Don’t Romanticize Traditional Cities that Never Existed

(I’m aware that I’ve been posting more slowly than usual; you’ll be rewarded with train stations soon.)

I saw a tweet by Strong Towns that compared traditional cities with the suburbs, and the wrongness of everything there reminded me of how much urbanists lie to themselves about what cities were like before cars. Strong Towns is more on the traditional urbanism side (to the point of rejecting urban rail on the grounds that it leads to non-gradual development), but a lot of what I’m critiquing here is, regrettably, commonly believed across the urbanist spectrum.

The basic problem with this comparison is that there was never such a thing as traditional urbanism. There are others; all of the claims in the comparison are false – for example, the line about “makes communities brittle” misses how little community empowerment cities had in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before zoning, and the line about top-down versus bottom-up energy misses how centralized coal and hydroelectric plants were at the turn of the century whereas left-voting NIMBY suburbs today are the most reliable place to find decentralized rooftop solar plants. But the fundamental problem is that Strong Town, and most urbanists, assume that there was a relatively fixed urban model around walkability, which cars came in and wrecked in the 20th century.

What’s true is that before mass motorization, people didn’t use cars to get around. But beyond that tautology, every principle of urban walkability was being violated in one pre-automobile urban typology or another.

Local commuting

Pre-automobile industrial cities were not 15-minute cities by any means. Marchetti’s constant of commuting goes back to at least the early 19th century; people in pre-automobile New York or London or Berlin commuted to a commercializing city center. This was to some extent understood in the second half of the 19th century: the purpose of rapid transit in New York, first steam els and then the subway, was to provide a fast enough commute so that the working class of the Lower East Side would get out of its tenements and into lower-density houses where they’d be turned from hyphenated Jews and Italians into proper Americans.

There has been a real change in that, in Gilded Age New York (and, I believe, in third-world cities today like Nairobi), people worked either locally or in city center. There was very little crosstown commuting, and so the Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan in 1811 emphasized north-south commuting to Lower Manhattan, while private streetcar concessionaires likewise built routes to city center and rarely crosstown. Nor was there much long-distance travel except by the people who did work in city center: there were people who lived their entire lives in Brooklyn without visiting Manhattan, which became unthinkable by the early 20th century already. But this hardly makes Gilded Age Brooklyn a 15-minute city, any more than a modern suburb where most people do not visit city center out of fears of crime is anything but a suburb of the city, living off of the income generated by people who do commute in.

In truly premodern city, the situation depended on the time and place. Medieval European cities famously had little commuting – shopkeepers would live in the same building that housed their store, sleeping on an upper floor. But in Tang-era Chang’an, people did commute (my reference is the History of Imperial China series, no link, sorry). This is very far from the result of thousands of years of tinkering, when each time and place did something different before industrialization, and then went to yet another set of layouts after.

Local infrastructure

Pre-automobile industrial cities mixed top-down and bottom-up approaches, same as today. The grid plans favored in the United States, China, and the Roman Empire were more top-down than the unplanned street networks of most medieval and Early Modern European cities, each designed for a different cultural context. (In Imperial Rome much of the context was about following military manuals, for those cities that descend from forts.) In the medieval Muslim world, cities had cul-de-sacs long before cars, because this way each clan could have its own walled garden, so to speak.

Widely divergent contexts

Premodern cities developed in widely divergent contexts. Based on these contexts, they could look radically different. The comparison mentions war and peace; well, defensive walls were a fixture in many cities, and these mattered for their urban development. They were not nice strolls the way some embankments are today. There aren’t any good examples of walls in North America, but there are star forts, and they’re not usually pleasant walks – their purpose was to make the day of besieging troops as bad as possible, not to make tourists feel good about the city’s history. Medieval walls were completely different from star forts, and didn’t make for a walkable environment, either – in Paris I would routinely walk to the park and to the exterior of the Château de Vincennes, and while the park was pleasant, the castle has a moat and none of the street uses that activate a street, like retail or windows. The modern equivalents of such fixtures should be compared with prisons and modern military bases (some using the historic star forts), not touristy palaces.

Even the concept of city center is, as mentioned above on commuting, neither timeless (it didn’t exist in premodern Europe) nor a product of cars (it did exist in 19th-century America and Europe). Joel Garreau points out, either in Edge City or in some of the articles he’s written about the concept, that the traditional downtown was really only a fixture for a few generations, from the early 19th century to the middle of the 20th.

The issue of fragility

The entire comparison is grating, but smoehow the thing that bothers me most there is not the elementary errors, but the last point, about how traditional cities were antifragile for millennia before modern suburbia came in and wrecked them with debt.

This, to be very clear, is bullshit. Premodern cities could depopulate with one plague, famine, or war; these often co-occurred, such as when Louis XIV’s wars led to such food shortages that 10% of France’s population died in two famines spaced 15 years apart (put another way: France underwent a Reign of Terror’s worth of deaths every two weeks for a year and a half, and then a second for somewhat less than a year). In 1793, 10% of Philadelphia’s population died of yellow fever within the span of a few months. After repeated sacks and economic decline, Jaffa was abandoned in much of the Early Modern era.

Industrial cities generally do not undergo any of these things. (They can be subjected to genocide, like the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust, but that’s not at all about urbanism.) But that’s hardly a millennia-old tradition when it only goes back to about the middle of the 19th century, after the Great Hunger. In the UK, the Great Hunger affected rural areas like Ireland and Highland Scotland, but in a country that was at the time majority-rural – Britain would only flip to an urban majority in 1851 – it’s hardly a defense. Nor did the era after 1850 feature much stability in the cities; boom-and-bust cycles were common and the risk of unemployment and poverty was constant.

Mineta Shows How not to Reduce Construction Costs

There’s a short proposal just released by Joshua Schank and Emma Huang at the Mineta Transportation Institute, talking about construction costs. It’s anchored in the experience of Los Angeles more than anything, and is a good example of what not to do. The connections the authors have with LA Metro make me less confident that Los Angeles is serious about reforming in order to be able to build cost-effective infrastructure. There are three points made in the proposal, of which two would make things worse and one would be at best neutral.

What’s in the proposal?

The report links to the various studies done about construction cost comparison, including ours but also Eno’s and Berkeley Law’s. It does so briefly, and then says,

Often overlooked are the inefficiencies and shortcomings inherent in the transportation planning process, which extend far beyond cost, to the quality of the projects, outcomes for the public, and benefits to the region. Rather than propose sweeping, but politically unfeasible, policy changes to address these issues, we focused on more attainable steps that agencies can take right now to improve the process and get to better outcomes.

