Penn Station Tracks

In 2015, I argued that New York Penn Station should be replaced with a hole in the ground, and such a station would have sufficient capacity. I will defend those posts: in the 21st century, elaborate stations are not required for high-quality rail service, and it’s more important to have good passenger egress and intermodal connections than a signature station. The topic of this post is more niche: which rail lines should connect to Penn Station?

The three-line system

In all writing I’ve done on the subject since around 2010, I’ve assumed that Penn Station should be a three-line stations. In blog posts about regional rail for New York I’ve consistently called them Lines 1, 2, and 3; one map can be found in this post, with slightly less expansive version on Google Maps, and, consistently, Line 1 (red) is the existing Northeast Corridor, Line 2 (green) runs along the same route but uses the Gateway tunnel across the Hudson and then goes via Grand Central, and Line 3 (orange) connects the Empire Connection to the LIRR via a slightly realigned approach, otherwise using existing tracks.

At the station, their order from south to north is 2, 1, 3; the numbers are chronological (1 preexists, 2 is a higher priority to build than 3). Gateway is to enter Penn Station south of the existing tunnel and the room for a Grand Central connection is to the south (31st Street), forcing that line to be the southernmost. The East River Tunnels go under 32nd and 33rd, each as a track pair going in opposite directions rather than 32nd running eastbound and 33rd westbound, and the track pair under 33rd has a better connection to the LIRR while that under 32nd has a better connection across the Hudson; the Empire Connection loops under the Hudson tunnel to connect to southern tracks, but that’s a single-track link and needs to be doubled anyway, so it might as well be realigned.

With three lines and six approach tracks, Penn Station should have 12 platform tracks: each approach track should split into two and the two tracks should serve the same platform, a solution used for the expensive but operationally sound Stuttgart 21 project. There should not be any flexibility, save perhaps some emergency crossovers at the station, not to be used in service: the required throughput is so extensive that such flexibility is fake, reducing capacity by almost as much as the full closure of a track.

The footprint of the station looks around 155 meters wide gross, or around 145 net, corresponding to 24 per platform. The total width of the tracks is 1.7 (track center to platform) plus 4.5 (distance between track centers; Shinkansen regulations say 4.3) plus around 2 if a safety zone between each track pair is desired, which is a total of about 8 meters. The platform width is then 24 – 8 = 16. If a heavy column between two tracks adjacent to different platforms is required, this adds about another meter to maintain the safety zones, for a total of 9, resulting in 15-meter platforms.

15-meter platforms are extremely wide. Châtelet-Les Halles’s RER A and B platforms are 17 meters, and are wider than necessary; they in contrast have insufficient vertical circulation at rush hour. At 15 meters, there’s room for six escalators per access point and possibly also a staircase; at 16, there’s definitely room for the staircase. Six escalators can run without any rush hour variation, always three up and three down, and would still clear a full train with many standees in a minute. I do not foresee any capacity problems at the station if it is built this way.

But this leads to the question: since the platforms are so oversize, perhaps it is useful to have more of them at lower width?

The four-line system

Penn Station could potentially serve not three lines but four. Right now it only has infrastructure for a line and a half, and with Gateway it would have one and two halves; even three looks like a generational project. But there’s good cause to think even farther ahead and make room for a fourth line: a dedicated intercity railway. The four-line system would maintain Lines 1, 2, and 3 as above, but then add an unnumbered line with no regional trains, only intercity train.

This comes out of my ridership model for high-speed rail for the United States: at full buildout, the system would be difficult to fit into an approach track with regional trains, and regional trains would only be able to run every 5 minutes or even worse, rather than every 2 or 2.5. Moreover, once high-speed rail exists on the Northeast Corridor, the return on investment on extensions is so great that it is likely that such extensions will happen. Politics make such extensions even more favorable: high-profile investment in the Northeast’s intercity rail and in New York is likely to lead to demand for such investment in other regions, regardless of the business case, and it is fortunate that the business case for such extensions is strong independently of the politics.

I presume that, from south to north, the platform order should be Line 2 eastbound, Line 2 westbound, intercity eastbound, Line 1 eastbound, Line 1 westbound, intercity westbound, Line 3 eastbound, Line 3 westbound. The problem here is that Penn Station’s footprint is only adjacent to three east-west streets, not four, and so the intercity tunnels have to duck under private property, and the best place for them going east is to act as 31.5th and 32.5th Streets. Using the existing tunnels and then displacing regional rail to new tunnels is also possible, but less desirable: the existing tunnels have small diameter, and so it’s easier to keep them lower-speed while the new tunnels get to be bigger and support 200 km/h while maintaining enough free air to avoid creating pressure problems in passengers’ ears.

Under this system, the existing footprint of Penn Station is wide enough for 18 meters gross per each of the eight platforms, or 10 meters net. This is not out of the question, and would ordinarily be completely fine: it’s enough for four escalators per access point, or three and a staircase. At Penn Station I am slightly squeamish purely because on Lines 1 and 3 it’s the only city center station, and thus more crowded than the usual for a regional train station.

But it’s possible to slightly widen the footprint. Under no circumstances should there be any digging past the footprint of 31st and 33rd Streets: the cost of construction under existing buildings is too high. Plans for demolishing the block between 30th and 31st Streets (Block 780) are in an advanced stage, related to both a real estate deal with Vornado and plans for Penn Station South expansion, but they are extraordinarily expensive (around $10 billion at this point), and redevelopment of the block is easier on firma than over rail tracks. For all intents and purposes, the maximum usable footprint is between the lot lines of 31st and 33rd, which is 175 meters gross, perhaps 160 net with some distance between the dig and the lot line.

