trained on foreign networks like the Shinkansen (as does, to a lesser extent, Germany). Most provincial cities are connected to Paris at an average speed higher than 200 km/h – Bordeaux is 2:06 and 538 km from Paris, averaging 256 km/h, and the trains run mostly hourly, with one 1.5-hour midday gap.
German trains never run this fast. The fastest connections between major cities are Berlin-Hamburg, currently 289 km in 1:43, and Cologne-Frankfurt, 177 km that is currently 1:17 but that I have seen done in about 1:05. But the frequency is hourly with additional slightly slower trains in between, and the connections to regional lines are much better than anything offered in France. German high-speed rail infrastructure is far behind what France has and advocates refuse to learn from France’s success, but operations here are better.
And then between countries, nothing is as good as what’s available domestically in either country. The only pair of major European cities connected at high speed across borders is Paris-Brussels, 314 km in 1:22 or 230 km/h, with trains having two 1.5-hour gaps but otherwise running a mix of hourly and twice hourly. But the fares are considerably higher: looking at trains on the 12th of July, I’m seeing mostly 82-109€ fares with a few 70€ tickets and one 57€ itinerary, while the longer Paris-Lyon connection offers many tickets in the 60s and several, run by Trenitalia rather than SNCF, for 35-39€. Where the TGV averages about 0.10€/passenger-km in fare receipts, Thalys averages 0.21€ if 2019 turnover and 2017 p-km can be compared.
Elsewhere, average speeds are nowhere near what Thalys achieves. Paris-Frankfurt, as mentioned in the lede, is 3:49 over about 585 km, for an average of 153 km/h; it’s a respectable speed for an ICE train, but ICEs run hourly whereas Paris-Frankfurt runs every two hours with a four-hour gap. Moreover, Paris-Frankfurt as far as I can tell has the best operations of any cross-border line in Western Europe, in the sense that the headway between trains is (other than the one four-hour gap) much less than the one-way trip time, and the fares look mostly the same as those of domestic TGVs and ICEs over the same length.
It is imperative to build a system of cross-border trains in Europe with both good operations – frequent, reliable, well-connected to other lines, and charging 0.10€/km for the privilege and not twice that. So why is Paris-Frankfurt the best way to do it?
The issue of SNCF
To rail watchers outside France, and even sometimes within it, SNCF is public enemy #1. My above-linked previous post goes over some of the ways SNCF degrades service just to spite any possible competitor (though, of note, Paris-Lyon has Trenitalia service). It gets to the point that Jon and other people interested in EU-wide policy keep talking about operations and about how it’s possible, usually through private competition, to coerce SNCF to be more accommodating.
The problem with this mentality is that SNCF’s service, fundamentally, works where it needs to. Domestic rail ridership is no longer the highest in Europe, DB having overtaken it in the 2010s, but remains about on a par with Germany per capita and higher than other large countries. Passenger-km performance, of more relevance to intercity rail, is very good: on pre-corona numbers, France is about on a par per capita with Austria and better than any other EU state except possibly the Netherlands, which doesn’t report those numbers. From SNCF’s perspective, privatizing eurocrats are trying to mess with its perfectly working system. No wonder they’re resistant. With the EU run by people who mostly think in terms of obscure EU institutions and don’t really know the technical details of trains well, any coercion sufficiently strong to get past SNCF resistance is likely to destroy the system rather than reform it to provide better service.
Now, people in France are aware that French economic performance is not great. France is nowhere near having the cultural cringe toward Northern Europe that Italy and Spain have. But on the ground and in politics, people are aware of Northern Europe’s superior economic performance in the last 15 years. However, so long as the TGV is the premier rail system in Europe, there is no pressure to change anything: France, unlike Spain, is sufficiently proud of itself that it is aware of its strengths, and therefore has little interest in Germanizing on matters where Germany is not clearly well ahead.
Ironically, this means that the best way to get SNCF to behave better is to improve German and perhaps British trains to the point that French people can look up to them rather than denigrate their insufficient speed. A domestic German train network that offers present-day or better levels of connectivity but also French or near-French speeds would get a large boost to ridership, eclipsing ridership on the TGV with its difficulties with expanding beyond its core Paris-province market, and showcasing good service to French travelers that they’d agitate for better. Even on the matter of improving SNCF operations, the best way forward is to improve the quality of physical infrastructure for high-speed rail in Germany and show that Germany can build things too rather than take decades to do anything.
Why Paris-Frankfurt
The Shinkansen began with Tokyo-Osaka, and the TGV with Paris-Lyon. Even less flashy programs began with strong lines – the Zurich S-Bahn began with fast commuter rail service on the Goldcoast, a rich region where suburbanization out of Zurich began early, creating much demand for regional service. The first line showcasing a program cannot be a small pilot; pilot programs are replete in the visionless United States, and there people have learned, correctly, to mistrust anything politicians and agency heads say about bringing the future.
Thalys and Eurostar, in a way, created a strong initial system, for the benefit of rich travelers. Paris, Brussels, and London are connected by fast trains, with the connections to London in practice slower due to the extra time required for security theater, passport checks, and airline-style boarding. The business traveler for whom spending 80€ for a 1.5-hour trip is no big deal loves taking the train between Paris and Brussels; Diego Beghin has mentioned how coworkers take the train to Paris but drive or fly to Germany, since Belgium-Germany trains are too slow to bother with (Brussels-Aachen is 175 km in 1:12). With enough of a volume of high-end travelers, SNCF, which owns the majority of Thalys, sees little reason to change its way for a social mission beyond French borders; thus, the first line showcasing cross-border rail for the entire population must be elsewhere.
This is where Paris-Frankfurt comes in. The connection is 584 km today, 379 km from Paris to Saarbrüucken (322 fast, 57 slow) in 1:50 and another 205 on the German side in about two hours. An entirely high-speed connection would be a few kilometers shorter if it went via Mannheim as trains do today; if it skipped Mannheim to avoid overloading the Frankfurt-Mannheim link, and went via Mainz instead, it would be around 170 km instead. Cutting about 15 minutes from the French side and then cutting the German side to a one-way trip of 45 minutes should be viable, with some tunneling but less than most German lines; this would create a one-way trip time of around 2:20 between the two cities.
The cost should be around 6 billion €. This is for about 160 km on the German side (the other 10 km are legacy approaches to Frankfurt and Saarbrücken) plus 40 km on the French side; German high-speed rail costs are generally considered to be 30 million € per kilometer with average German levels of tunneling.
The population served would be large. German metro area definitions are always iffy, but Frankfurt’s region, Hesse-Darmstadt, has 4 million people. Then, the former region of Rheinhessen-Pfalz, home to both Mainz and Kaiserslautern as well as some smaller cities with decent regional connections to them, has another 2.1 million people, of whom some must be assigned to the Rhine-Neckar Region but the rest can be deemed to be in the Mainz or Kaiserslautern sheds. The state of Saarland has a million people, and the binational functional urban area straddling it and France has 800,000. Moreover, the business and general connections between Paris and Frankfurt are healthy for an international connection; the size of the cities connected potentially makes this an even stronger link than Paris-Brussels if both infrastructure and operations are good.
The usual Shinkansen-trained model I use for predicting high-speed rail ridership has the combination of Paris-Frankfurt, Paris-Rheinhessen-Pfalz, and Paris-Saarbrücken at 12.8 million passengers a year, which should fill two trains per hour; if ridership overperforms as domestic TGVs do, multiply that by 1.5. The current offer is a train every two hours, but Paris-Frankfurt really is weakened by the mediocre trip time. The elasticity of ridership with respect to trip time is about -2, which means going from 3:49 to 2:20 is a factor of 2.7 increase in ridership. This, in turn, should permit running more frequency, which shouldn’t have much impact on end-to-end traffic (it’s already incorporated into the model) but should strongly buoy the intermediate points; today, the Paris-Saarbrücken frequency is a brutal four trains per day, since some trains run express to Frankfurt. In addition to 12.8 million international passengers, the model predicts a good deal of intra-German traffic, depending on how fast the other German connections are – Frankfurt-Saarbrücken is not by itself strong, but it would speed up connections from Saarbrücken to Cologne, the entire Ruhr, Stuttgart, Munich, and eventually Berlin.