Mineta’s more attainable steps, in lieu of what we say about project delivery and standardization, are threefold:

  1. Promise Outcomes, not Projects: instead of promising a concrete piece of infrastructure like a subway, agencies should promise abstract things: “mode-agnostic mobility solutions that ‘carried x riders per day’ or ‘reduced emissions by x%’ or ‘reduced travel time by x minutes,'” which may be “exclusive bus lanes, express bus services, or microtransit.”
  2. Separate the Planning and Environmental Processes: American agencies today treat the environmental impact statement (EIS) process as the locus of planning, and instead should separate the two out. The planning process should come first; one positive example is the privatized planning of the Sepulveda corridor in Los Angeles.
  3. Integrate Planning, Construction, and Operations Up Front: different groups handling operations and construction are siloed in the US today, and this should change. There are different ways to do it, but the report spends the longest time on a proposal to offload more responsibilities to public-private partnerships (PPPs or P3s), which should be given long-term contracts for both construction and maintenance.

Point #2 is not really meaningful either way, and the Sepulveda corridor planning is not at all a good example to learn from. The other two points have been to various extents been done before, always with negative consequences.

What’s the problem with the proposal?

Focusing on outcomes rather than projects is called functional procurement in the Nordic countries. The idea is that the state should not be telling contractors what to do, but only set broad goals, like “we need 15,000 passengers per hour capacity.” It’s a recent reform, along many others aiming to increase the role of the private sector in planning.

In truth, public transport is a complex enough system that it’s not enough to say “we need X capacity” or “we need Y speed.” Railways have far too many moving parts, to the point that there’s no alternative to just procuring a system. Too many other factors depend on whether it is a full metro, a tramway, a tram-train (in practice how American light rail systems function), a subway-surface line, or a commuter train. In practice, functional procurement in Sweden hasn’t brought in any change.

In the case of Sepulveda, LA Metro did send some of the high-level P3 proposals to Eric and me. What struck me was that the vendors were proposing completely different technologies. This is irresponsible planning: Sepulveda has a lot of different options for what to do to the north (on the San Fernando Valley side) and south (past LAX), and not all of them work with new technology. For example, one option must be running it through to the Green Line on the 105, but this is only viable if it’s the same light rail technology.

The alternative of microtransit is even worse. It does not work at scale; over a decade of promises by taxi companies that act like tech companies have failed to reduce the cost structure below that of traditional taxis. However, it does open the door for politicians who think they’re being innovative to bring in inefficient non-solutions that are getting a lot of hype. The report brings the example of a New York politician who was taking credit for (small) increases in subway frequency; well, many more politicians spent the 2010s saying that San Francisco’s biggest nonprofit, Uber, was the future of transportation.

The point recommending P3s for their integration of operations and infrastructure is even worse. The privatization of state planning has been an ongoing process in certain parts of the world – it’s universal in the English-speaking world and advancing in the Nordic countries. The outcomes are always the same: infrastructure construction gets worse.

The top-down Swedish state planning of the third quarter of the 20th century built around 104 km of the T-bana, of which 57 are underground, for $3.6 billion in 2022 prices. The present process, negotiated over decades with people who don’t like an obtrusive state and are inspired by British privatization, is building about 19 underground km, for $4.5 billion. This mirrors real increases in absolute costs (not just overruns) throughout Scandinavia. The costs of Sweden in the 1940s-70s were atypically low, but there’s no need for them to have risen so much since then; German costs have been fairly flat over this period, Italian costs rose to the 1970s-80s due to corruption and have since fallen, Spanish costs are still very low.

As we note in the Swedish case report, Nordic planners take it for granted that privatization is good, and ding Germany for not doing as much of it as the UK; of these two countries, one can build and one can’t, and the one that can is unfortunately not the one getting accolades. The United Kingdom, was building subways for the same costs as Germany and Italy in the 1960s and 70s, but its real costs have since grown by a factor of almost four. I can’t say for certain that it’s about Britain’s love affair with P3s, but the fact that the places that use P3s the most are the worst at building infrastructure should make people more critical of the process.

Britain Remade’s Report on Construction Costs

The group Britain Remade dropped a report criticizing Britain for its high infrastructure construction costs three days ago. I recommend everyone read Sam Dumitriu and Ben Hopkinson’s post on the subject. Sam and Ben constructed their own database. Their metro tunneling costs mostly (but not exclusively) come from our database but include more detail such as the construction method used; in addition, they have a list of tram projects, another list of highway projects, and a section about rail electrification. Over the last three days, this report has generated a huge amount of discussion on Twitter about this, with appearances in mainstream media. People have asked me for my take, so here it is. It’s a good report, and the recommendations are solid, but I think it would benefit from looking at historical costs in both the US and UK. In particular, while the report is good, the way it’s portrayed in the media misses a lot.

What’s in the report

Sam and Ben’s post talks about different issues, affecting different aspects of the UK, all leading to high costs:

NIMBYism

The report brings up examples of NIMBYs slowing down construction and making it more expensive, and quotes Brooks-Liscow on American highway cost growth in the 1960s and 70s. This is what has been quoted in the media the most: Financial Times call it the “NIMBY tax,” and the Telegraph spends more time on this than on the other issues detailed below.

The NIMBYs have both legal and political power. The legal power comes from American-style growth in red tape; the Telegraph article brings up that the planning application for a highway tunnel under the Thames Estuary is 63,000 pages long and has so far cost 250 million £ in planning preparations alone (the entire scheme is 9 billion £ for 23 km of which only 4.3 are in tunnel). The political power is less mentioned in the report, but remains important as well – High Speed 2 has a lot of gratuitous tunneling due to the political power of the people living along the route in the Home Counties.

Start-and-stop construction

British rail electrification costs are noticeably higher than Continental European ones. The report points out that construction is not contiguous but is rather done in starts and stops, leading to worse outcomes:

Lack of standardization

Sam and Ben bring up the point Bent Flyvbjerg makes about modularization and standardization. This is the least-developed point in the report, to the point that I’m not sure this is a real problem in the United Kingdom. It is a serious problem in the United States, but while both American and British costs of infrastructure construction are very high, not every American problem is present in the UK – for example, none of the British consultants we’ve spoken to has ever complained about labor in the UK, even though enoguh of them are ideologically hostile to unions that they’d mention it if it were as bad as in the US.

What’s not in the report?

There are some gaps in the analysis, which I think compromise its quality. The analysis itself is correct and mentions serious problems, but would benefit from including more things, I believe.

Historical costs

The construction costs as presented are a snapshot in time: in the 21st century, British (and Canadian, and American) costs have been very high compared with Continental Europe. There are no trends over time, all of which point to some additional issues. In contrast, I urge people to go to my post from the beginning of the year and follow links. The biggest missing numbers are from London in the 1960s and 70s: the Victoria and Jubilee lines were not at all atypically expensive for European subway tunnels at the time – at the time, metro construction costs in London, Italian cities, and German cities were about the same. Since then, Germany has inched up slightly, Italy has gone down due to the anti-corruption laws passed in the 1990s, and the United Kingdom has nearly quadrupled its construction costs over the Jubilee, which was already noticeably higher than the Victoria.