With 160 net meters, there are 20 meters per platform with tracks, or 12 per platform alone. This is wide enough for anything: four escalators and a staircase fit, which has enough capacity (albeit with some compromises) with permanent escalator directionality and more than enough if escalators run three-and-one at rush hour.

The benefits of creating about two extra meters per platform should be weighed against the cost of adding to the footprint of Penn Station, which is not $10 billion but also not zero, and I don’t want to make pronouncements without seeing a reliable estimate. This also depends on the difficulty of building intercity rail tunnels under private property.

Coordinated planning

A coordinated Penn Station rebuild plan should be considered together with some plan for how to use those tracks. Infrastructure investment must always come with a precise service plan, with sample timetables to the minute shared with the public for democratic review.

The upshot is that Penn Station rebuild must come with a good idea of how much service the region expects to run. A high-speed rail plan argues in favor of the four-line system, provided the cost of the extra tunnels is reasonable (low-to-mid single-digit billions; $10 billion is far too high). Otherwise, the three-line system is better.

Leapfrogging

Eric Stoothoff is the chief engineer of the MBTA. Last month, he offered the following excuse for why the MBTA just deelectrified the trolleybuses in Cambridge, replacing them with diesel buses and hoping in a few years to obtain battery-electric buses (BEBs):

We want to leapfrog Europe, not play catch-up. If BEBs are the future, why not have the future now?

https://twitter.com/mbtaroc/status/1493768313154904073

Unfortunately for Stoothoff, BEB technology still does not work in freezing temperatures. The current state of it is buses that have diesel heaters – otherwise the battery drains too fast in winter, as it did three years ago when I reported it for CityLab.

The actual cutting edge of electric bus technology is in-motion charging (IMC), in which the bus spends part of the route under wire and then part under battery, with an off-wire range of about 10 km. IMC is especially valuable for Boston, which is unusual for an American city in having an unplanned street network in which the same trunk road splits into several farther out, and then the trunk can be wired. Cambridge’s now-defunct trolleybus network had a short trunk, but could still be an attractive IMC target. In Boston proper, Washington Street is a valuable trunk for wire, with routes splitting off-wire to destinations in Dorchester and Mattapan farther south.

Stoothoff seems unaware of this, because he is an insular, ignorant, incurious manager. He uses leapfrogging as an excuse not to learn. Other American agencies buy BEBs, and then find that they don’t work in winter without diesel heaters, and instead of seeing what Europe does, he talks of leapfrogging.

Leapfrogging means something completely different. It means skipping an intermediate tech that has been obsoleted by newer tech. A classic example of leapfrogging is China’s phone network: by the time China developed enough for mass use of phones, in the 2000s, cellular phones were ubiquitous and mature enough that China skipped wired phones entirely, and did not have to spend money on building phone cable infrastructure in rural areas. More recently, mobile payments are connecting rural areas in Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari to banking without the need for physical branches.

On the level of infrastructure, it makes sense: there is no need to invest in intermediate technology if something better is available. In the realm of rail, there are a lot of technological dead-ends that nobody needs to develop anymore – superseded electrification standards, experimental jet- or nuclear-powered trains, obsolete track geometry standards, etc. Train stations today are designed differently from in the steam era: the train is not noxious to be nearby, so the train shed is integrated into the passenger concourse, and train turn times are short, permitting much smaller station footprints even in major cities.

But on the level of knowledge, it’s daft. Leapfrogging requires knowing what the cutting edge is. Chinese development experts know exactly what technology is used in developed countries and what they should imitate and what they can bypass. The PLA began its modernization process in 1991 after Desert Storm and only began innovating rather than implementing NATO standards a few years ago. African development experts are generally aware of trends in rich countries as well.

This knowledge is especially important in public transportation, because many legacy cities had higher ridership before WW2 than they do today and there’s a lot of nostalgia for that era. Understanding why the modern train station can be compact and platform-centric, without a waiting concourse and space for a telegraph operator and baggage handlers, is crucial in limiting the construction costs of stations on new lines. Without such understanding, it’s easy to imitate historic stations; even in Europe, where trains are integrated into train sheds without the separate waiting halls characteristic of North America, most major-city stations are historic and very big, because they’re inherited from when they needed to be and the land was at the edge of the city and therefore cheaper.

But what one does not do is tear up legacy infrastructure that is still useful. Europe’s great train terminals are almost all oversize, but there’s no point in blowing them up and shrinking them just because it’s more modern. Urban renewal projects at train stations are common, but they replace goods yards that left the cities alongside industry, not passenger circulation. And at least shrinking station footprints has redevelopment value in major city centers; deelectrifying trolleybuses has no such value.

So under no circumstances should cities with existing trolleys remove the tail electrification for IMC. This is not what IMC-using cities do – they use IMC to expand the network rather than shrink it. It may be too late for Boston, but San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver should keep what they have.

And it’s even worse, because Stoothoff wasn’t justifying deelectrifying on the way to the future. No: he misstated what the future is. His incuriosity is such that he assumes BEBs are the future, from a position of interacting with American agencies that think the same and find fixed wire infrastructure too hard. Peripheries that engage in leapfrogging are voracious consumer of the metropole’s learning in order to apply it to their own circumstances, but Stoothoff cannot even bring himself to admit that the United States is a periphery and needs to absorb this knowledge.