A strong first line, like Paris-Lyon or Tokyo-Osaka, is likely to stimulate popular demand for more. It would not be a niche – broad sections of society in France and Germany would be familiar and only lament that the same quality of service, offered domestically and on this line, is not available on links like Paris-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Cologne, or Brussels-Cologne, and eventually on other cross-border European links, covering the entire Union through accretion of more city pairs.
I’ve found some TGV ridership data with which I can check the model I use for high-speed rail ridership projection. The model is trained on Japanese data and has flaws in Japan too, but I’ve wanted to see how well it ports to Europe, where I don’t have as complete a dataset of ridership between pairs of metropolitan areas. Thankfully, I have just found a short Omnil report from 2015 about intercity rail ridership at the Parisian terminals, from which we can extract some information. The TGV overperforms the model substantially; this can be explained with fudge factors, but those fudge factors only work if we assume that the aspects of the TGV that seasoned rail advocates hate don’t matter much.
The model
As a reminder, the model posits that the annual ridership in millions between two metropolitan areas with populations and in millions, of distance d kilometers, is,
The model is very accurate for ridership between Tokyo and other cities on Honshu; it overpredicts inter-island ridership, but becomes correct if we replace the Japanese air/rail modal splits with European ones, where taking the train over five hours is more normal than in Japan. I would expect that in isolation, European ridership should overperform it, because fares here are much lower, about 0.10-0.11€/kilometer compared with about $0.23/kilometer on the Shinkansen. French ridership significantly overperforms, beyond what the fares alone can explain, as we will see.
We will need to modify the model as written above for the French case anyway. TGV ridership relies on direct through-service from Paris to every city in France, including many that are not on the network of dedicated high-speed lines (called LGVs); trains serve those by diverting from the LGVs to classical lines, on which they travel more slowly. Therefore, while we can apply the model as above for connections that entirely use LGVs, like Paris-Lyon or Paris-Marseille, we need to consider the slower speeds for connections that use classical lines. For those, we assume that trains average 220-225 km/h; this is the rough average speed of the express Shinkansen trains as well as that of the TGVs to Lyon and Marseille. Thus, the model, at travel time t, is,
The floor of 500 km, or in this case a trip time of hours, is empirical in Japan. But then it is clear, from Italian data, that speeding up the trip has a roughly square-law effect on ridership, even within the limit – the growth in ridership on Bologna-Florence is consistent with an even higher elasticity of ridership with respect to average speed. The best way to reconcile these two observations is that in the presence of high-speed rail, the effect of distance cancels out the effect of better competition with the car up to about 500 km, but if the trains are slower, the car is more competitive and this is seen as a square law at all speeds. This is not too relevant to France, but is useful context for medium-distance, medium-speed lines in Germany.
TGV ridership
I have never been able to find city-to-city or station-to-station ridership figures in France. The Omnil report is no exception: it reports ridership at the Paris stations and breaks down where people are going by region of France in the geography of 2015, before the merger of some regions.
The total ridership at the Paris stations, including TGVs, low-speed intercity trains, and other regions’ regional trains (TERs) but not Paris-area regional trains (Transilien), is 443,000/day; of those, the TGVs comprise 239,000 and the slow trains 204,000. The four Parisian terminals with TGVs – Gare de Lyon, Gare du Nord, Gare Montparnasse, Gare de l’Est – have 92% of the TGV ridership in the region, while the other 8% are at suburban stations on bypasses around the city, like CDG Airport. Ridership is asymmetric: two-thirds of those 443,000 daily riders don’t live in Ile-de-France, which is what we should expect of a commuter-heavy ridership profile. Within Ile-de-France, 63% of passengers originate or are destined to Paris itself and another 21% for the Petite Couronne suburbs, showcasing destination centralization – Paris is only 17% of regional population and about 33% of regional employment, but 63% of those interregional and intercity trips go there and not to the suburbs.
There is also a breakdown of where passengers are connecting, by region of France or country. Picardie is increasingly an exurb of Paris, to the point that as France was debating the merger of regions in the early 2010s, one proposal was to detach its southernmost department, Oise, and attach it to Ile-de-France; 19% of the non-Francilien passengers originate there and 10% of Franciliens go there, for a ratio of nearly 4:1. More relevantly to high-speed rail, Rhône-Alpes is 9% of both non-Francilien and Francilien ridership, for a ratio of about 2:1, and a total of about 40,000/day, or around 13 million/year. PACA is 5% of non-Francilien and 7% of Francilien ridership, for a ratio of about 1.4:1 and a total of 25,000/day or around 8 million/year.
So we need to evaluate our model against an observed ridership of 13 million between Paris and Rhône-Alpes, and 8 million between Paris and PACA. Both sets of numbers involve multiple city pairs, with fairly long tails: France is a country of small metro areas, the median person living in a metro area of 330,000, whereas half of Japan lives in the metro areas of Tokyo (37 million), Osaka (18 million), and Nagoya (9 million).
French metro areas and the model
France recently changed its definition of metro areas. The old one, the aire urbaine, was similar in definition to the American metropolitan statistical area; the new one, the EU-wide functional area, generally spits out slightly larger numbers, though it still seems tighter than the Japanese definition. The functional area of Paris, comprising Ile-de-France, about half of Oise, and surrounding communes, has 13.2 million people. The new definition splits Nice and Cannes apart, which is good, since both have TGV service to France.
Metro city
Population
Trip time
Prediction
Lyon
2.29
1:58
4.586
Grenoble
0.72
3:01
0.999
Saint-Etienne
0.5
2:58
0.771
Geneva (French part)*
0.44
3:13
0.485
Annecy
0.3
3:45
0.321
Chambéry
0.26
2:52
0.49
Valence
0.26
2:12
0.805
Bourg-en-Bresse
0.14
1:50
0.49
Marseille
1.88
3:07
2.02
Nice
0.62
5:48
0.24
Toulon
0.58
4:02
0.47
Cannes
0.39
5:18
0.199
Avignon
0.34
2:40
0.701
Geneva is deemed to have 1.2 million people, and the 0.44 million in the French part are imputed proportionally, rather than counted as a separate metro area, since there is no direct connection to Pari except via Geneva.
The Rhône-Alpes metro regions combine to a predicted ridership of 8.95 million; actual ridership is higher by about 50%. The PACA metro regions combine to a prediction of 3.63 million; actual ridership is higher by a factor of maybe 2.2.
Note that the prediction is already based on some optimistic assumptions. The trip time is the best that can be sustained multiple times a day; the issue of frequency is ignored, so the effective trip time on connections from Paris to cities like Annecy with a train every three hours gets no malus, even though the Japanese city pairs that the model is trained on get multiple express trains per hour. This is relevant, because as we examine fudge factors below to rescue the model, we need to keep ignoring or at best minimizing the malus due to poor frequency and lack of trip spontaneity in the ticketing system.
Fudge factors explaining the overperformance
We need to explain why Rhône-Alpes overperforms by 50%, and PACA by more than 100%.
Fares
The average JR East Shinkansen fare revenue in 2020-1 was ¥23.8/passenger-km (source, PDF-p. 50), and has risen little in the last 10 years. The average TGV fare revenue in 2019 was 0.10€/passenger-km (source, pp. 16 and 20) and has likewise little changed in nominal terms. These differ by a factor of 1.6. The elasticity of high-speed ridership with respect to price varies widely by study; the Italian study linked above says -0.37, one Spanish study says -0.59, and Börjesson’s lit review says -0.59 for non-business trips and -0.72 for business trips. A value of -0.5 explains a factor of 1.27 overperformance by itself; a value of -0.6 explains a factor of 1.33.