The upshot is that whatever happened that made Britain incapable of building happened between the 1970s and the 1990s. The construction cost increase since the 1990s has been real but small: the Jubilee line extension, built 1993-9, cost 218.7 million £/km, or 387 million £/km in 2022 prices; the Northern line extension, built 2015-21, cost 375 million £/km, or 431 million £/km in 2022 prices. The Jubilee extension is only 80% underground, but has four Thames crossings; overall, I think it and the Northern extension are of similar complexity. It’s a real increase over those 22 years; but the previous 20 years, since the original Jubilee line (built 1971-9), saw an increase to 387 million £/km from 117 million £/km.

The issue of soft costs

Britain has a soft costs crisis. Marco Chitti points out how design costs that amount to 5-10% of the hard costs in Italy (and France, and Spain) are a much larger proportion of the overall budget in English-speaking countries, with some recent projects clocking in at 50%. In the American discourse, this is mocked as “consultants supervising consultants.” Every time something is outsourced, there’s additional friction in contracting – and the extent of outsourcing to private consultants is rapidly growing in the Anglosphere.

On Twitter, some people were asking if construction costs are also high in other Anglo countries, like Australia and New Zealand; the answer is that they are, but their cost growth is more recent, as if they used to be good but then learned bad practices from the metropole. In Canada, we have enough cost history to say that this was the case with some certainty: as costs in Toronto crept up in the 1990s, the TTC switched to design-build, supposed inspired by the Madrid experience – but Spain does not use design-build and sticks to traditional design-bid-build; subsequently, Toronto’s costs exploded, going, in 2022 prices, from C$305 million/km for the Sheppard line to C$1.2 billion/km for the Ontario Line. Every cost increase, Canada responds with further privatization; the Ontario Line is a PPP. And this is seen the most clearly in the soft cost multiplier, and in the rise in complaints among civil servants, contractors, and consultants about contracting red tape.

Britain Remade’s political recommendations

Britain Remade seems anchored not in London but in secondary cities, judging by the infrastructure projects it talks most about. One of its political recommendations is,

Britain is one of the most centralised countries in the world. Too often, Westminster prioritises investments in long-distance intercity rail such as HS2 or the Northern Powerhouse Rail when they would be better off focusing on cutting down commuting times. Local leaders understand local priorities better than national politicians who spend most of their time in Westminster. If we really devolved power and gave mayors real powers over spending, we’d get the right sort of transport more often.

Britain Remade is campaigning for better local transport. We want to take power from Westminster and give it to local leaders who know better. But, we also want to make sure transport investment stretches further. That’s why we are calling for the government to copy what other countries do to bring costs down, deliver projects on time, and build more.

https://www.britainremade.co.uk/building_better_local_transport

Devolution to the Metropolitan counties – those covering Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and Newcastle – has been on the agenda in the UK for some time now. This reform is intended to give regions more power over spending, inspired by the success of devolution to London, where Transport for London has good operating practices and plenty of in-house capacity. More internationally-minded Brits (that is, to say, European-minded – there’s little learning from elsewhere except when consultants treat Singapore and Hong Kong as mirrors of their own bad ideas) will even point out the extensive regional empowerment in the Nordic countries: Swedish counties have a lot of spending power, and it’s possible to get all stakeholders in the room together in a county.

And yet, the United States is highly decentralized too, and has extreme construction costs. Conversely, Britain knew how to build infrastructure in the 1960s and 70s, under a centralized administrative state. Devolution to the Metropolitan counties will likely lead to good results in general, but not in infrastructure construction costs.

The media discourse

The report raises some interesting points. The start-and-stop nature of British electrification is a serious problem. To this, I’ll add that in Denmark, electrification costs are higher than in peer Northern European countries because its project, while more continuous, suffered from political football and was canceled and then uncanceled.

Unfortunately, all media discussion I can see, in the mainstream as well as on Twitter, misses the point. There’s too much focus on NIMBYism, for one. Britain is not the United States. In the United States, the sequence is that first of all the system empowered NIMBYs politically and legally starting in the 1960s and 70s, and only then did it privatize the state. In the United Kingdom, this is reversed: the growth in NIMBY empowerment is recent, with rapid expansion of the expected length of an environmental impact statement, and with multiplication of conflicting regulations – for example, there are equity rules requiring serving poor and not just rich neighborhoods, but at the same time, there must be a business case, and the value of time in the British benefit-cost analysis rules is proportional to rider income. This explosion in red tape is clearly increasing cost, but the costs were very high even before it happened.

Then, there are the usual incurious ideas from the Twitter reply gallery, including some people with serious followings: Britain must have stronger property rights (no it doesn’t, and neither does the US; look at Japan instead), or it’s related to a general cost disease (British health care costs are normal), or what about Hong Kong (it’s even more expensive).

The Importance of Tangibles

I’m writing this post on a train to Copenhagen. So many things about this trip are just wrong: the air conditioning in the car where we reserved seats is broken so we had to find somewhere else to sit, the train is delayed, there was a 10-minute stop at the border for Danish cops to check the IDs of some riders (with racial profiling). Even the booking was a bit jank: the Deutsche Bahn website easily sells one-ways and roundtrips, but this is a multi-city trip and we had to book it as two nested roundtrips. Those are the sort of intangibles that people who ride intercity trains a lot more than I do constantly complain about, usually when they travel to France and find that the TGV system does really poorly on all the metrics that the economic analysis papers looking at speed do not look at. And yet, those intangibles at the end of the day really are either just a matter of speed (like the 10-minute delay at the border) or not that important. But to get why it’s easy for rail users to overlook them, it’s important to understand the distinction between voice and exit.

Voice and exit strategies

The disgruntled customer, employee, or resident can respond in one of two ways. The traditional way as understood within economics is exit: switch to a competing product (or stop buying), quit, or emigrate. Voice means communicating one’s unhappiness to authority, which may include exercising political power if one has any; organizing a union is a voice strategy.

These two strategies are not at all mutually exclusive. Exit threat can enhance voice: Wikipedia in the link above gives the example of East Germany, where the constant emigration threat of the common citizenry amplified the protests of the late 1980s, but two more examples include union organizing and the history of Sweden. With unions, the use of voice (through organizing and engaging in industrial action) is stronger when there is an exit threat (through better employment opportunities elsewhere); it’s well-known that unions have an easier time negotiating better wages, benefits, and work conditions during times of low unemployment than during times of high unemployment. And with Sweden, the turn-of-the-century union movement used the threat of emigration to the United States to extract concessions from employers, to the point of holding English classes for workers.

Conversely, voice can amplify exit. To keep going with the example of unions, unions sometimes engage in coordinated boycotts to show strength – and they request that allies engage in boycotts when, and only when, the union publicly calls for them; wildcat boycotts, in which consumers stop using a product when there is a labor dispute without any union coordination, do not enhance the union’s negotiating position, and may even make management panic thinking the company is having an unrelated slump and propose layoffs.