A better MBTA is one in which Stoothoff is replaced with a more competent chief engineer, perhaps hired from abroad. But it’s not just him. He’s a removable obstacle to progress, but there are many like him – many managers who assume the future is one thing when it’s the other, and use their wrong beliefs to justify not imitating best practices. They have an assortment of excuses, and misstating what technological leapfrogging is is among them.

What’s going on in Czechia?

Prague has one of Europe’s busiest metros, and what looks like the highest per capita rail ridership in not just Europe but also the non-Tokyo world. And yet, expansion is seeing exploding costs.

In our database, the past extensions in Prague are not especially expensive. The most recent expansion to open was that of Line A to Nemocnine Motol, built 2010-5. It cost 20.2 billion CZK for 6.1 km, or 3.3 billion CZK/km; in PPP dollars, this is around $250 million/km. This is just how much things in Czechia would cost. The previous extension was that of Line C to Letňany, built 2004-8; it cost 15 billion CZK/4.6 km, the same as the later Line A extension per km, and in the interim period, Czechia had practically no inflation. Both lines had a feature that should slightly suppress costs: the Line C extension was partly cut-and-cover and partly bored, and the Line A extension, otherwise fully underground, has a daylit terminus built into the side of a hill.

And now Prague is building Line D, at a far higher cost. The current estimate is 73 billion CZK/10.5 km. This is in PPP terms $540 million per km, making it the most expensive metro (not S-Bahn) line I know of in Continental Europe, and only marginally cheaper per km than the Battersea extension of the Northern line in London.

The map provided in the link shows the line not even going all the way to city center. Its northern terminus, Náměstí Míru, connects with Line A, is in the center, but is just outside the historic core where the three current lines meet; from there the line is to go south, intersecting Line C peripherally and Line B not at all. Nor is the line quite fully underground – like the Nemocnine Motol extension, it has minor daylit segments, including a river crossing, a station, and a depot; overall, it looks 90% underground, not 100%.

I do not know what’s going on there. The Czech economy is growing, but there’s no singular boom that should explain why the 2020s are so profoundly different from the 2000s and 10s. On my Twitch stream, a Czech commenter speculated that the contractor ecosystem is breaking, with only 5-6 contractors, all domestic, and reticence to hire foreign, whereas for example in Sweden there’s a steady influx of Turkish and Chinese contractors, and in the private sector Prague’s construction sites are full of immigrants from poorer countries. But then Skanska was one of the lead contractors for the extension to Letňany.

Radial Metro Design on Rivers

The most common and most useful design paradigm for an urban metro system is radial. Subway lines should be running across the city, passing through city center with transfers to other radial lines; larger cities can also support a circumferential line, or for the largest megacities (like Moscow) two, and unless there are multiple circumferentials, every pair of lines should intersect with a transfer. For example, here is Prague:

There are three lines, meeting in a Soviet triangle, running from one side of city center to the other. Together with an intact tramway network, this boosts Prague’s annual urban rail ridership to around 830 million a year, which is 310/capita, a figure that isn’t far lower than Tokyo’s and is higher than anywhere else I can think of.

But in some cities – but not Prague – there’s a kink in the radial design. For example, here’s Kyiv, with planned expansion:

The three existing lines form a perfect Soviet triangle. Line 4, Podilsko-Vyhurivska, is under construction and radial as well. And then there is the under-construction eastern extension of Line 3, Syretsko-Pecherska, looping back to meet Line 1 at Darnytsia. This is not standard radial design. But it’s fully understandable given the situation of Kyiv.

Kyiv has a division into left-bank and right-bank Kyiv. The Dnipro is, with islets included, 1-2 km wide, one of the widest rivers of Europe. There are few bridges. The main of the city is on the right bank, but left-bank Kyiv has its own independent center around Darnytsia, encouraged by the city’s development plan precisely because the river is such an obstacle.

The river division is not universal. Prague doesn’t quite have it – the Vltava is 160-200 m wide and there are many bridge crossings, so even though city center grew along the right bank, much of the near-center is on the left bank. The city is also hilly enough that there’s no coherent left- vs. right-bank identity, and the streetcar system is sufficient to connect left-bank neighborhoods with each other without passing through city center.

Conversely, London does have this division. Bank terms are not used there – one says North and South London – but the situation is the same, even though the Thames at 250 meters is not much wider than the Vltava, and has many crossings as well. Nonetheless, a South London identity exists, defined by paucity of river crossings to East London (but not to Central or West London), and by its own centers at Waterloo and London Bridge.

As a result, the radial Underground network forms a coherent sub-network in South London. Just as the Kyiv Metro is planned to feature a loop back on Line 3 in left-bank Kyiv starting 2023, London built the Victoria line to swerve east to cross each trunk of the Northern line twice, once in North London and once in South London, and the crossing with the main line at Stockwell is even cross-platform. Unfortunately, the South London crossing with the Battersea extension is without a transfer, a deliberate design decision made to reduce ridership and perhaps reduce crowding on the Vic.

Finally, New York should think explicitly in terms of right- and wrong-side parts of the city, the right side referring to city center, that is Manhattan. New York’s subway network is not radial, but the same principles apply just the same. There is a strong wrong-side identity for Brooklyn, and historically Downtown Brooklyn was a very large business center; today it remains near-tied with Long Island City for largest job center in the region outside Manhattan. Early-20th century designers did not think in such comparative terms but they understood that it was valuable to connect Brooklyn homes with Brooklyn jobs, and thus most subway lines in Brooklyn converge on Downtown Brooklyn, and only the J/M/Z and the L go directly from Williamsburg to Manhattan.