In fact, Germany, charging similar average intercity rail fares to France, seems to overperform the Shinkansen model too. I have little data here, only line-wide Berlin-Hamburg and Berlin-Munich, both of which look like they overperform by about 20%. This can result from a 30% overperformance mitigated by the issue of lower speed: the modeled prediction is based on trip times, but when trips are shorter than about 2:15, the model stops seeing the impact of slowdowns – Berlin-Hamburg is 1:44 and Berlin-Leipzig is 1:13, where at Shinkansen or TGV speeds they’d be 1:17 and 0:45 respectively.
Metro area size
French metro area definitions, even with the new functional areas, are somewhat tighter than Japanese ones. The functional area of Berlin has 5 million people, but reckoned the Japanese way (1.5% of the age 15+ population commuting to the central city), practically all of Brandenburg would count, a population of 5.7 million in total. This is likely more significant in PACA, where the above-listed metro area are 80% of the total population, than in Rhône-Alpes, where they are 90%. It’s possible even Paris is a bit bigger than 13.2 million – but only a bit, since Ile-de-France and Oise together only have 13.1 million. This factor can scrounge some extra ridership, but probably no more than 10%, maybe a bit more in PACA.
Leisure travel
Provence is renowned for its tourism, which generates extra trips out of Paris beyond what we should expect from population alone. This should disproportionately affect Nice and Cannes; for what it’s worth, I’m seeing seven weekday trains from those cities and Toulon to Paris, I believe all skipping Marseille, and 14 trains from Marseille; if we take ridership as proportional to the offer, this does show some Riviera overperformance relative to Marseille, though not by much.
Of course, the majority of Paris-PACA ridership comprises Provençals, not Franciliens. But perhaps the 1.4:1 ratio of Provençals to Franciliens is atypically low, and the 2:1 ratio in Rhône-Alpes is more normal of capital-province relations; I have no Japanese numbers on this, and would overall expect to see similar asymmetries in both countries, given their similar level of economic capital-centricity. If 2:1 is typical, then the extra leisure ridership from the capital to make it 1.4:1 adds a total of 14%, which is far less than PACA’s overperformance relative to Rhône-Alpes.
Metro area coverage
The PACA cities have multiple stops. The population distribution in the Riviera is linear, and multiple cities with extensive leisure (like Saint-Tropez) are served by the TGV. Marseille likwise has a second stop at Aix-en-Provence, close by car to its northern suburbs to the point that I’ve heard it called Marseille-bis. If we split metro Marseille’s population 2:1 between Marseille and Aix, then the 0.8 exponent in the model produces a 14% increase in ridership. 14% and another 14% from leisure combine to 31%, which explains the majority of the PACA overperformance relative to Rhône-Alpes.
Competition with air in small cities
The TGV competes with cars and planes; domestic buses are almost a non-factor, and were entirely a non-factor in 2015 (they’re called Macron buses because it was Macron, as minister of economics in 2014-6, who passed the reform that allowed them). In Rhône-Alpes, competition is entirely with the car: Lyon is just close enough to Paris that air travel can’t compete; in PACA, competition is mostly with the plane, especially beyond Marseille.
The population distribution in both Rhône-Alpes and PACA may favor the train. The issue is that the secondary cities of Rhône-Alpes are around three hours from Paris, at which point the train is strongly favored but planes normally still exist, as in Marseille. However, those cities are scattered all over the region, and so there is no single airport that could serve them, except Lyon – and if the choice is to take the train for three hour or to drive an hour to Lyon-Saint-Exupéry, then the train can just demolish air competition.
In PACA, the same is true for the secondary cities. Nice has a strong airport with many flights to Paris, buoyed by the leisure market, but Toulon and Avignon don’t; on the eve of corona, Toulon-Hyères had 500,000 passengers a year, most not bound for Paris.
I believe this effect on air-rail competition is more significant in Rhône-Alpes than PACA. However, air competition is overall more significant in PACA than in Rhône-Alpes, and thus it likely effects a similar boost to TGV ridership in both regions, or perhaps is more significant in PACA, explaining the remainder of its overperformance.
Some conclusions
I don’t think the TGV’s overperformance of the model invalidates the model. Most of the overperformance in Rhône-Alpes can be explained by fares alone, and I think the rest can be explained by the modal split versus air being more favorable than in Japan given the small size of Annecy, Saint-Etienne, and so on. Most of the overperformance in PACA relative to Rhône-Alpes can then be explained by leisure travel and the good metro area coverage of the TGV thanks to Aix and the linear population distribution of the Riviera. However, these fudge factors have implications for rail planning in France, Europe, and beyond.
Connections to smaller cities
The modeled prediction is that Lyon and Marseille comprise little more than half the ridership to Paris from their respective regions. Moreover, the overperformance of TGV riderhip relative to the hinkanssen model likely comes disproportionately from smaller cities, due to their lack of good air connections. This underscores the importance of good service not just to million-plus metro areas but also to the tail of metro areas of half a million, give or take. Those metro areas are less important in rich Asia or the US, but are important throughout Europe.
This service to smaller cities can take the characteritic of TGV-style direct connections to Paris on classical lines. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, and increasingly Germany, service to smaller cities is provided through timed connections at carefully-chosen nodes; the Swiss network particularly excels at this. But the French system’s ridership is such that it not obviously inferior, and is unlikely to be inferior to the German system at all. Thus, a country like Poland or Britain can safely choose between the French and German system, or even mix them.
The issue of frequency
The low frequency of TGV services to smaller cities – trains run every two to three hours, often timed to just miss regional trains – should be visible as a serious malus to ridership. But it isn’t. Perhaps it exists and countermands the effect of lack of air competition to cities the size and distance class of Grenoble – but Grenoble is not Nice, and air competition there even under more favorable scenarios to planes would be second-order.
At the same time, there are markets where the TGV is visibly much weaker. The TGV’s modal split between provincial regions is not good. Because trains from Paris to Marseille don’t stop at Lyon, and trains from Paris to Lyon don’t continue onward to Marseille, the Lyon-Marseille city pair cannot piggyback on strong connections to the capital the way same-side pairs of provincial Japanese cities can. The dedicated Marseille-Lyon trains have an inexplicable six-hour gap, with frequent service on both sides of it, and the Toulon-Lyon trains are even worse. The modal split is evidently weaker – in 2009, nearly everyone drove betwen Lyon and Toulon (the 2023 number in the link are speculation for what if an LGV is built to Nice), even over a rail-friendly distance of about 390 km, averaging around 130-150 km/h.
So while the system that centers direct trains to Paris is not suspect, the lack of frequency on shorter connections between secondary cities is. This could be resolved with buying rolling stock that makes boarding and alighting faster, with two door pairs per car rather than just one; TGV connections not including Paris run local, and since the trains are not optimized for many stops, those connections have low average speed, which in turn discourages SNCF from providing more frequent local connections.
Liberalization
The EU is increasingly forcing national railways to allow on-rail competition. This is an idea imported from the UK, where John Major’s privatization of British Rail split up operations and infratructure, the latter eventually renationlized; in Japan, privatization broke up JNR into regional JR companies, each responsible for both infrastructure and operations as in the pre-nationalization era of rail, and in the US, the breakup of Conrail likewise restored the pre-nationalization status quo. SNCF resists the mandate for competition in increaingly spiteful ways: it makes up excuses why RENFE can’t operate on its network, and where it does operate, it won’t even let its crew use break rooms at French stations. Eurocrats, even more progressive ones, treat SNCF as public enemy #1.