The upshot is that constantly complaining about poor service is a voice strategy. It’s precise, and clearly communicates what the problem is. However, the sort of people who engage in such public complaints are usually still going to ride the trains. I’m not going to drive if the train is bad; I’d have to learn how to drive, for one. In my case, poor rail service means I’m going to take fewer trips – I probably would have done multiple weekend trips to each of Munich and Cologne this summer if the trains took 2.5 hours each way and not 4-4.5. In the case of more frequent travelers than me, especially railfans, it may not even mean that.

The trip not taken

On this very trip, we were trying to meet up in Hamburg with a friend who lives in Bonn, and who, like us, wants to see Hamburg. And then the friend tried booking the trip and realized that it was 4.5 hours Hbf-to-Hbf, and more than five hours door-to-door; we had both guessed it would be three hours; a high-speed rail network would do the trip in 2:15. The friend is not a railfan or much of a user of social media; to Deutsche Bahn, the revenue loss is noticeable, but not the voice.

And that’s where actually measuring passenger usage becomes so important. People who complain are not a representative cross-section of society: they use the system intensively, to the point that they’re unlikely to be the marginal users the railroad needs to attract away from driving or to induce to make the trip; they are familiar with navigating the red tape, to the point of being used to jank that turns away less experienced users; they tend to be more politically powerful (whereas my friend is an immigrant with about A2 German) and therefore already have a disproportionate impact on what the railroad does. Complaints can be a useful pilot, but they’re never a substitute for counting trips and revenue.

The issue is that the main threat to Deutsche Bahn, as to any other public railroad, is loss of passengers and the consequent loss of revenue. If the loss of revenue comes from a deliberate decision to subsidize service, then that’s a testament to its political power, as is the case for various regional and local public transport subsidy scheme like the Deutschlandticket and many more like it at the regional level in other countries. But if it comes from loss of passenger revenue, or even stagnation while other modes such as flying surge, then it means the opposite.

This is, if anything, more true of a public-sector rail operator than a private-sector one. A private-sector firm can shrink but maintain a healthy margin and survive as a small player, like so many Class II and III freight rail operators in the United States. But a national railway is, in a capitalist democracy, under constant threat of privatization. The threat is always larger when ridership is poor and when the mode is in decline; thus, British Rail was privatized near its nadir, and Japan National Railways was privatized while, Shinkansen or no Shinkansen, it was losing large amounts of money, in a country where the expectation was that rail should be profitable. Germany threatened to do the same to Deutsche Bahn in the 1990s and 2000s, leading to deferred maintenance, but the process was so slow that by the time it could happen, during the 12 years of CSU control of the Ministry of Transport, ridership was healthy enough there were no longer any demands for such privatization. The stagnant SNCF of the 2010s has had to accept outside reforms (“Société Anonyme”), stopping short of privatization and yet making it easier to do so in the future should a more right-wing government than that of Macron choose to proceed.

The path forward

Rail activists should recognize that the most important determinant of ridership is not the intangibles that irk people who plan complex multi-legged regional rail trips, but the basics: speed, reliability, fares, some degree of frequency (but the odd three-hour wait on a peripheral intercity connection, while bad, is not the end of the world).

On the train I’m on, the most important investment is already under construction: the Fehmarn Belt tunnel is already under construction, and is supposed to open in six years. The construction cost, 10 billion € for 18 km, is rather high, setting records in both countries. The project is said to stand to shorten the Hamburg-Copenhagen trip time, currently 4:40 on paper with an average delay of 21 minutes and a 0% on-time performance in the last month, to 2.5 hours. If Germany bothers to build high-speed approaches, and Denmark bothers to complete its own high-speed approaches and rate them at 300 km/h and not 200-250, the trip could be done in 1.5 hours.

Domestically, and across borders that involve regular overland high-speed rail rather than undersea tunnels, construction of fast trains proceeds at a sluggish pace. German rail advocates, unfortunately, want to see less high-speed rail rather than more, due to a combination of NIMBYism, the good-enough phenomenon, and constant sneering at France and Southern Europe.

But it’s important to keep focusing on a network of fast rail links between major cities. That’s the source of intercity rail ridership at scale. People love complaining about the lack of good rail for niche town pairs involving regional connections at both ends, but those town pairs are never going to get rail service that can beat the car for the great majority of potential riders who own a car and aren’t environmental martyrs. In contrast, the 2.5- and three-hour connection at long intercity distances reliably gets the sort of riders who are more marginal to the system and respond to seeing a five-hour trip with exit rather than voice.

Quick Note on Ecotourism and Climate

On Mastodon, I follow the EU Commission’s feed, which reliably outputs schlock that expresses enthusiasm about things that don’t excite anyone who doesn’t work for the EU. A few days ago, it posted something about green tourism that goes beyond the usual saying nothing, and instead actively promotes the wrong things.

The issue at hand is that the greenest way to do tourism is to avoid flying and driving. The origin of Greta Thunberg’s activism is that, in 2018, she was disturbed by the standard green message at school: recycle bottles, but fly to other continents for vacations and tell exciting stories. The concept of flight shame originates with her; she hasn’t flown at all since 2015 and famously traveled to New York by sailboat, but most of her followers are more pragmatic and shift to trains where possible (domestically) and not where it is too ridiculous (internationally, even within Europe).

So environmentally sustainable tourism means tourism that does not involve flying or driving. It means taking the train to Munich or Hamburg or Cologne – or Rome, for the dedicated environmental masochist – doing city center tourism, and at no point using a form of transportation that isn’t a train or maybe a bus.

But the European Commission isn’t recommending that. It’s telling people to choose ecotourism, with a top-down photo of a forest. From Europe, this invariably means flying long distances, and then getting around by taxi in a biome that Europe does not have, usually a tropical climate. The point of ecotourism is not to reduce emissions or any other environmental footprint; it’s to go see a place of natural beauty before it’s destroyed by climate change coming in part from the emissions generated by the trip to it.

This worse-than-nothing campaign comes at a time when there’s growth in demand for actually green tourism in sections of Europe. The more hardcore greens talk about night trains so that they can do those all-rail trips to more distant parts of Europe. People who believe that the Union might be able to do something instead hold out for high-speed trains.

Even with the Commission’s regular appetite for words over actions, there are things that can be done about greening tourism. For example, it could help advertise intra-European attractions that could be done by rail. Berlin is full of these “You are EU” posters that say nothing; they could be telling people how to get to Prague, to any Polish city within reasonable train range, to Jutland if there’s anything interesting there.

At longer range, it could be helping promote circuits of travel entirely by rail. There’s already an UNESCO initiative promoting circuits, designed entirely around ecotourism principles (i.e. drive to where you can see pretty landscapes). This could be adapted to rail circuits, perhaps with some promotional deals. People who go on vacation for 5 weeks at once could be induced to ride trains visiting a different city every few days, breaking what would be a flight or an unreasonably long rail trip into short segments; there are enough cycles in the European intercity rail network that people wouldn’t need to visit the same city twice. For example, one route could go Berlin-Prague-Vienna-Salzburg-Venice-Rome-Milan-Basel-Cologne-Berlin. This is a rather urban route; circuits that include non-urban rail destinations like Saxon Switzerland or the Black Forest are also viable, but the more destinations are added, the smaller the circuit can be.