By a fluke, all four subway lines in Queens connect to Manhattan via Long Island City, the nearest neighborhood to Midtown. Thus, a business center emerged there, growing to rival Downtown Brooklyn; just as the city’s geography can create a subway network, the subway network can create the city’s geography.

Why is Princeton Trying to Downgrade the Dinky?

Regular users of the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey know that there is a short branch off the line serving Princeton. Mainline trains do not use it – they continue between New York and Trenton – but a two-car shuttle, affectionately called the Dinky, connects the city with the train station. Historically, this is because the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey is a then-high-speed rail cutoff from 1863, which cut off Princeton from the old line. Trains run back and forth, with timed connections between New York (but not Trenton) and Princeton.

The Princeton stop on the Dinky, as can be seen in the satellite image, lies just outside the historic municipal limits of Princeton (since merged with the surrounding township). It serves the university fairly well, but is 800 meters at closest approach to the town’s main street, Nassau Street. So there has been a study for what to do to improve city access, in which a tram-train option was studied, looked good, and was dropped anyway. There are two options left: status quo, and a downgrade of the right-of-way to light rail with buses using the same corridor.

Unfortunately, transit advocates I respect, like Sandy Johnston, think the downgrade is an upgrade. So let me explain why in fact the light rail and bus option is inferior to current commuter rail operations.

The current use of the Dinky is as a connector to the Northeast Corridor. There is approximately nothing else at Princeton Junction: it’s one of the two busiest suburban stations in New Jersey, but like the other top station, Metropark, it’s a park-and-ride, designed exclusively for car-train interface. People who ride the Dinky do so to get to New York.

This means that the timed transfer with the mainline trains is critical. Frequency on the Dinky is irrelevant: all ridership from Princeton Junction into the town is going to be on the first train or bus after the mainline trains arrive, and almost all ridership to the junction is going to be on the last train that makes the connection. While frequency is not important except insofar as it matches that of the mainline, on-train capacity is important. My 2015 recollection is that off-peak ridership on the Dinky is maybe enough to fill an articulated bus (which New Jersey Transit only runs in Newark), maybe enough for a standard bus, depending on time of day – standees are likely, and standing on a bus is an awful passenger experience. At rush hour, the Dinky runs three-car trains (update 2022-2-18: no, it’s two-car trains) and they’re full.

The timed transfer is so important that the discussion of how to improve service must center how to make the transfer more efficient. The ideal improvement should be to regularize the timetable on the mainline commuter trains, and ensure that trains in opposite directions serve Princeton Junction around the same time (this is called a knot) so that the Dinky can connect to Trenton too, and even to Philadelphia with another timed transfer at Trenton or even through-service if that fits the New Jersey Transit and SEPTA schedules.

Sandy points out to me that while the Dinky only connects Princeton with the mainline, the right-of-way of the Dinky can serve more destinations – namely, the Route 1 job cluster, visible on the map as a line of office parks.

However, bus service from town to Route 1 is unlikely to succeed. It’s going to struggle to run sufficient frequency for what it needs, even as lower-frequency rail is sufficient for the Dinky’s current role:

  • Route 1 is not on the way between town and the station – there would have to be separate buses to Route 1 from the service to the train station (which I presume will stay on rail even if the downgrade is picked). This means there’s no bundling of destinations – the buses to Route 1 have to live off of Princeton-Route 1 trips.
  • Route 1 is a freeway with destinations located somewhat away, at automobile scale. Buses can stop on the side of the road but the walk is not great on the same side of the road and hostile and unsafe if crossing the road is required. A more pleasant experience is only possible if buses turn onto side roads, splitting frequency or increasing trip times.
  • Route 1 is not a large job center. OnTheMap says that between the route of the Dinky and the junction with I-295 beyond the above satellite image, which ends at Quakerbridge Road, there are 21,000 jobs. The origins of those jobs are dispersed – only 5,000 come from within the county, and only 368 come from within Princeton.
  • Conversely, the short distance traveled means that high frequency is crucial. A one-way trip from the townhouses just north of Nassau Street to the center of the Route 1 cluster along the right-of-way of the Dinky is 5.5 km, which at BRT and freeway speed is around 10 minutes one-way; a bus running less than once every 10 minutes might as well not run – but there is no chance for such a bus to fill at current demand.

Of course, the analysis of Route 1 assumes current development patterns stay with no or moderate change. A bigger change, such as greater development along Route 1 with sprawl repair, can make this option pencil out; O&D volumes need to rise by a factor of 3 assuming 100% transit modal split, or more if modal split is lower (which it invariably is, Route 1 is not Manhattan).

But then that raises the question – why engage in development in sprawl around a plan to downgrade a rail service?

If sprawl repair is plausible, then make Princeton more bikable and then set up bike lanes on Route 1 so that people can cycle to Route 1 jobs. The same bike lanes can also connect to the Dinky, with bike parking at the station, or even potentially at Princeton Junction if it’s faster to bike those 4 km than to ride a train and transfer. In the long run, all buses are going to have to be replaced by bikes anyway – bus operating costs are only going to go up.