And SNCF’s anti-competitive monopoly on domestic rail travel generates high rail ridership. Italy and Spain have both seen sharp increases in ridership from the competition mandate. But Madrid-Barcelona, offering worse frequency and a more broken market than the domstic TGVs (domestic TGVs are split just between lower-price OuiGo and higher-price InOui brands; Spanish high-speed trains have more classes of train on thinner markets), don’t perform nearly so well. Madrid-Barcelona riderhip in 2019 was 4.4 million; the modeled prediction is 4.1 million for this city pair alone, and 6 million including intermediate trip to Zaragoza. Riderhip ha risen since the introduction of competition in 2020, and mediacoveragehasbeenlaudatory, and at times depreating of France for failing to liberalize – but the 50% growth in ridership cited in most articles still leave the line barely overperforming the high-fare Shinkansen and strongly unerperforming the TGV.
European media should be less credulous of promises of private-sector efficieny and recognize that the TGV’s model of public-sector monopoly, with integration between infraatructure and service (even if this means shoving direct trains to Paris on trunk line rather than building a Swiss integrated timed transfer system), produces better outcomes than competition. Germany has the same model too and, relative to how slow its trains are, has good outcomes too; Switzerland, the undisputed leader of European rail ridership, resists privatization entirely. Private competition did not invent high-speed rail, and where it has been introduced it has so far failed to produce outcomes on a par with what the TGV has with entirely public operations.
The Regional Connector just opened in Los Angeles. This is a short, expensive tunnel permitting through-running for the city’s main light rail lines, linking the A Line (formerly Blue) with the half of L (formerly Gold) to Pasadena and Azusa and the E (formerly Expo) with the half of the L to East Los Angeles. It’s a welcome development and I only regret that this line cost, in 2022 dollars, $660 million per km. The broader question about the line, though, is that of line pairing and network coherence.
Network coherence is a nebulous concept. I can best define it as “it looks reasonable on a map,” but then the number of railfan crayons that violate coherence principles is so large that it has to be defined more precisely. Usually I talk about it in two concrete ways: a rapid transit network should avoid reverse-branching and tangential lines.
But there are some more concerns, which are less obvious than those two, and also appropriate to violate in some cases. My previous post on New York alludes to the principle of consistency of local and express trains, which is good to aspire to but may conflict with other priorities. In fact, the current pattern in Los Angeles is coherent: trains go north-south on the new A Line or east-west on the new E Line; the question, posed to me by a supporter (thank you!), is whether it should be. I think this is right, but it’s not obvious (in fact it wasn’t to the reader who posed this question).
The issue is that simple coherence – lines from the south should go north and not east, express trains on one side should go through city center and then be express on the other side, and so on – is a good starting point. But there may be other concerns at play. When SEPTA opened the Center City Commuter Connection in the 1980s, it relabeled its commuter rail lines R1 through R8, skipping R4, pairing each branch on the former Pennsylvania Railroad side with one on the Reading side; the resulting map, for which this was an early plan, was not at all coherent and featured self-intersecting lines, but it matched the lines based on expected ridership and railyard locations.
The New York City Subway, likewise, has some pairings that only make sense in light of railyards. The R train shares local tracks in Manhattan with the W train, but in Queens it goes to the Queens Boulevard Line whereas the N shares tracks with the W to Astoria, because the Queens Boulevard Line has a yard at the end and the Astoria Line does not, and the N has a yard at the Brooklyn end of Coney Island whereas the R does not at Bay Ridge; the R is the longest all-local line in the system and railfans periodically propose to switch it with the N in Queens, but the railyard issue makes it problematic in the current situation.
Matching branches by ridership, though, runs into the problem of inconsistent headways on the trunk. A light rail line running every eight minutes can share a tunnel with another light rail line running every eight, but if one of them runs every six minutes, they will run into each other on the shared section. This problem is magnified if both the shared section and the branches are long, which is usually the case in New York; thankfully, in Los Angeles the shared section is short enough that optimizing on it is less important. At most, it’s possibly to match branches by ridership if the train lengths can be made different.
The final concern that may lead to violations of coherence is origin-and-destination ridership patterns; I think this is what my reader had in mind when querying it. Such patterns may be ethnic – there’s a notable bump in ridership between Anacostia and Columbia Heights on the Washington Metro, and it’s likely that such patterns also exist elsewhere in cities that just don’t track O&D pairings, like New York with its internal Chinatown buses. They may even be classed, in the sense that wealthier Americans are likelier to be working in city center, but on the whole, rich and poor people are mostly traveling to the same places. They may be sporadic – a university may be driving ridership enough that there could be connections to either places students want to go or (for commuter universities like UBC) where students live.
O&D pairings like this should, as a rule, never drive infrastructure decisions. These patterns are too fleeting – for example, Columbia Heights’ gentrification is so rapid that the links with Anacostia are unlikely to last for more than a generation. However, it’s not always bad to look at them when making decisions on service for a given infrastructure network.
The issue, though, is that there’s no real compulsion to connect Long Beach with East Los Angeles or Santa Monica with Pasadena and Azusa. The commute data doesn’t suggest special links (which, to be fair, it also doesn’t in Washington). I am not aware of any other big pattern that would create such ridership. So it’s something that I think Metro should have looked at (and probably did), but ultimately made the right decision on.
The maps below detail what New York could build if its construction costs were normal, rather than the highest in the world for reasons that the city and state could choose to change. I’ve been working on this for a while – we considered including these maps in our final report before removing them from scope to save time.
Higher-resolution images can be found here and here; they’re 53 MB each.
Didn’t you do this before?
Yes. I wrote a post to a similar effect four years ago. The maps here are updated to include slightly different lines – I think the new one reflects city transportation needs better – and to add light rail and not just subway and commuter rail tunnels. But more importantly, the new maps have much higher costs, reflecting a few years’ worth of inflation (this is 2022 dollars) and some large real cost increases in Scandinavia.
What’s included in the maps?
The maps include the following items:
278 km of new streetcars, which are envisioned to be in dedicated lanes; on the Brooklyn and Queensborough Bridges, they’d share the bridges’ grade separation from traffic into Manhattan, which in the case of the Brooklyn Bridge should be an elevated version of the branched subway-surface lines of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and most German cities. Those should cost $8 billion in total, based on Eno’s European numbers plus some recent urban German projects.
240 km of new subway lines, divided as 147.6 km in the city (97.1 km underground) and 92.4 km across the Hudson and in New Jersey (45.2 km underground). Of those 240 km, 147.5 km comprise four new trunk lines, including the already-planned IBX, and the rest are extensions of existing lines. Those should cost $25.2 billion for the city lines and $15.4 billion for the New Jersey lines.
Rearrangement of existing lines to reduce branching (“deinterlining“) and improve capacity and schedule robustness; the PATH changes are especially radical, turning the system into extensions of the 6 and 7 trains plus a Hoboken-Herald Square shuttle.
48.2 km of commuter rail tunnels, creating seven independent trunk lines across the region, all running across between suburbs through the Manhattan core. In addition to some surface improvements between New York and Newark, those should cost $17.7 billion, but some additional costs, totaling low single-digit billions, need to be incurred for further improvements to junctions, station platforms, and electrification.
The different mode of transportation are intended to work together. They’re split across two maps to avoid cluttering the core too much, but the transfers should be free and the fares should be the same within each zone (thus, all trains within the city must charge MetroCard/OMNY fare, including commuter rail and the JFK AirTrain). The best way to connect between two stations may involve changing modes – this is why there are three light rail lines terminating at or near JFK not connecting to one another except via the AirTrain.
What else is included?
There must be concurrent improvements in the quality of service and stations that are not visible on a map:
Wheelchair accessibility at every station is a must, and must be built immediately; a judge with courage, an interest in improving the region, and an eye for enforcing civil rights and accessibility laws should impose a deadline in the early to mid 2030s for full compliance. A reasonable budget, based on Berlin, Madrid, and Milan, is about $10-15 million per remaining station, a total of around $4 billion.
Platform edge doors at every station are a good investment as well. They facilitate air conditioning underground; they create more space on the platform because they make it easier to stand closer to the platform edge when the station is crowded; they eliminate deaths and injuries from accidental falls, suicides, and criminal pushes. The only data point I have is from Paris, where pro-rated to New York’s length it should be $10 million per station and $5 billion citywide.