Connecticut Pays Double for Substandard Trains

Alstom and Connecticut recently announced an order for 60 unpowered coaches, to cost $315 million. The cost – $5.25 million per 25 meter long car – is about twice as high as the norm for powered cars (electric multiple units, or EMUs), and close to the cost of an electric locomotive in Europe. It goes without saying that top officials at the Connecticut Departmemarknt of Transportation (CTDOT) need to lose their jobs over this.

The frustrating thing is that unlike the construction costs of physical infrastructure, the acquisition costs of rolling stock were not traditionally at a premium in the United States. Metro-North’s EMUs, the M8s, were acquired in 2006 for $760.3 million covering 300 cars (see PDF-p. 16); a subsequent order in 2013 for the LIRR and Metro-North was $1.83 billion for 676 cars. But then over the 2010s, the MTA’s commuter railways lost their ability to procure rolling stock at such cost. The $5.25 million/car cost is not even an artifact of recent inflation – the cost explosion was visible already on the eve of corona.

It appears that some of the trains are on their way to the fully wired Penn Station Access project, expanding Metro-North service to Penn Station via the line currently used only by Amtrak (today, Metro-North only serves Grand Central). The excuse I’ve heard is that it’s happening too fast for Metro-North or CTDOT to order proper EMUs. In reality, Penn Station Access has been under construction and previously under design for many years, and the regular replacement of the rolling stock on the other lines is also known well in advance.

Nor are these unpowered coaches some kind of fast off-the-shelf order. If they were, they wouldn’t cost like an electric locomotive. The Trains.com article says,

The 85-foot stainless steel cars, designed for at least a 40-year service life, will be based on Alstom’s X’Trapolis European EMU railcar, designed to meet Federal Railroad Administration requirements and tailored to meet Connecticut Department of Transportation needs.

In other words, Alstom took an existing EMU, gutted it to make it an unpowered coach, and then added extra weight on it for buff strength, to satisfy regulations that have already been superseded: the FRA rolling stock regulations were aligned with European norms in 2018, in dialog with the European vendors, and yet not a single one of the American commuter rail operators has seen fit to make use of the new regulations, instead insisting on buying substandard trains that no other market has any use for.

Ideally, this order should be stopped, even if CTDOT needs to pay a penalty – perhaps laying off top management would partly defray that penalty. The options should not be exercised. All future procurement should be done by people with experience buying trains that cost $100,000 per meter of length, not $210,000. If this is not done, then no public money should be given to such operations.

Rolling stock costs, Europe version

Meanwhile, in Europe, inflation hasn’t made trains cost $210,000 per meter of length. In the 2010s, nominal costs were actually decreasing for Swiss FLIRTs. Costs seem to have risen somewhat in the last few years, but overall, the cost inflation looks lower than the general inflation rate – manufacturing is getting more efficient, so the costs are falling, just as the costs of televisions and computers are falling.

Even with recent inflation, Alstom’s Coradia Stream order for RENFE cost 8.95 million € per train. I can’t find the train length – the press release only says six cars of which two are bilevel. An earlier press release says that this is 100 meters long in total, but I don’t believe this number – the bilevel Streams in Luxembourg are 27 meters long per car (and cost 2.53 million €/car; Wikipedia says the 34 trains break down as 22 short, 12 long), and other Streams tend to be longer per car as well. Bear in mind that even at 100 meters, it’s barely more than $100,000/m for a train that’s partly bilevel.

Other Coradia Stream orders have a similar or slightly higher cost. An order for 100 trains for DSB, all single-level, is 14 million €/train, including 15 years of full maintenance; Wikipedia says that these are 109 meter long. An order for 17 trains totaling 72 27-meter cars for the Rhine-Main region cost 218.2 million €. A three four-car, 84-meter train order for Abruzzo costs 19 million €.

To be fair, some orders look more expensive. For new regional operations through the soon to open Stuttgart 21 station, Baden-Württemberg has ordered 130 106-meter Streams, mixed single- and double-deck, for 2.5 billion €; I think this is the right comparison, but the cost may also include an option for 100 trains, which makes it clearer why this costs double what the rest of Europe pays. Baden-Württemberg’s Mireo order costs 300 million € for 28 three-car, 70 meter long EMUs – less than the Streams, more than the norm elsewhere in Europe for single-deck EMUs.

But what we don’t have in Europe is unpowered single-level coaches at $210,000/meter. That is ridiculous. Orders would be canceled and retendered at this cost, and the media would question the agencies and governments that approved such a waste.

It’s only Americans who have no standards at all for their government. Because they have no standards, they are okay with being led by people who cost the public several million dollars per day that they choose to wake up and go to work, like MTA head Janno Lieber or his predecessor Pat Foye, or many others at that level. Because those leaders are extraordinarily incompetent, they have not fixed what their respective agencies were bad at (physical infrastructure construction) but have presided over the destruction of what they used to be good at and no longer are (rolling stock procurement). The result is worse trains than any self-respecting first-world city gets for its commuter rail system, at a cost that is literally the highest in the world.

Pete Buttigieg, Bent Flyvbjerg, and My Pessimism About American Costs

A few days ago, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg appeared together with Bent Flyvbjerg to discuss megaprojects and construction costs. Flyvbjerg’s work on cost overruns is, in the English-speaking world, the starting point for any discussion of infrastructure costs, and I’m glad that it is finally noticed at such a high level.

Unfortunately, everything about the discussion, in context, makes me pessimistic. The appearance was about establishing a Center of Excellence at the Volpe Center to study project delivery and transmit best practices to various agencies; but, in context with what I’ve seen at agencies as well as federal regulators, it will not be able to figure out how to learn good practices the way it is currently set up, and what it can learn, it won’t be able to transmit. It’s sad, really, because Buttigieg clearly wants to be able to build; with his current position and presidential ambitions, his path upward relies on being able to build transportation megaprojects, but the current US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the political system writ large seem uninterested in reforming in the right direction.

What Flyvbjerg said

Flyvbjerg’s studies are predominantly about cost overruns, rather than absolute costs. The insights required to limit overruns are not the same as those required to reduce costs in general, but they intersect substantially, and in recent years Flyvbjerg has written more about absolute costs as well. The topics he discussed with Buttigieg are in this intersection.

In latter-day Flyvbjerg, there’s a great emphasis on standardization and modularity. He speaks favorably of Spain’s standardized construction methods as one reason for its famously low construction costs – costs that remain very low in the 2020s. We found something similar in our own work, seeing an increase of 50% in New York construction costs coming from lack of standardization in track and station systems; in our own organization, we conceive of standardization as a design standard, separate from the issue of project delivery, but fundamentally it’s all about how to deliver infrastructure construction cost-effectively.