And if redevelopment is plausible, look again at the satellite image and see what the land use at the existing train stations is like. Princeton is one of the most expensive places in the United States, and the Dinky station has a golf course on one side; that’s 0.5 km^2 of land, or, as I prefer to think of it, 50,000 housing units. Another 0.05 km^2 consists of parking lots right near the station, and can and should be redeveloped as a town center extension for a population that can swamp the existing town population by a factor of 4. The parking lots at Princeton Junction and the undeveloped land between them are another 0.4 km^2 of prime real estate.

In general, I cannot think of any railway where service would be improved by a downgrade from mainline rail to bus. But the Dinky has specific issues making such a downgrade especially deleterious for current users, namely the need for a timed connection, while the proposed source of new trips, namely Route 1, is too weak to be worth much. Thankfully, a no-build option keeping the status quo is still under consideration, and I hope that the region chooses it and invests in making the Dinky better rather than in replacing it.

Notes on Accessibility and Chronic Pain

I’m surrounded by people who have various chronic pain disorders. I’m not sure why this is; people with disabilities tend to be marginalized and made invisible, and this is especially true for disabilities other than what’s become the universal symbol for the community, the wheelchair. I speculate that queer communities make chronic pain more visible because they normalize talking about one’s body, and this way people casually tell me about their Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), their chronic fatigue, their sciatica, their epilepsy, their motion sickness, their sensory issues, their car crash injuries. Not all of the people I’ve spoken to about this in the last five years are queer, but a hefty proportion are, likely a majority, and the rest tend to be public transit advocates who are sensitive to this issue. This makes it not a perfect ethnography, but I do think the combination of talking to experts and members of the lay public is good at showing some of what transit planners have unfortunately so far overlooked.

The issue of chronic pain

Public accommodations for disabled people look at a few classes of disabilities. Wheelchair users are the best-known and form the universal symbol for the group, to the point that the name of the program in Britain is “step-free access”; it makes sense since elevator installation on subways is the most expensive retrofit required, but is not the only issue. Two additional important classes are blind and deaf people; for their benefits, systems install tactile pavements on platforms and arrange things so that station announcements are both visible from the train and clearly audible.

However, chronic pain syndromes are not on the list of disabilities to be so covered by design standards. The assumption is that invisible disabilities do not really exist; one person suffering from both EDS and complications from a debilitating car crash told me that they considered walking around with a cane, not because they needed it, but because otherwise people would assume they were able-bodied and freely run into them and not accommodate their need for a seat at public facilities.

Compounding this issue is the matter of spoons. Spoons are, in the disability community, an analog of hit points or mana pool in RPGs, an abstracted level of energy that is drained by routine activities, such as household chores, work, having a difficult conversation with a romantic partner, or dealing with medical care. In addition to having a more limited pool of spoons, people with disabilities also have to deal with a medical care system that is often adversarial and hostile; doctors flat out disbelieve patients’ pain, especially when they are women or racial minorities, which issue has been publicized more broadly with post-viral fatigue for long covid. The upshot of spoons is that people with disabilities can expend a spoon and act in ways that do not appear different from the behavior of able-bodied people, such as boarding a bus with poor ride quality, but they can’t do so consistently, and accessibility standards should acknowledge this and figure out how to minimize spoon consumption.

The issue of long covid makes accommodations for people with chronic pain an especially pertinent issue. Corona is not the first infection to lead to long-term ill effects, but because it is so much more virulent than the flu and the cold, it affects many more people, including many middle-class people who are used to getting what they need from the medical system to obtain a diagnosis. A hefty fraction of the population has been made permanently disabled, outside corona fortresses like Taiwan, and this means that going forward, access for this class of people will be a serious public issue.

Disability and harassment

People with disabilities do not expect the general public or any authority to be sympathetic to them or their needs. Twitter is full of threads giving people advice about how to deal with hostile doctors, and both in public and in private, people who require regular medical care think little of the medical establishment; I suspect one of the connections with queerness is that trans people tend to have a similar negative experience.

This lack of sympathy includes outright harassment. It’s lesser-known than sexual harassment, but it follows a similar pattern: one asshole makes derisive or threatening remarks, and the general public stands by. In some cases, the public may want to be helpful but not know how and thereby make things worse: one of my interviewees spoke of a friend who has seizures and is afraid to take public transport because if they have an episode on a bus then people might try to help them in the wrong way such as sticking a spoon in their mouth, which could lead to broken teeth.

The people I’ve interviewed who mentioned harassment or public hostility to me, including women and men, did not propose the same mechanisms as women who are afraid of sexual harassment. Women who worry about sexual harassment tend to complain about a general fear of crime, mentioning problems like poor lighting, obstructed sight lines, and loitering, and positives like nearby retail and safety in numbers. I have not heard the same from the disabled people I’ve spoken to. To the extent there’s a specific ask, it’s better public awareness and training, in common with people with other disabilities (wheelchair users object to strangers touching their wheelchairs without permission).

Trains, buses, and automobiles

Most of my interviewees have said that they prefer trains to buses, often strongly. Trains have better ride quality; buses are rickety and make them feel more fatigued, motion sick, or in outright pain. Some did not mention mode choice either way; I don’t recall any who explicitly said they are indifferent between bus and rail transit. The better ride quality of trains must be viewed as a key factor behind the rail bias, the observation that at equal speed and other amenities, trains get around 40% more ridership than buses.