Signaling must be upgraded to the most modern standards; the L and 7 trains are mostly there already, with communications-based train control (CBTC). Based on automation costs in Nuremberg and Paris, this should be about $6 billion systemwide. The greater precision of computers has sped up Paris Métro lines by almost 20% and increased capacity. Together with the deinterlining program, a single subway track pair, currently capped at 24 trains an hour in most cases, could run about 40 trains per hour.
Improvements in operations and maintenance efficiency don’t cost money, just political capital, but permit service to be more reliable while cutting New York’s operating expense, which are 1.5-2.5 time a high as the norm for large first-world subway systems.
The frequency on the subway and streetcar lines depicted on the map must conform to the Six-Minute Service campaign demand of Riders Alliance and allies. This means that streetcars and subway branches run very six minute all day, every day, and subway trunk lines like the 6, 7, and L get twice as much frequency.
What alternatives are there?
Some decisions on the map are set in stone: an extension of Second Avenue Subway into Harlem and thence west along 125th Street must be a top priority, done better than the present-day project with it extravagant costs. However, others have alternatives, not depicted.
One notable place where this could easily be done another way is the assignment of local and express trains feeding Eighth and Sixth Avenues. As depicted, in Queens, F trains run local to Sixth Avenue and E trains run express to Eighth; then, to keep the local and express patterns consistent, Washington Heights trains run local and Grand Concourse trains run express. But this could be flipped entirely, with the advantage of eliminating the awkward Jamaica-to-Manhattan-to-Jamaica service and replacing it with straighter lines. Or, service patterns could change, so that the E runs express in Queen and local in Manhattan as it does today.
Another is the commuter rail tunnel system in Lower Manhattan. There are many options for how to connect New Jersey, Lower Manhattan, and Brooklyn; I believe what I drew, via the Erie Railroad’s historic alignment to Pavonia/Newport, is the best option, but there are alternatives and all must be studied seriously. The location of the Lower Manhattan transfer station likewise requires a delicate engineering study, and the answer may be that additional stops are prudent, for example two stops at City Hall and South Ferry rather than the single depicted station at Fulton Street.
What are those costs?
I encourage people to read our costs report to look at what goes into the numbers. But, in brief, we’ve identified a recipe to cut New York subway construction costs by a factor of 9-10. On current numbers, this means New York can cut its subway construction costs to $200-250 million per kilometer – a bit less in the easiest places like Eastern Queens, somewhat more in Manhattan or across water. Commuter rail tunnel costs are higher, first because they tend to be built only in the most difficult areas – in easier ones, commuter rail uses legacy lines – and second because they involve bigger stations in more constrained areas. Those, too, follow what we’ve found in comparison cases in Southern Europe, the Nordic countries, Turkey, France, and Germany.
In total, the costs so projected on the map, $66.3 billion in total, are only slightly higher than the total cost of Grand Paris Express, which is $60 billion in 2022 dollars. But Paris is also building other Métro, RER, and tramway extensions at the same time; this means that even the program I’m proposing, implemented over 15 years, would still leave New York spending less money than Paris.
Is this possible?
Yes. The governance changes we outline are all doable at the state level; federal officials can nudge things and city politician can assist and support. There’s little confidence that current leadership even wants to build, let alone knows what to do, but it’s all doable, and our report linked in the lede provides the blueprint.
Swiss intercity rail planning follows the maxim “run as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible.” This is usually uttered in opposition to high-speed rail in the sense of the French TGV network. But what does this slogan really mean? And how does it inform good planning?
The issue of timed connections
The origin of the Swiss planning system is in the 1970s and 80s, as it was refining intercity rail, taking what West Germany was doing with its InterCity brand and going further. Two key elements were present from the start: timed connections, and regular clockface timetables (initially every two hours in West Germany). The clockface timetabling facilitated the timed connections, since it’s easier to figure out how to schedule a timed transfer at (say) Frankfurt if the same train moves happen at the same intervals.
With these elements in place, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) set up a schedule in which trains would be timed to arrive in Zurich all at the same time, currently just before the hour, and depart all at the same time, currently on or just after the hour.
The issue is what to do at stations other than Zurich. Optimizing for timed connections at Zurich means compromising on the question of what to do at other cities. If trains arrive and depart Zurich roughly on the hour, then the terminal at the other end may have ugly arrival and departure times – for example, a 1:40 trip time, with Zurich arrival :56 and departure :04, would mean that the other end has an arrival time of :44 and a departure time of :16. If it’s an hourly train, it means it’s not possible to time connections there – an arriving bus or regional train would have a transfer time of perhaps 20 minutes, which in a country the size of Switzerland is a large share of the overall trip.
And then there is the looming issue of intercity connections. Zurich is located fairly centrally in Switzerland, but there are some key connections that don’t go anywhere near it, led by Bern-Basel via Olten. Bern’s central location makes it a great node for timed connections as well. However, the Zurich-Bern trips took 1:09, making it impossible to have timed everywhere-to-everywhere connections in both cities.
Speeding up trains to make connections
In the 1980s, the Zurich-Bern trips took 1:09, so connections could only be timed in Zurich, not Bern. At the time, there were plans for a French-style high-speed rail network connecting Zurich, Bern, and Geneva, but those plans were canceled due to high costs relative to Switzerland’s size.
Instead of running as fast as possible, enough to connect Zurich and Geneva in perhaps 1:30, trains would run as fast as necessary, just enough to make connections. The centerpiece of this plan, dubbed Rail 2000, was to speed up Olten-Bern by just enough to shorten Zurich-Bern and Basel-Bern to 0:56 and 0:55 respectively. This way, trains could arrive in all three cities just before the hour and depart just after, facilitating more timed connections.
This system was a resounding success. Swiss rail ridership has been sharply rising in the last 20 years, from an already fairly high level; by all metrics I am aware of, such as modal split, ridership per capita, and passenger-km per capita, it is Europe’s strongest rail network. More speedups are planned, all aiming to add more points where trains can be timed to connect, called knots, till the network looks like this:
The shape of Switzerland
The notion of running trains as fast as necessary is in one sense a global principle. But its surface manifestation of a system designed as an alternative to high-speed rail is a product of Swiss geography; in Japan, the current speed of the Shinkansen is also as fast as necessary. Switzerland’s current knot diagram has to be understood in the context of the following geographical features:
Switzerland is small enough that the strongest trunk corridors, like Zurich-Bern, can support just a train every half hour.
Switzerland is also physically small enough that the Zurich-Bern-Basel triangle has legs of about 110 km, which an upgraded rail system can connect in an hour minus transfer time, and which it is very hard to speed up to 30 minutes minus transfer time.
Switzerland is two-dimensional: there is no central trunk through which all service must pass – the diagram above depicts Zurich-Olten as a key link, but Luzern, though not yet a knot, connects separately to both Zurich and Bern.
Swiss train stations have a surplus of tracks, while still functioning as central stations, without the separation into different stations for different directions that Paris and London have.
Switzerland is not unique in having these features. The Netherlands is the same: it’s a small two-dimensional country with demand for many connections to be timed. The Netherlands built a 300 km/h high-speed rail line between Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the border with Belgium toward Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris, but this line is not important to its intercity rail planning, which instead lives on Swiss-style knots.
However, not even all small countries are like Switzerland and the Netherlands. Israel is one- rather than two-dimensional: all trains pass through Tel Aviv and the Ayalon Railway, and there is no real need for timed connections, as the most important city pair not involving Tel Aviv, Haifa-Jerusalem, passes through Tel Aviv, with through-service to begin as soon as electrification is completed. Taiwan is so linear that a single high-speed rail line connects all of its cities, with higher ridership per capita than in any other country I have data for except maybe Japan; even before high-speed rail, the shape of its mainline network was a single line on the west coast connecting the cities and another on the east coast connecting smaller settlements.