To an extent, the American public-sector transportation project managers I know are aware of the issue of modularity, and are trying to apply it at various levels. However, they are hampered both by obstructive senior managers and political appointees and by federal regulations. For example, to build commuter rail stations, modular design requires technology that, due to supply chain issues, is not made in the United States; this requires a waiver from Buy America rules, which should be straightforward since “not made in the US” is a valid legal reason, but the relevant federal regulatory body is swamped with requests and takes too long to process them, and the federal regulators we spoke to were sympathetic but didn’t seem interested in processing requests faster.

But Flyvbjerg goes further than just asking for design modularity. He uses the expression “You’re unique, like everybody else.” He talks about learning from other projects, and Buttigieg seems to get it. This is really useful in the sense that nothing that is done in the United States is globally unique; California High-Speed Rail, among the projects they discussed, was an attempt to import technology that already 15 years ago had a long history in Western Europe and Japan. But that project was still planned without any attempt to learn the successful project delivery mechanisms of those older systems. And the Volpe Center, federal regulators, and federal politicos writ large seem uninterested in foreign learning even now.

What we’ve seen

Eric, Elif, Marco, and I have presented our findings to Americans at various levels – not to Buttigieg himself, but to people who I think may regularly interact with him; I can’t tell the exact level, not being familiar with government insider culture. Some of the people we’ve interacted with seem helpful, interested in adopting some of our findings, and willing to change things; others are not.

But what we’ve persistently seen is an unwillingness to just go ahead and learn from foreigners. The new Center of Excellence is run by Cynthia Maloney, who’s worked for Volpe and DOT since 2014 and worked for NASA before; I know nothing of her, but I know what she isn’t, which is an experienced transportation professional who has delivered cost-effective projects before, a type of person who does not exist in the United States and barely exists in the rest of the English-speaking world.

And there’s the rub. We’ve talked to Americans at these levels – regulators, agency heads, political advisors, appointees – and they are often interested in issues of procurement reform, interagency coordination, modular design, and so on. But when we mention the issue of learning from outside the US, they react negatively:

  • They rarely speak foreign languages or respect people who do, and therefore don’t try to read the literature if it’s not written in English, such as the Cour des Comptes report on Grand Paris Express.
  • They have no interest in hiring foreigners with successful experience in Europe or Asia – the only foreigner whose name comes up is Andy Byford, for his success in New York.
  • They don’t ever follow up with specifics that we bring up about Milan or Stockholm, let alone Istanbul, which Elif points out they don’t even register as a place that could be potentially worth looking at.
  • They sometimes even make excuses for why it’s not possible to replicate foreign success, in a way that makes it clear they haven’t engaged with the material; for a non-transportation example, a New York sanitation communications official said, with perfect confidence, that New York cannot learn from Rome, because Rome was leveled during WW2 (in fact, Rome was famously an open city).

Even the choice of which academics to learn from exhibits this bias. Flyvbjerg is very well-known in the English-speaking world as well as in countries that speak perfect nonnative English, including his own native Denmark, the rest of Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. But in Germany, France, and Southern Europe, people generally work in the local language, with much lower levels of globalization, and I think this is also the case in East Asia (except high-cost Hong Kong). And there’s simply no engagement with what people here do from the US; the UK appears somewhat better.

You can’t change the United States from a country that builds subways for $2 billion/km in New York and $1 billion/km elsewhere to a country that does so for $200 million/km if all you ever do is talk to other Americans. But the Volpe Center appears on track to do just that. The American political sphere is an extremely insulated place. One of the staffers we spoke to openly told us that it’s hard to sell foreign learning to the American public; well, it’s even harder to sell infrastructure when it’s said to cost $300 billion to turn the Northeast Corridor into a proper high-speed line, where here it would cost $20 billion. DOT seems to be choosing, unconsciously, not to have public transportation.

Urbanism for non-Tourists

There’s a common line among urbanists and advocates of car-free cities to the effect that all the nice places people go to for tourism are car-light, so why not have that at home? It’s usually phrased as “cities that people love” (for example, in Brent Toderian), but to that effect, mainly North American (or Australian) urbanists talk about how European cities are walkable, often in places where car use is rather high and it’s just the tourist ghetto that is walkable. Conversely, some of the most transit-oriented and dynamic cities in the developed world lack these features, or have them in rather unimportant places.

Normally, “Americans are wrong about Europe” is not that important in the grand scheme of things. The reason American cities with a handful of exceptions don’t have public transit isn’t that urbanist advocacy worries too much about pedestrianizing city center streets and too little about building subways to the rest of the city. Rather, the problem is the effect of tourism- and consumption-theoretic urbanism right here. It, of course, doesn’t come back from the United States – European urbanists don’t really follow American developments, which I’m reminded of every time a German activist on Mastodon or Reddit tries explaining metro construction costs to me. It’s an internal development, just one that is so parallel to how Americans analytically get Europe wrong that it’s worth discussing this in tandem.

The core of public transit

I wrote a blog post many years ago about what I called the in-between neighborhoods, and another after that. The two posts are rather Providence-centric – I lived there when I wrote the first post, in 2012 – but they describe something more general. The workhorses of public transit in healthy systems like New York’s or Berlin’s or Paris’s, or even barely-existing ones like Providence’s, are urban neighborhoods outside city center.

The definitions of both “urban” and “outside city center” are flexible, to be clear. In Providence, I was talking about the neighborhoods on what is now the R bus route, namely South Providence and the areas on North Main Street, plus some similar neighborhoods, including the East Side (the university neighborhood, the only one in Providence’s core that’s not poor) and Olneyville in the west. In larger, denser, more transit-oriented Berlin, those neighborhoods comprise the Wilhelmine Ring and thence stretch out well past the Ringbahn, sometimes even to city limits in those sectors where sufficient transit-oriented development has been built, and a single district like Neukölln may have more people than the entirety of Providence.

In Berlin, this can be seen in modal splits by borough; scroll down to the tables by borough, and go to page 45 of each PDF. The modal split does not at all peak in the center. Among the 12 boroughs, the one with the highest transit modal split for work trips is actually Marzahn-Hellersdorf, in deep East Berlin. The lowest car modal split is in the two centermost boroughs, Mitte and Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain, both with near-majorities for pedestrian and bike commutes – but the range of both of these modes is limited enough that it’s not supportable anywhere else in Berlin.

Nor is shrinking the city to the range of a bike going to help. Germany is full of cities of similar size to the combined total of Mitte and Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain; they have much higher car use, because what makes the center of Berlin work is the large concentration of jobs and other destinations brought about by the size of the city.

The same picture emerges in other transit cities. In Paris, the city itself is significant for the region’s public transit network, but its residents only comprise 30% of Francilien transit commuters, and even that figure should probably subtract out the outer areas of the city, which tourists don’t go to, like the entire northeast or the areas around and past the Boulevards of the Marshals. The city itself has much higher modal split than its suburbs, but that, again, depends on a thick network of jobs and other destinations that exist because of the dominance of the city as a commercial destination within a larger region.