Other opinions are variable. Some have said that even trains induce fatigue, and as a result, they drive everywhere; others have explicitly said the otherwise and prefer trains to cars on ride quality and motion sickness grounds. Bikes are less clear – the German chronic pain podcaster I talked to said that she has difficulty riding bikes but public transit is fine, and the Americans I’ve talked to did not say much about bikes, but then American cities are in general not nearly as bike-friendly as Berlin.

The magnitude of the bus effect varies by person, type of bus, and system. Reasons people have cited for avoiding buses include sudden acceleration and deceleration cycles, uncomfortable seats, insufficient straps to hold on, brake squeal, old buses in general, the noise and rattling of the diesel engine, and the experience of waiting at a bus stop on the street with nowhere to sit. Trolleybuses, lacking a diesel engine, are better according to some but not all people I have spoken to. One person emphasized that driving on the same arterial road used by a bus was much better than riding the bus, singling out Denver for its poor ride quality in comparison with the better buses of Sydney.

Trains vary in quality too. One interviewee complained that the ride quality on the Washington Metro deteriorated after the system switched from automatic (albeit not driverless) operation with smooth acceleration and braking to manual driving, leading to motion sickness.

One thing I did not hear commonly despite asking multiple times was complaints about walking. To the contrary, one source, familiar with modern transit planning conventions, explicitly said they’re fine with walking longer to consolidated stops, and another would walk longer distances to the subway to avoid the bus. But one planner, Allan Rosen who has proposed many bus reforms in New York, has argued in public that his sciatica makes walking longer to the bus stop more difficult.

The need for seats

It’s understood that in public accommodations, the disabled, elderly, and pregnant should have first priority for seats. Signs and PSAs remind passengers on trains and buses to get up if they see such a person, designating priority seats near the doors; there are also strong social norms about getting up for elderly people (my mother taught me this when I started riding the bus alone, at age 10).

This is compounded for people with invisible disabilities. Passengers will not spontaneously get up for someone who is in physical pain. When I would get sick enough that my legs hurt, I had no expectation of being able to get people to give me a seat, and had to seize what I could on Vancouver buses. This is one of the reasons as mentioned above one of my sources considered walking with a cane, which they otherwise did not need.

The implication is that seats must be available. Every bus stop must have a bench and shelter on a system that expects people who are not desperately poor to ride public transport. Train stations and other public facilities must have ample seating space for the general public as well; the hostile architecture trend of eliminating seating in order to repel homeless people must cease.

On vehicles, the seating-standing space tradeoff is murkier. Trains that cram many seats into the same space at the expense of standing space end up cramped. Moreover, for the people I’ve interviewed, a short period of standing typical of urban rail trips, of perhaps 10 minutes or even 20, is tolerable, even at the expense of some spoon expenditure.

Motion sickness

There is ample literature studying motion sickness on various forms of transport, public and private. Examples include Dobie et al cited in Persson, and Cohen et al, regarding trains; Griffin-Turner 1 and 2 regarding buses; and Li-Reda-Butz and Ittner-Mühlbacher-Weisswange regarding car drivers and passengers with further implications to buses.

One of my sources also told me of getting vertigo on the long escalators of the deepest stations of the Washington Metro, those on the Red Line as it transitions from running under hilly terrain to ducking under Rock Creek.

In general, motion sickness levels show great heterogeneity. Backward-facing seats, which the literature implies are less comfortable and which get a 5% discount on Korean high-speed trains, are no trouble for those sources who I asked directly, and yet they are unusually bad for me, an otherwise able-bodied person. Much depends on exact characteristics of acceleration, smoothness of ride, and road quality.

Sensory issues

A pair of people who I interviewed together told me about sensory issues. Those are even worse-known than physical chronic pain, and have implications for system design that are at odds with current norms. The issue is that of lighting quality: lighting that is too harsh or unnatural can induce migraines and repel passengers. The Denver system, already bad for its physical ride quality, also has such harsh white light at stations and on vehicles.

Sensory issues are especially delicate, as the worst cases can induce seizures, and people who get seizures are an important constituency for public transportation as many cannot drive for fear they might be incapacitated while on the road and cause an accident.

The language of universal design

The trend within accessibility advocacy is toward universal design and fostering independence. To that end, wheelchair users are promulgating norms in which it is prohibited to touch a stranger’s wheelchair without consent. Gap standards incorporate this norm by mandating such narrow gaps between train or bus and platform that a wheelchair user can safely traverse it without requiring someone else to push them. For the same reason, there is some agitation by wheelchair users in the United States against local regulations that require drivers to strap them in when they board a bus, such as those of New York City Transit, robbing them of their independent mobility.

Likewise, the trend is toward universal design, rather than special accommodations. Nobody wants to be judged for demanding special treatment or delaying other passengers; my sources, all either middle-class or aspiring to that status, have never once mentioned paratransit as an option. In this mentality, elevators are a lifeline for people in wheelchairs but are also useful for able-bodied people with strollers or heavy luggage, tactile pavements help prevent accidents, and clear audiovisual announcements help able-bodied passengers who are not alert during the trip and are especially helpful for people who don’t speak the language. And far from an obscure radicalism, the practice of universal design was first explained to me by Laura Brelsford, assistant general manager of accessibility at the MBTA.

Accommodating people with EDS, motion sickness, sciatica, or especially in the coming generation long covid is likewise a matter of universal design. Better ride quality on buses and trains means that I have a better user experience and (through precise computer control) faster trips while people who are more sensitive to motion sickness can ride at all without vomiting. Railstituting buses with trams where appropriate likewise has wide-reaching benefits, accruing again the most to people with chronic fatigue, and the same is true of the intermediate option of using trolleybuses or IMC. Bus shelter has very high impact relative to its cost, and this again especially benefits people who can’t stand for 10 minutes waiting for a bus.

