How to Waste Money on Public Transportation

This is the fourth in a series of five (not four) posts about the poor state of political transit advocacy in the United States, following posts about the Green Line Extension in metro Boston, free public transport proposals, and federal aid to operations, to be followed by a post about how to do better instead.

I think very highly of Yonah Freemark. His academic and popular work on public transport and urbanism ranges from good to excellent, and a lot of my early thinking (and early writing!) on regional rail and high-speed rail owes a debt to him.

But I think he’s wrong in his proposal for a Green New Deal for transportation. This is a proposal by the Climate and Community Project (not the Urban Institute as I said in previous posts – sorry) to decarbonize transport in the United States, through fleet electrification and investments in public transport. Yonah is one of several authors; I identify him with the public transit-related parts of the report, but I want to make it clear that it’s the report I’m criticizing, regardless of who wrote what.

The fundamental problem of the CCP report is what I’ve been building up to in the last three posts in this series: it tries to please everybody by throwing money everywhere and making conflicting promises. The Green Line Extension was built this way under Deval Patrick, and costs ballooned, and what passed for discipline under Charlie Baker just reinforced the same long-term loss of state capacity that led to the cost explosion.

For example, here’s its take on fleet electrification:

In other words, there is a compelling and immediate need to decarbonize this fleet within a decade. And that’s feasible: buses are replaced every 10 to 15 years on average, and commuter rail trains about every 25 years; currently, commuter trains in the United States are on average 22 years old. Publicly owned vehicles would be replaced with the electric equivalent; for privately owned contracted vehicles (the case for many school buses), and requirements for electrification would be written into contracts and tax credits given to assist the transition of buses from fossil fuels to electric. The commissioning of thousands of new transit vehicles would produce new, good-paying union jobs in manufacturing. The shift to electric transit vehicles would affect maintenance requirements, and the Department of Transportation must ensure the mechanic and operator workforce is fully prepared for the electric transition through workforce retraining assistance. This may require retraining, such as encouraging mechanics to retrain as electric vehicle charging installers.

(…)

Electrifying existing diesel railways would require overhead catenary electrical wires to be useful for electrified trains (though the trains themselves actually cost less than diesel vehicles). The cost of railway electrification infrastructure alone is between roughly $1 and $5 million per mile. There are roughly 6,600 miles of non-electrified commuter rail in the United States, plus roughly 20,800 miles of non-electrified Amtrak service (with some overlap between the two). Amtrak’s routes are mostly owned by freight rail companies, but we suggest joint electrification that includes both passenger trains and freight trains, using this program for Amtrak and another we lay out below for the freight lines. To electrify the national passenger rail network of existing lines would cost between $27 and $137 billion. In addition, new trains would have to be purchased to run on these electrified lines.

I cite this pair of paragraphs because of something they show about the study: it is not uniformly bad. The second paragraph is a decent idea (though $1m/mile is very cheap), and trying to workshop how to wire the national freight network is not necessarily a bad idea, even if the report doesn’t go into enough detail about what the business barrier to electrification is for the private carriers.

But the first quoted paragraph is awful. Here’s the key thing: “The commissioning of thousands of new transit vehicles would produce new, good-paying union jobs in manufacturing” is a giant waste of money. Bus vendors outside North America consistently produce equipment for much less than the protected North American market; the Boris Bus, at £350,000 per unit (around $500,000), is both cheaper than American buses and locally considered expensive, a prime example of Boris Johnson’s poor performance as mayor of London.

The passenger rail industry does not exist in the United States, and attempts by American governments to coerce it to build factories domestically in order to create well-paying jobs have resulted in ballooning costs. The premium for recent American rolling stock orders, behind bespoke regulations, protectionism, informal state-level protectionism, and agency heads that know less than recently-graduated interns who make one quarter of what they do (less, if those interns are European), looks like 50% over European equivalents. Nor does this do much job creation, except perhaps for sitework consultants: the premium for some recent orders has been $1 million per $20/hour 4-to-6-year job created. Those are not objectively good jobs – the wages are not much higher than present-day retail, food service, and delivery jobs – but backward-looking politicians consider them inherently moral, and the report coddles them instead of looking forward.

Then, the report has the following recommendations for how to spend money on improving public transportation:

End the use of federal infrastructure funding for new highway infrastructure, except for focused opportunities that improve equity. Provide immediate funds for a quick-start infrastructure program for walking and cycling. Vastly expand support for transit and metropolitan network planning.

Appropriate $250 billion over 10 years, or $25 billion annually, in federal funding bill to support transit operations funding throughout the United States.

Increase federal support for transit and intercity rail capital projects to $400 billion over 10 years, or $40 billion annually, providing funds for new lines, maintenance of existing infrastructure, and upgrades designed for equitable accessibility.

Require metropolitan planning organization voting systems to be proportional to resident population. Mandate adjustments to local zoning policy to enable more dense, affordable housing near transit in exchange for federal aid. Implement regional commuter benefits throughout the nation.

This, I’m sorry, is a bad program. The $40 billion/year capital investment is not bad, but the proposal explicitly includes maintenance, making it vulnerable to the state of good repair scam, in which agencies demand escalating amounts of money for infrastructure with nothing to show for it. The $25 billion/year operating aid is likely to be a waste as well.