Where tourists go

The in-between neighborhoods that drive the transit-oriented character of major cities are generally residential, or maybe mixed-use. Usually, they do not have tourist destinations. In Berlin, I advocate for tourists to visit Gropiusstadt and see its urbanism, but I get that people only do it if they’re especially interested in urban exploration. Instead, tourism clusters in city center; the museums are almost always in the center to the point that exceptions (like Balboa Park in San Diego) are notable, high-end hotels cluster in city center (the Los Angeles exception is again notable), and so on.

These tourism-oriented city centers often include pedestrianized street stretches. Berlin is rather atypical in Germany in not having such a stretch; in contrast, tourists can lose themselves in Marienplatz in Munich, or in various Altstadt areas of other cities, and forget that these cities have higher car use than Berlin, often much higher. For example, Leipzig’s car modal split for work trips is 47% (source, p. 13), higher than even Berlin’s highest-modal split borough, Spandau, which has 44% (Berlin overall is at 25%).

To be clear, Leipzig is, by most standards, fairly transit-oriented. Its tram network has healthy ridership, and its S-Bahn tunnel is a decent if imperfect compromise between the need to provide metro-like train service through the city and the need to provide long-distance regional rail to Halle and other independent cities in the region. But it should be more like Berlin and not the reverse.

Another feature of tourist cities is the premodern city core, with its charming very narrow streets. Berlin lacks such a core, and Paris only has a handful of such streets, mostly in the Latin Quarter. But Stockholm has an intact Early Modern core in Gamla Stan; it is for all intents and purposes a tourist ghetto, featuring retail catering to tourists and not much else. Stockholm is a very strong transit city with a monocentric core, but the core is not even at Gamla Stan, but to its north, north of T-Centralen, and thus the other tourist feature, the pedestrianized city center street with high-end retail, remains distinct from the premodern core.

Tellingly, these premodern cores exist even in thoroughly auto-oriented cities, ones with much weaker public transit than Leipzig. Italy supplies many examples of cities that were famously large in the Renaissance, and still have intact cores where one can visit the museums. A few years ago, Marco Chitti pointed out how Italian politicians, like foreign tourists, like taking photo-ops at farmers’ markets in small historic cities, while meanwhile, everyone in Italy does their shopping at suburban shopping centers offering far lower prices. To the tourist, Florence looks charming; to the resident, it is, in practice, a far more auto-oriented region than Stockholm or Berlin.

Quick Note: Andy Byford and Through-Running

At an event run by ReThinkNYC, Andy Byford spoke for five minutes in support of through-running at Penn Station. They put out the press release, so I feel it’s fine to reprint it in full here with some comments.

The timing works well for what I’m involved in. The Transportation and Land Use program at Marron is about to release a playable 3D model of a reimagined Penn Station designed around through-running and around maximally efficient passenger egress, with above-ground structures like Madison Square Garden removed; I was hoping for the model to come out in June in time for the debate about whether to extend the Garden’s operating permit, but that debate seems to be going the right way regardless, and the Garden itself is open to moving, for a price. Then, the Effective Transit Alliance is about to release a long report explaining the issue of through-running, why it’s good for New York, and how to implement it.

The bulk of what we’re about to do on this side of the TLU program for the next year is figure out timetable coordination for regional and intercity rail, so showing how everything would fit together should take some time, but the question of feasibility has already been answered; the work is about how to optimize questions like “where do high-speed bypasses go?” or “which curves is it worthwhile to fix?” or “which junctions should be grade-separated?”.

First of all I am honored to be in a conversation with people that I regard as absolutely luminaries in the transit space, people like Prof. [Robert] Paaswell, people like Dr. [Vukan] Vuchic. These are luminaries to me in the field of, not only transport planning, but in the particular area we’re talking about today, namely through-running.

I was very encouraged to hear Assemblymember [Tony] Simone talk about the benefit of avoiding demolishing a beautiful part of New York City, which although I live in D.C. now, is a city that is so dear to my heart. I feel I’m an adopted New Yorker, I love that place and it would break my heart to see beautiful buildings torn down on Eighth and Seventh Aves. when they don’t need to be.

I should say at the get-go, that I’m not speaking on behalf of Amtrak. I’m speaking as a railway professional. I’ve worked in transit now for 34 years. But I just feel this is a golden opportunity — and the assembly member mentioned that — and one of the other speakers also mentioned the benefits of through-running and made reference to what happened in London.  London learned that lesson. There are two effectively two cross London railroads.

There’s the Elizabeth Line, which I had the pleasure of opening with Her Majesty the Queen back in 2022, and that’s has been transformative in that where people used to have to jump on the Central Line, had to get off at Paddington and then go down to the Central Line and or down to Lancaster Gate and go through Central London to go to East London to Liverpool St. and then go out the other side, now they don’t have to.

The Central Line has been immediately relieved of pressure and you’ve got a state of the art, very high speed actually, through-service state of the art railway, under the wires. Beautiful stations, air conditioned, which at a stroke has been a game changer for London, connecting not only the key parts of Central London, but also Heathrow Airport, Paddington, Liverpool St., Canary Wharf and the City of London. It is a game changer. People in Frankfurt, people in Amsterdam, people in Paris and dare I say, New York, are probably gnashing their teeth because that was a game changer for London.

Well, I live in the States now, I’m going to be an American hopefully in a few years time and I want to do my bit for the States. So it seems to me that this is a golden opportunity for the U.S. and for New York City to have something similar to the Elizabeth Line, to have something that has that economic regenerative impact in New York.

And the other corridor of course, was Thameslink, that preceded Crossrail, but that’s the north/south corridor. There again, once upon a time you used to rock up in South London and have to get on the Tube you’ll be getting on the Vic Line or you’re getting on the Northern and have to go up to Euston or Kings Cross to go north.

Now, you don’t have to do that and what London has seen is the benefit of that cross-London traffic and that through-running because you’ve got not only the economic benefits of the City but the knock-on effect of north, south, east and west of businesses popping up, of housing being developed and of relief to the existing transport lines.

So I don’t know how this is going to pan out, but what I would say, Sam [Turvey]: is good for you for at least calling the question. This is a golden opportunity. It’s not just about building something that’s more aesthetically pleasing — important as though that is, Penn Station is kind of an embarrassment — but you can’t fix it by just putting in a few light boxes, by just heightening the ceilings, by just widening a few corridors.

If we’re going to do all of that, why not take the opportunity to fix the damn thing once and for all, which is, I’m going to say: get rid of the pillars, which means move MSG, but at the very least, do something with the track configuration to enable through-running.

So that’s it, that’s my pitch. I do stress that’s my personal opinion. I’m not speaking on behalf of Amtrak. I don’t know all the facts. If it was the case that someone asked me to have a look at this, I’ll be honored to do that, but I’m just speaking as a private person who cares about New York City, who cares about the States and who’s seen what good looks like along with people far smarter than me like Prof. Paaswell and Dr. Vuchic. So thank you so much.