All of these design issues are difficult to quantify. This makes them invisible to the manager who asks for metrics and data for everything as an excuse for inaction, as invisible as the chronic pain sufferers who they most benefit. But they are real, and from a broad enough view, their impact on the use and health of a public transport network is large.

Quick Note: California Gets Electrification Wrong

Caltrans has a new plan to make its intercity rail fleet zero-emission. The snag: it rejects electrification as infeasible and is instead looking for hydrogen fuel cell trains. I do not think any of the people who were involved in this study is competent enough to keep working in this field, and it’s important to explain why.

I refer readers to the electrification report we at TransitMatters put out a few months ago. It talks about the costs and benefits of overhead wire, and goes over some case studies of some electrification projects, some good (Trondheim), some okay (Israel, Denmark), and some examples of what not to do (Caltrain, Toronto). Since then I’ve seen additional data of electrification costs out of Italy, where they’re near the bottom of our range.

Our report also goes into alternatives to wire and why they’re infeasible. Hydrogen is not even remotely close. The largest order as of 2019 was 27 trains for the Rhine-Main region, each 54 meters long, for 500M€, or around 343,000€ per linear meter; single-level EMUs typically cost around 80,000€/m in Europe. It’s infant technology with wanting performance and its cost is not worth it compared with the cost of wiring the trains.

Instead, Caltrans thinks that overhead wires are infeasible. It does not publish cost estimates; those estimates would be based on the failure of Caltrain and not on successes in non-English-speaking countries (or even in Britain, with high but not fire-everyone costs), because nobody at Caltrans who has any authority knows or cares.

To make it worse, Caltrans says electrification “has right-of-way implications.” In other words, it requires space for poles and this is supposed to be difficult. In reality, it isn’t. A short distance from the tracks is needed for poles, but the rights-of-way in the state are not especially constrained; Caltrain, in a fairly dense suburban area, did not have that problem, but rather had problems with the execution of the design and with unusual standards for pole placement.

It’s a perennial problem in the United States that rail managers and agency heads are allergic to electrification. It’s a foreign concept, literally. They don’t travel – when they do they think of it as a vacation, not as work to see how countries with an order of magnitude more rail ridership per capita do it. None of the people they know knows, either. Nor are they technically apt or curious – they come from a managerial culture in which speaking of technical details is low-prestige, and making excuses and talking about politics are high-prestige. Fresh master’s graduates in Europe know more than they ever will. They are useless, and they know it.

So they avoid that technology using whatever excuses that they can find. Hydrogen feels to them like they’re innovative; they’re not, US mainline passenger rail is a joke, but they think they are because the notion that the US is a technological laggard doesn’t come naturally to them, since in many fields, none of which is public-sector, the US really is at the technological frontier. Nor are they qualified to tell the difference between mature and experimental tech, which is why they think electrification is not affordable and hydrogen trains at four times the upfront acquisition cost and an unproven maintenance cost are.

The only long-term solution to this recurrent problem is removing the people involved. I don’t have direct experience with California the way I do with the Northeast, but between what I know of the Northeast and what Richard Mlynarik and others have said of California, what’s likely is that the top people do not know what an EMU is, the traditional railroaders think electric wires are for toy trains, and the analysts have never once written an alternatives analysis in which the outcome was not politically pre-decided.

How Tramway Networks Look

I’ve been thinking about trams today. The origin of this post is that yesterday’s post about modal versus other questions concerning public transport led to a conversation about how in some places, namely Vancouver, the light rail versus subway debate is big. And that got me thinking about how cities that do not have subways arrange their streetcar networks. These cities exist, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, and often have very strong public transport – this is for example the Zurich model, based on a combination of streetcars and an S-Bahn system. Some such cities don’t even have an S-Bahn system. How do they arrange their tramway networks?

The top tram cities

I asked on Twitter what the busiest tramway network is in cities without a subway. Across all cities, including ones that have both streetcars and metro tunnels, the answer was Saint Petersburg at the beginning of the 21st century, and today is either still Saint Petersburg, where ridership has been in decline recently, or Budapest; Prague is the third. All have around 400 million annual riders, or somewhat less.

Among cities without subways, it’s harder to tell, because the information isn’t always out there; streetcars are not as well-studied as subways, a pattern of which I am guilty of contributing to with the focus of the Transit Costs Project (for now). Zurich, Brno, Zagreb, and Melbourne all have around 200 million annual passengers each, and Bratislava, Kraków, Łódź, an Belgrade are all plausible contenders except that I have not been able to find ridership figures for them.

Additional cities with strong ridership but not 200 million a year include the Upper Silesia complex with about 100 million, which is weak for its size with high car modal split for a Polish city, and smaller cities like Leipzig, Dresden, Linz, Basel, Geneva, Košice, Gothenburg and Lviv.

The pattern of tram cities

All of the high-ridership tram cities I’ve been able to find have historically maintained their systems. Cities that closed their streetcars in the postwar era and have since reopened them as modern light rail systems sometimes have very strong ridership, like Paris, but that’s in conjunction with a metro system; the Ile-de-France tram network is strikingly circumferential and barely penetrates city limits, where the Métro predominates. In the United States, the busiest modern light rail system is Los Angeles and the busiest without a subway is Portland, with 40 million annual trips, in a metro area of comparable size to Upper Silesia, which is much more auto-oriented than monocentric Polish city regions like those of Warsaw and Kraków.