And then in large countries, running as fast as necessary requires choosing a speed. Germany is two-dimensional like Switzerland, but has a string of city pairs 90-100 km apart – Hanover-Bielefeld-Dortmund, or Mannheim-Stuttgart, or the Fulda-Frankfurt-Würzburg triangle, or Würzburg-Nuremberg – for which running a fast as necessary entails a choice between connections in 60, 45, or 30 minutes. Longer-distance city pairs, like Nuremberg-Munich, Berlin-Leipzig, and the Hamburg-Hanover-Bremen triangle, are even less constrained.
Capacity
The Swiss network is based on the idea that near major stations like Zurich, trains should arrive and depart on pulses every 30 minutes. This way, the Olten-Bern line runs eight intercity trains per hour, but they are not equally spaced: they are timetabled in two platoons over a period of seven minutes each, with the off time used for regional trains not participating in the knot system.
Even in the Netherlands, this isn’t quite tenable. Amsterdam-Eindhoven trains come at regular 10-minute interval, each third train requiring a connection at Utrecht and the other two trains in three running directly. In Israel, Tel Aviv-Haifa trains run at 30-minute intervals midday, but for two four-hour peak periods each day this is boosted to four trains per hour – and this is even before electrification has been completed.
The situation in Germany deserves especial mention. Germany is investing in it intercity rail network in a way that sometimes tries to be Switzerland except bigger (such as the Deutschlandtakt and other measures supported by technical advocates) and sometimes tries to build high-speed rail lines and through-stations like Stuttgart 21. The technical advocates dislike Stuttgart 21 and argue that it’s un-Swiss to timetable intercity trains throughout the hour rather than in two pulses with inactivity between them. But Germany has large enough cities that it can’t afford to keep intercity lines out for so much time. Already, with mediocre speeds, the Deutschlandtakt plan for 2030 prescribes 4.5 trains an hour between Frankfurt and Mannheim and between Frankfurt and Cologne. As more high-speed lines come online, demand will grow; Deutsche Bahn projects to double ridership between 2019 and the 2030s, which will force the busiest links to operate a train every five to 10 minutes.
Is Swiss planning useful outside Switzerland and the Netherlands?
Unambiguously, yes. However, it would look different.
The best place to see how different it should be is, naturally, the Northeastern United States, my area of research. None of the features that made Rail 2000 work is present there: the region is large and has huge cities, is one- rather than two-dimensional, and has capacity-constrained stations forcing round-the-hour use of every approach track.
What this means is that there is little optimization from running slower than as fast as possible on the Northeast Corridor trunk line. However, running a fast as necessary remains a solid planning maxim on all the branches that connect to it, with their own timed connections to one another and to local buses in secondary cities like Worcester and Springfield. Most trains between Boston and Washington should run as express as practical based on station track speeds, and the local trains may plausibly only run every half hour, making them ideal for a system of timed half-hourly connections.
London and Paris are both famous for their elaborate rail terminals, each with many tracks to store trains connecting the capital with one direction of the country’s provinces. This leads rail advocates to romanticize this type of station; Jarrett Walker said in 2009 that these stations make the arriving passengers feel grander for, in theory, being able to walk directly from platform to station entrance without changing levels. Earlier this month, Ido Klein generalized from London and Paris to the rest of Europe, arguing that the setup in Tel Aviv, with only through-tracks on the Ayalon Railway and only six platform tracks at Savidor Center, is inadequate. Ido is incorrect on this; the Israel Railways network needs continued capital investment in the Ayalon Railway and not in alternatives such as more terminating tracks or a bypass.
What is the situation in Israel?
The Israel Railways network, owing to Israel’s small size and lack of connections to other countries, is in effect an interregional system, in which the most common intercity trips are 60 km (Tel Aviv-Jerusalem) or 90 km (Tel Aviv-Haifa). Due to the country’s narrow width, it is entirely centered on Tel Aviv, where the four stations of the Ayalon Railway – University, Savidor Center, HaShalom, HaHagana – are on pre-corona numbers the four busiest in the country; this leads to much political distaste, as everywhere else in the Israeli economy.
Blue lines are in operation for passenger service; light blue denotes electrified lines as of last year, with a few additional segments having been wired since. Green lines are freight-only. Gray lines are abandoned. Source: Wikipedia.
The Ayalon Railway has three tracks, with plans for a fourth in the design phase; capacity is said to be around 14 trains per hour per track, even with the latest ETCS signals, and I’ve been told of at least one Israel Railways manager who disbelieved that the Munich S-Bahn could push 30 trains per hour per track. The main station in construction is Savidor Center, which has six platform tracks, but in ridership it is second to HaShalom, which is better-located in the Tel Aviv central business district and has only three tracks. Practically all trains run through Tel Aviv – only the trains to Jerusalem terminate in Tel Aviv.
Do trains need to terminate in or bypass Tel Aviv?
No.
There are plans for a bypass railway east of the city, but they’re largely for political reasons, signifying that the state supports decentralizing economic geography away from Tel Aviv. The most important city pair not involving Tel Aviv, Haifa-Jerusalem, does not get any faster via the bypass, and will be direct via the Ayalon Railway as soon as electrification is completed up to Haifa. The city pair that could most gain from a Tel Aviv bypass, Jerusalem-Beer Sheva, has its most direct route passing through Bethlehem and Hebron, which besides being in the Territories (and in Area A) have terrain from hell.
Terminal tracks are likewise useless. Demand from Tel Aviv to points north and south is fairly symmetric on both intercity and commuter rail; there was some asymmetry before the new Tel Aviv-Jerusalem line opened, but at this point Jerusalem’s one station has elbowed its way to the number four position, narrowly ahead of Tel Aviv University, and together with Beer Sheva, Jerusalem forms a fine counterpart to Haifa.
But what about Europe?
Ido’s thread goes over the largest 10 metropolitan areas in the EU and UK, and looks at their intercity rail stations, which he defines as stations serving lines of at least 200 km in length. Among those, he finds that London and Paris only have terminals (their through-stations are for regional rail), and the same is true of Milan, Rome, and Athens. However, from that point, things fall apart.
First, Madrid, Barcelona, and Warsaw have intercity rail through-stations; Ido incorrectly says they are not. Madrid Atocha is a through-station; there’s little to no AVE through-service there or at Chamartín, but they are both through-stations, and the medium-speed Alvias, which are faster than anything in Israel, run through routinely. Barcelona-Sants has AVE through-service between Madrid and France; most trains terminate, but that’s because of asymmetric demand, not because it’s inherently better. Warsaw has a through-tunnel and many through-running intercity trains listed as serving Warszawa Centralna.
Second, Ido skips over Germany. He portrays Berlin as atypical for having a through-station at Hauptbahnhof, but the Berlin way is what Germany wishes were the norm for all cities. Smaller German cities either have through-stations, like Hanover or the cities of the Rhine-Ruhr, or act as pinch-points, with through-trains coming in and reversing direction to continue onward, including Leipzig, Frankfurt, and (until Stuttgart 21 opens) Stuttgart. The pinch-point operations are as efficient as they can be, but still occupy more platform and approach slots than through-trains would.
Third, the actual practice of Paris and London is that it’s assumed people only travel between the capital and a provincial city. France and the UK do not have good everywhere-to-everywhere trains. Paris has a bypass, the Interconnexion Est, but the service quality on it is terrible: the operating paradigm is that trains that bypass Paris make every intermediate stop, which takes 5-10 minutes per station, as the TGVs are not designed for fast boarding and alighting at intermediate points but for nonstop Paris-provincial city trips.