How to Ensure You Won’t Have Public Transportation

In talking to both activists and government officials, I’ve encountered some assumptions that are clearly incompatible with any sort of viable public transportation provision. In some cases, when I don’t feel obliged to be polite, I immediately react, “Then you will not have public transit” or “you will not have trains.” These include both operations and construction. None of the political constraints mentioned in those conversations appears hard; it’s more a mental block on behalf of the people making this statement, who are uncomfortable with certain good practices. But there really is no alternative; social scientific results like various ridership elasticities can no more be broken than economic laws. Moreover, in some of these cases, half-measures are worse than nothing, leading reform among certain groups of activists to be worse than if those activists had done literally anything else with their spare time than advocacy.

The practices: operations

There’s a lot of resistance among American transit activists to the sort of bus operations that passengers who are not very poor are willing to rely on.

Frequency

American advocacy regarding frequency comes extremely compromised. The sort of frequencies that permit passengers to transfer between buses without timing the connection are single-digit headways, and the digit should probably not be a 9 or even an 8. Nova Xarxa successfully streamlined Barcelona’s bus network as a frequent grid, with buses coming every 3-8 minutes depending on the route. Vancouver and Toronto’s frequent grids are both in the 5-8 minute range.

However, American transit agencies think it’s unrealistic to provide a grid of routes running so frequently. Therefore, they compromise themselves down to a bus every 15 minutes. At 15 minutes, the wait time is too onerous; remember that these are buses that don’t run on a fixed schedule, so a transferring passenger is spending 15 minutes waiting in the average case and 30 minutes in the worst case. These are all city buses, with an in-vehicle trip time in the 15-30 minutes range. A bus system that requires 30 minutes of worst-case wait might as well not exist. If this replaces buses that run every 20 or 30 minutes on a fixed schedule, then this makes things worse.

Bus reliability

Buses naturally tend to bunch. The only lasting solution is active control, i.e. better dispatching. I’ve heard managers treat the prospects of hiring a few more dispatchers as a preposterous extravagance. This is not because of some political diktat; hiring freezes are stupid, but those managers don’t push back and don’t hire more dispatchers even when there’s no hiring freeze.

There’s a bit more interest in technological solutions, but when I was trying to explain conditional signal priority to some managers, they didn’t really get it. This is not quite the same issue – this is not a compromise due to perceived (almost never actual) political constraints, but rather lack of technical chops and disinterest in acquiring it. But lacking such chops, the marginally labor-intensive solution is the only one, and yet it’s not done.

Bus-rail integration

American managers love to slice the market; this includes transit managers, in a situation where the issue of frequency makes any makret segmentation a net negative to all riders. In the suburbs, this results in a segmentation of buses for the poor and trains for the rich; once the buses have average incomes that are only around half the area average, both managers and activists treat them as a kind of soup kitchen, and resist any attempt at integration.

This is less bad in the main cities – bus-subway integration in the American cities that have subways is good, except for Washington. But in Washington on Metro, and everywhere on commuter rail, there’s resistance to fare integration; New York makes incremental changes to reduce the commuter rail fare premium, but until fares are equalized and transfers made free, this is just a subsidy to the rich segment of the market, rather than a breaking down of the segmentation.

The practices: construction and governance

I bundle governance and construction because, in practice, all the examples I’ve seen of people compromising their own ability to do cost reform involve governance.

Learning from others

At a meeting with some government officials to discuss our costs report, one of the people involved asked us if there are any good examples from the United States, saying that as a matter of politics, it’s hard to get Americans to adapt foreign governance schemes. I don’t know how important this person was; long-time readers know that I don’t know Washington Bureaucratese or its Brussels, Albany, Sacramento, etc. equivalents, and in particular I can’t tell from a title, CV, or social cues whether I’m talking to a decider or a flunky. I certainly did not say “Okay, then you won’t have cost-effective construction, and over time, Americans will learn that the government can’t do anything”; I tried explaining why no, it’s really important to learn from foreigners, especially nonnative Anglophones, and I don’t think it got through.

Building up state capacity

Something about Americans makes them hostile to the idea that the government overtly governs. This is not because they’re inherently ungovernable, but because some of them like to pretend to be. This has led to workarounds, which Bring Back the Bureaucrats by John DiIulio (this is DIIULIO in all caps, not DILULIO) calls the leviathan by proxy model, in which the state is outsourced to consultants. Thus, dismantling the state and instead calling in consultants is supposedly the only way to get Americans to accept government spending. This was said to us, at the same meeting as in the above section, by a different person.

This is, like most political claims that justify inaction, bunk. Consultants are not a popular group in the broad public. “This all goes to consultants” is a standard line justifying misturst of government, regardless of politics, to the point that generic anti-everything populists like to make consultants public enemy #1. In New York, even the unions make this one of their rallying cries in opposition to various kinds of outsourcing; there’s no excuse there to keep hiring consultants to do design and then not knowing how to manage them, where what the MTA should do is replace its leadership with people who know better and staff up to the tune of a four-figure planning and engineering department. It costs money. It costs less money than the New York premium for construction, the difference amounting to around a full order of magnitude.

Saying no to surplus extraction

The United States abounds with examples of infrastructure projects that got outside funding, which could be federal, or even just state if the scale is small enough, that local departments took as opportunities for getting other people’s money.

The solution there is simple: just say no. This requires overruling local regulators, but I routinely see states do it when they care to – Long Island’s entire group of interests, including the LIRR, local officials, and state electeds, opposed Metro-North’s Penn Station Access due to turf battles over train slots into Penn Station that were not even in shortage, until Andrew Cuomo fired LIRR head Helena Williams and all of those supposedly intractable voices were silenced. The ability of California High-Speed Rail to defeat rich NIMBYs in Silicon Valley is also notable; the project is moribund, but not because of NIMBYs.

And somehow, when a municipal fire department or parks department makes demand, the immediate reaction in the same country that did the above is to give in. Federal officials who I’m fairly certain are important deciders told me stories about how “in our system of government” (exact words) there is expectation of municipal autonomy and it breaks some unwritten covenant to interfere when a fire department refuses to certify light rail construction that meets fire code, as in suburban Seattle, because the department wants it to go beyond the code. The state that does not take responsibility and respond appropriately – which in this case ranges from disestablishing the fire department in question to disestablishing the entire suburb – is the state that will not really be able to expand its urban rail network, which is really sad since Seattle’s last extension was good and its high rate of housing growth makes it a good place to invest.

Benchmarking to an external world

Activists and managers may tell themselves that they’re just following some kind of necessary political logic. But at the end of the day, neither the passengers nor the contractors care. If the political logic dictates that the bus system be bad, then passengers will just not use it, and instead get cars and drive and vote against any further increases in transit funding due to memory of its low quality. Likewise, if the political logic dictates that capital construction be run by incompetents with no successful (i.e. non-Anglosphere) experience who can’t say no to requests for other people’s money and who mismanage the consultants, then the region will just not be able to build, even if, like Seattle, it clearly wants to. There’s an external world out there and not just the machinations of political insiders.