Moreover, nearly all examples I know are in Central and Eastern Europe. Elsewhere, trams were shut down in the postwar era, or replaced with subway-surface Stadtbahn systems as in San Francisco and most West German cities. This is going to color the analysis, because just as there are American, Soviet, British, French, and German traditions of how to build rapid transit, there are national and areal traditions of how to build tramways, and with the exceptions of Melbourne and Gothenburg, all of the top systems in metro-free cities are in one or two macro-regions (Warsaw Pact and German), which means that shared features may be either the key to success or just a regional cultural feature.

The shape of strong tramway networks

I encourage readers to go to Alexander Rapp’s website with maps of rapid transit and tram networks around the world, and toggle the maps so that the top streetcar networks are visible.

For example, here is Zagreb:

Here is Melbourne, which doesn’t yet have a metro but is building one at very high costs:

Here is Brno, which has around 200 million annual passengers in a metro area of 700,000:

The striking features of these networks and others without as good maps on Wikipedia (Gothenburg, Zurich), to me, are,

  • The network design is radial – crosstown routes are rare and sporadic.
  • The lines form something like a mesh in a small city center, perhaps the size of the historic premodern core, in which one can walk from one end to another; Melbourne, which does not have the history of a walled European city, shows convergent evolution with the same pattern.
  • Owing to the long history of such systems, the ones I’ve used (Prague, Zurich, Basel, Leipzig, East Berlin) have basic stations with shelter and in Zurich’s case ticketing machines but no other facilities.
  • There is extensive interlining and branching in all directions.

Moreover, as I should blog about soon in the future, Melbourne exhibits the same pattern even with a weak city center: the centralmost 100 km^2 of the city, which in Canada or Europe or the most centralized American cities should have 30-40% of metropolitan employment, only have 15%.

The Interborough Study

I was excited about the idea of Interborough Express (IBX) as announced by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and then last week her office released a preliminary report about the alternatives for it, and I got less excited. But it’s not that the study is bad, or that Hochul is bad. Rather, the study is a by the numbers alternatives analysis, shorter than the usual in a good way; its shortcomings are the shortcomings of all American planning.

The main rub is that the report looks at various options for the IBX route, broken down by mode. There’s a commuter rail option, which bakes in the usual bad assumption about commuter rail operations, including heavier trains (lighter trains are legal on US tracks as of 2018) and longer dwell times that are explained as a product of the heavier trains (dwell times have nothing to do with train mass). That’s par for the course – as we saw yesterday, everything that touches mainline rail in North America becomes stupid even in an otherwise understandable report.

But even excluding commuter rail, the study classifies the options by mode, focusing on bus rapid transit and light rail (and no subway, for some reason). It compares those two options and commuter rail on various measures like expected ridership and trip times. This is normal for American alternatives analyses for new corridors like IBX: they look at different modes as the main decision point.

This is also extraordinarily bad governance. There are some fundamental questions that are treated as afterthoughts, either not studied at all or mentioned briefly as 1-2 sentences:

  • How far north should the line go? The IBX plan is to only go from Jackson Heights to the south, in contrast with older Triboro proposals going into the Bronx.
  • What should the stop spacing be? The stops can be widely spaced, as in the current proposal, which stops mainly at intersection points with other lines, or more closely spaced, like an ordinary subway line.
  • Under a light rail option, should the line be elevated where the trench is too narrow or at-grade?
  • Should freight service be retained? What are the benefits of retaining freight rail service on the Bay Ridge Branch and what are the incremental costs of keeping it versus taking over the right-of-way?
  • How large should the stations be?
  • How frequent should the trains be? If freight service is retained, what frequencies are compatible with running freight on the same tracks for part or all of the line?

A better study must focus on these questions. Some of them, moreover, must be decided early: urban planning depends on whether the line goes into the Bronx or not; and industrial planning depends on what is done with freight service along the corridor.

Those questions, moreover, are more difficult than the modal question. A BRT option on a rail corridor without closely parallel arterial roads should be dismissed with the same ease that the study dismisses options not studied, and then the question of what kind of rail service to run is much less important than the scope of the project.

But American planning is obsessed with comparing public transit by mode rather than by corridor, scope, or any other aspect. Canadian planning has the same misfeature – the studies for the Broadway SkyTrain extension looked at various BRT and light rail options throughout, even though it was clear the answer was going to be SkyTrain, and omitted more fundamental questions regarding the cost-construction disruption tradeoff or even the scope of the project (the original studies from 2012 did not look at truncating to Arbutus, an option that had been talked about before and that would eventually happen due to cost overruns).

So overall, the IBX study is bad. But it is interestingly bad. Andrew Cuomo was a despicable governor who belongs in prison for his crimes. Less criminal and yet similarly loathsome people exist in American public transit. And yet, Hochul and her office are not like that, at all. This is not a sandbag, or a corrupt deal. It’s utterly ordinary in its failure; with all the unique failures of the Cuomo era stripped, what is left is standard American practice, written more clearly than is usual, and it just isn’t up to par as an analysis.

Hochul has been moving on this project very quickly, and good transit advocates should laud this. It should not take long to publish a report comparing alternatives on more fundamental questions than mode, such as scope, the role of freight, and the extent of civil infrastructure to be used. The costs and benefits of IBX heavily depend on the decisions made on such matters; they should not be brushed aside.