The way forward
Province-province trips are difficult to serve with high frequency. Therefore, the best practice for them is to run through the main city if possible. Israel can do it, using the Ayalon Railway, and once electrification provides through-service from Haifa to Jerusalem, this city pair can piggyback on the higher demand of Haifa-Tel Aviv and Tel Aviv-Jerusalem to serve passengers frequently. Israel is famously small; Haifa-Jerusalem is around 150 km and 1:36 with upcoming speedups planned for electrification and other investments – trains have to run at worst every 20-30 minutes to avoid throwing away ridership, and this can only be supported if they run through Tel Aviv.
London and Paris have many rail terminals because they were huge cities in the steam era and private railroads figured they should connect the capital with one section of the country. This inherited infrastructure is a liability to both of their respective national rail networks, especially that of France, where Paris is centrally located and could be the center of a Lille-Marseille spine. Israel’s newer network lacks this seam, and this should be celebrated and form the basis of further investment.
The most important investment is to ensure that the Ayalon Railway can run at decent capacity. Electric multiple units on regional and interregional rail systems with more complexity than that of Israel Railways do much better than 14 trains per hour on each track: Zurich does 16 and is (I believe) capable of 24, Munich does 30, Tokyo does 24 on some commuter lines with comparable length to Israel’s intercity lines. This is not a problem of the signaling system, which has been upgraded to ETCS Level 2 at the same time as the electrification project. Rather, it’s a problem of how the trains are timetabled, and possibly also of infrastructure on the commuter rail branches, some of which are still single-track.
If it’s possible to cancel the Eastern Railway plans, it should be canceled. There isn’t much that’s being served on the way, and the split in frequency between Haifa-Tel Aviv, Tel-Aviv Jerusalem, and Haifa-Jerusalem trains would seriously hurt ridership on the last of the three city pairs. The fourth track on Ayalon Railway is useful, but long-term plans to go up to six tracks should be shelved – a four-track electrified line could support a large multiple of current traffic.
From time to time, I see plans for intercity rail service into Boston going via Springfield. These include in-state rail plans to run trains between the two cities, but also grander plans to have train go between Boston and New Haven via Springfield, branded as the Inland Route, as an alternative to the present-day Northeast Corridor. In-state service is fine, and timed connections to New Haven are also fine for the benefit of interregional travel like Worcester-Hartford, but as an intercity connection, the Inland Route is a terrible choice, and no accommodation should be made for it in any plans. This post goes over why.
What is the Inland Route?
Via Wikipedia, here’s a map of the Northeast Corridor and connecting passenger rail lines:
Red denotes Amtrak ownership, and thus some non-Northeast Corridor sections owned by Amtrak are included, whereas the New Rochelle-New Haven section, while part of the corridor, is not in red because it is owned by state commuter rail authorities. Blue denotes commuter rail lines that use the corridor.
The Inland Route is the rail route in red and black from New Haven to Boston via Springfield. Historically, it was the first all-rail route between New York and Boston: the current route, called the Shore Line, was difficult to build with the technology of the 1840s because it required many river crossings, and only in 1889 was the last river bridged, the Thames just east of New London. However, as soon as the all-rail Shore Line route opened, mainline traffic shifted to it. Further investment in the Shore Line relegated the Inland Route to a secondary role, and today, the only passenger rail at all between Boston and Springfield comprises a daily night train to Chicago, the Lake Shore Limited. More recently, there has been investment in New Haven-Springfield trains, dubbed the Hartford Line, which runs every 1-2 hours with a few additional peak trips.
What rail service should run to Springfield?
Springfield is a secondary urban center, acting as the most significant city in the Pioneer Valley region, which has 700,000 people. It’s close to Hartford, with a metro population of 1.3 million, enough that the metro areas are in the process of merging; this is enough population that some rail service to both New York and Boston is merited.
In both cases, it’s important to follow best practices, which the current Hartford Line does not. I enumerated them for urban commuter rail yesterday, and in the case of intercity or interregional rail, the points about electrification and frequency remain apt. The frequency section on commuter rail talks about suburbs within 30 km of the city, and Springfield is much farther away, so the minimum viable frequency is lower than for suburban rail – hourly service is fine, and half-hourly service is at the limit beyond which further increases in frequency no longer generate much convenience benefit for passengers.
It’s also crucial to timetable the trains right. Not only should they be running on a clockface hourly (ideally half-hourly) schedule, but also everything should be timed to connect. This includes all of the following services:
Intercity trains to Hartford, New Haven, and New York
Intercity trains to Boston
Regional trains upriver to smaller Pioneer Valley cities like Northampton and Greenfield (those must be at least half-hourly as they cover a shorter distance)
Springfield buses serving Union Station, which acts as a combined bus-rail hub (PVTA service is infrequent, so the transfers can and should be timed)
The timed connections override all other considerations: if the demand to Boston and New York is asymmetric, and it almost certainly is, then the trains to New York should be longer than those to Boston. Through-running here is useful but not essential – there are at least three directions with viable service (New York, Boston, Greenfield) so some people have to transfer anyway, and the frequency is such that transfers have to be timed anyway.
What are the Inland Route plans?
There are perennial plans to add a few intercity trains on the New Haven-Springfield-Boston route. Some such trains ran in my lifetime – Amtrak only canceled the last ones in the 2000s, as improvements in the Shore Line for the Acela, including electrification of the New Haven-Boston section, made the Inland Route too slow to be viable.
Nonetheless, plans for restoration remain. These to some extent extend the plans for in-state Boston-Springfield rail, locally called East-West Rail: if trains run from Boston to Springfield and from Springfield to New Haven, then they might as well through-run. But some plans go further and posit that this should be a competitive end-to-end service, charging lower fares than the faster Northeast Corridor. Those plans, sitting on a shelf somewhere, are enough that Massachusetts is taking them into account when designing South Station.
Of note, no modernization is included in these plans. The trains are to be towed by diesel locomotives, and run on the existing line. Both the Inland Route and East-West plans assume frequency is measured in trains per day, designed by people who look backward to a mythologized golden age of American rail and not forward to foreign timetabling practices that have only been figured out in the last 50 years.
Is the Inland Route viable as an intercity route into Boston?
No. This is not even a slag on the existing plans; I’m happy assuming best practices in other cases, hence my talk of timed half-hourly connections between trains and buses above. The point is that even with best practices, there is no way to competitively run a New Haven-Springfield-Boston route.
The graphic above is suggestive of the first problem: the route is curvy. The Shore Line is very curvy as well, but less so; it has a bad reputation because its curves slow trains that in theory can run at 240 km/h down to about 150-180 km/h, but the Boston-Springfield Line has tighter curves over a longer stretch, they’re just less relevant now because the trains on the line don’t run fast anyway. In contrast, the existing Northeast Corridor route is fast in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
The Inland Route is also curvy on the Boston-Worcester stretch, where consideration for slow trains is a must. The main way to squeeze extra speed out of a curvy line is to cant it, but this is less viable if there is a mix of fast and slow trains, since slow trains would be overcanted. This, in fact, is the reason Amtrak trains outside the Northeast are slower than they were in the middle of the 20th century – long-distance passenger trains have less priority for infrastructure design than slow freight trains, and so cant is limited, especially when there are hills. Normally, it’s not a problem if the slower trains are commuter trains, which run fast enough that they can just take the curve, but some curves are adjacent to passenger train stations, where passengers would definitely notice the train sitting still on canted track, leaning to the inside of the curve.
Then, there is the issue of how one gets into Boston. The Providence Line is straight and fast and can be upgraded to provide extra capacity so that fast intercity trains can overtake slow ones if need be. The Worcester Line has a two-track narrows in Newton, hemmed by I-90 with no possibility of expansion, with three stations on this stretch and a good location for a fourth one at Newton Corner. Overtakes are possible elsewhere (one is being designed just to the west, in Wellesley – see my sample timetable here), but they still constrain capacity. It’s comparably difficult from the point of view of infrastructure design to run a 360 km/h intercity train every 15 minutes via Providence and to run a 160 km/h intercity train every 30 minutes via Springfield and Worcester. Both options require small overtake facilities; higher frequency requires much more in both cases.
The Worcester Line is difficult enough that Boston-Springfield trains should be viewed as Boston-Worcester trains that go farther west. If there’s room in the timetable to include more express trains then these can be the trains to Springfield, but if there’s any difficulty, or if the plan doesn’t have more than a train every half hour to Worcester, then trains to Springfield should be making the same stops as Boston-Worcester trains.
Incentives for passengers
The worst argument I’ve seen for Inland Route service is that it could offer a lower-priced alternative to the Northeast Corridor. This, frankly, is nuts.
The operating costs of slower trains are higher than those of faster trains; this is especially true if, as in current plans, the slow trains are not even electrified. Crew, train maintenance, and train acquisition costs all scale with trip time rather than trip distance. Energy costs are dominated by acceleration and deceleration cycles rather than by cruise speed at all speeds up to about 300 km/h. High-speed trains sometimes still manage lower energy consumption per seat-km than slow trains, since slow trains have many acceleration cycles as track speeds change between segments whereas high-speed lines are built for consistent cruise speed.
The only reason to charge less for the trains that are more expensive to operate is to break the market into slow trains for poor people and fast trains for rich people. But this doesn’t generate any value for the customer – it just grabs profits through price discrimination that are then wasted on the higher operating costs of the inferior service. It’s the intercity equivalent of charging more for trains than for buses within a city, which practice is both common in the United States and a big negative to public transit ridership.
If, in contrast, the goal is to provide passengers with good service, then intercity trains to Boston must go via Providence, not Springfield. It’s wise to keep investing in the Shore Line (including bypasses where necessary) to keep providing faster and more convenient service. Creating a class system doesn’t make for good transit at any scale.
A bunch of us at the Effective Transit Alliance (mostly not me) are working on a long document about commuter rail through-running. I’m excited about it; the quality of the technical detail (again, mostly not by me) is far better than when I drew some lines on Google Maps in 2009-10. But it gets me thinking – how come through-running is the ask among American technical advocates for good passenger rail? How does it compare with other features of commuter rail modernization?
Note on terminology
In American activist spaces, good commuter rail is universally referred to as regional rail and the term commuter rail denotes peak-focused operations for suburban white flighters who work in city center and only take the train at rush hour. If that’s what you’re used to, mentally search-and-replace everything I say below appropriately. I have grown to avoid this terminology in the last few years, because in France and Germany, there is usually a distinction between commuter rail and longer-range regional rail, and the high standards that advocates demand are those of the former, not the latter. Thus, for me, a mainline rail serving a metropolitan area based on best practices is called commuter and not regional rail; there’s no term for the traditional American system, since there’s no circumstance in which it is appropriate.
The features of good commuter rail
The highest-productivity commuter rail systems I’m aware of – the Kanto area rail network, the Paris RER, S-Bahns in the major German-speaking cities, and so on – share certain features, which can be generalized as best practices. When other systems that lack these features adopt them, they generally see a sharp increase in ridership.
All of the features below fall under the rubric of planning commuter rail as a longer-range subway, rather than as something else, like a rural branch line or a peak-only American operation. The main alternative for providing suburban rapid transit service is the suburban metro, typical of Chinese cities, but the suburban metro and commuter rail models can coexist, as in Stockholm, and in either case, the point is to treat the suburbs as a lower-density, longer-distance part of the metropolitan area, rather than as something qualitatively different from the city. To effect this type of planning, all or nearly all of the following features are required, with the names typically given by advocates:
Electrification/EMUs: the line must run modern equipment, comprising electric multiple units (self-propelled, with no separate locomotive) for their superior performance and reliability
Level boarding/standing space: interior train design must facilitate fast boarding and alighting, including many wide doors with step-free boarding (which also provides wheelchair accessibility) and ample standing space within the car rather than just seated space, for example as in Berlin’s new Class 484
Frequency: the headway between trains set at a small fraction of the typical trip time – neighborhoods 10 km from city center warrant a train every 5-10 minutes, suburbs 20-30 km out a train every 10-20 minutes, suburbs farther out still warrant a train every 20-30 minutes
Schedule integration: train timetables must be planned in coordination with connecting suburban buses (or streetcars if available) to minimize connection time – the buses should be timed to arrive at each major suburban station just before the train departs, and depart just after it arrives
Pedestrian-friendliness: train stations designed around connections with buses, streetcars if present, bikes, and pedestrian activity – park-and-rides are acceptable but should be used sparingly, and at stations in the suburbs, the nearby pedestrian experience must come first, in order to make the station area attractive to non-drivers
Fare integration/Verkehrsverbund: the system may charge higher fares for longer trips, but the transfers to urban and suburban mass transit must be free even if different companies or agencies run the commuter trains and the city’s internal bus and rail system
Infill: stations should be spaced regularly every 1-3 km within the built-up area, including not just the suburbs but also the city; slightly longer stop spacing may be acceptable if the line acts as an express bypass of a nearby subway line, but not the long stretches of express running American commuter trains do in their central cities
Through-running: most trains that enter city center go through it, making multiple central stops, and then emerge on the other side to serve suburbs in that direction
Is through-running special?
Among the above features, through-running has a tendency to capture the imagination, because it lends itself to maps of how the lines fit together in the region; I’ve done more than my share of this, in the 2009 post linked in the intro, in 2014, in 2017, and in 2019. This is a useful feature, and in nearly every city with mainline rail, it’s essential to long-term modernization; the exceptions are cities where the geography puts the entirety of suburbia in one direction of city center, and even there, Sydney has through-running (all lines go west of city center) and Helsinki is building a tunnel for it (all lines go north).
The one special thing about through-running is that usually it is the most expensive item to implement, because it requires building new tunnels. In Philadelphia, this was the Center City Commuter Connection, opened in 1984. In Boston, it’s the much-advocated for North-South Rail Link. In Paris, Munich, Tokyo, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Milan, Madrid, Sydney, Zurich, and other cities that I’m forgetting, this involved building expensive city center tunnels, usually more than one, to turn disparate lines into parts of a coherent metropolitan system. New York is fairly unique in already having the infrastructure for some through-running, and even there, several new tunnels are necessary for systemwide integration.
But there are so many other things that need to be done. In much of the United States, transit advocacy has recently focused on the issue of frequency, brought into the mainstream of advocacy by Jarrett Walker. Doing one without the other leads to awkward situations: after opening the tunnel, Philadelphia branded the lines R1 through R8 modeled on German S-Bahns while still running them hourly off-peak, even within the city, and charging premium fares even right next to overcrowded city buses.
This is something advocates generally understand. There’s a reason the TransitMatters Regional Rail program for commuter rail modernization puts the North-South Rail Link on the back burner and instead focuses on all the other elements. But there’s still something about through-running that lends itself to far more open argumentation than talking about off-peak frequency. Evidently, the Regional Plan Association and other organizations keep posting through-running maps rather than frequency maps or sample timetables.
Through-running as revolution
I suspect one reason for the special place of through-running, besides the attractiveness of drawing lines on a map, is that it most blatantly communicates that this is no longer the old failed system. There are good ways of running commuter rail, and bad ways, and all present-day American commuter rail practices are bad ways.
It’s possible to make asks about modernization that don’t touch through-running, such as integrating the fares; in Germany, the Verkehrsverbund concept goes back to the 1960s and is contemporary with the postwar S-Bahn tunnels, but Berlin and Hamburg had had through-running for decades before. But because these asks look small, it’s easy to compromise them down to nothing. This has happened in Boston, where there’s no fare integration on the horizon, but a handful of commuter rail stations have their fares reduced to be the same as on the subway, still with no free transfers.
Through-running is hard to compromise this way. As soon as the lines exist, they’re out there, requiring open coordination between different railroads, each of which thinks the other is incompetent and is correct. It’s hard to sell it as nothing, and thus it has to be done as a true leap generations forward, catching up with where the best places have been for 50+ years.
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