Transit agencies can invest money prudently, but the report says nothing about how to do it, instead proposing to zero out highway funding (which is a good way to save money, but is less relevant to mode shift than American transit advocates think it is). The one concrete suggestion for what to do with the money is “One goal, for example, would be for all residents to have access to a bus or train with a short wait within at most a 15-minute walk at all times of the day.” This is a standard I can get behind in a dense place like New York; nearly everywhere else, it means overfunding coverage routes in low-density areas, often middle-class white flight suburbs, ahead of workhorse urban routes. Writing years ago about New Haven, Sandy Johnston noted that a bus reform there would cannibalize the circuitous suburban bus branches to add service on the core routes through the city and Hamden. The CCP report would do the opposite, boosting frequencies where they are least useful.

Finally, the MPO rules seem weak. I get what Yonah (and perhaps the other authors) wants to do here: he wants to incentivize more housing production near mass transit nodes. But MPO voting weights are not especially relevant. What is relevant is using state power to disempower local communities, which are dominated by NIMBYs even in places where the residents vote YIMBY at the state level, such as San Francisco. The report talks about banning single-family zoning (okay, but duplexes are not TOD), but that’s it. Then it suggests extracting developer profits through mandatory inclusionary housing, which acts as a tax on TOD and reduces housing production. The authors of the study are left-wing, but do not propose public housing, only taxes on TOD to subsidize some local housing; Yonah knows this is not how social housing works in Paris, but he still proposes this for the United States.

The theme of lack of willingness to prioritize flow throughout these recommendations. There is no discussion of how to prioritize good investments, how to increase efficiency (the report points out operating costs for all US transit combined are $50 billion/year; this is 2.5 times the German level, for similar ridership, not per capita), how to make sure that progress does not get extracted by programs for groups thought inherently moral.

No Federal Aid to Transit Operations, Please

This is the third in a series of four posts about the poor state of political transit advocacy in the United States, following posts about the Green Line Extension in metro Boston and free public transport proposals, to be followed by an Urban Institute report by Yonah Freemark.

In the United States, political transit activists in the last few years have set their eyes on direct federal aid for operating subsidies for public transport. Traditionally, this has not been allowed: federal aid goes to capital planning (including long-term maintenance), and only a small amount of money goes to operations, all in peripheral bus systems. Urban transit agencies had to operate out of fares and local and state money. Demands for federal aid grew during corona, where emergency aid to operations led to demands for permanent subsidies, and have accelerated more recently as corona recovery has flagged (New York’s subway ridership is only around 60% of pre-corona levels). But said demands remain a bad idea in the short and long terms.

In the early 20th century, when public transport was expected to support itself out of fares, operating costs grew with wages, but were tempered by improvements in efficiency. New York City Transit opened with ticket-takers at every subway entrances and a conductor for every two cars; within a generation this system was replaced with automatic turnstiles and one conductor per train. Kyle Kirschling’s thesis has good data on this, finding that by the 1930s, the system grew to about 16,000 annual car-miles (=26,000 car-km) per employee.

And then it has stagnated. Further increases in labor efficiency have not happened. Most American systems have eliminated conductors, often through a multi-decade process of attrition rather than letting redundant workers go, but New York retains them. The network today actually has somewhat less service per employee than in the 1930s, 14,000 car-miles as of 2010, because fixed costs are spread across a slightly smaller system. Compare this with JICA’s report for Mumbai Metro comparing Japanese cities: Tokyo Metro has 283,871,000 car-km (PDF-p. 254) on 8,474 employees (PDF-p. 9), which is 33,500/employee, and that’s without any automation and with only partially conductor-less operations; Yokohama gets 40,000.

Moreover, the timeline in the US matches the onset of subsidies, to some extent: state and local subsidies relieved efficiency pressure. In Canada, TTC saw this and lobbied against subsidies for its own operations in the 1960s, on the grounds that without a breakeven mandate, the unions would capture all surplus; it took until the 1970s for it to finally receive any operating subsidies.

Federal subsidies make all of this worse. They are other people’s money (OPM), so local agencies are likely to maximize them at the expense of good service; this is already what they do with capital money, lading projects with local demands for betterments figuring that if everyone else hogs the trough then they should as well.

Then there is the issue of wages. Seniority systems in American unionized labor create labor shortages even when pay is high, because of how they interact with scheduling and tiered wage structures. Bus drivers in Boston earn around $80,000 a year, a pay that German bus and train drivers can only dream of, but starting drivers are in probational status and have a lower wage (they are not even given full-time work until they put in a long period of part-time work). Moreover, because drivers pick their shifts in seniority order, drivers for about the first 10 years are stuck with the worst shifts: split shifts, graveyard shifts at inconsistent intervals, different garages to report to. New York manages to find enough bus drivers to fill its ranks but only by paying around $85,000 a year; other American cities, paying somewhat less, are seeing thousands of missed runs over the year because they can’t find drivers.

And outside aid does nothing to fix that. Quite to the contrary, it helps paper over these problems and perpetuates the labor gerontocracy. New York City Transit has learned to react to every crisis by demanding a new source of income; there is not enough political appetite for transparent taxation, so the city and state find ever more opaque sources of funds, avoiding political controversy over wanton inefficiency but creating more distortion than a broad income tax would.

Instead of subsidizing current consumption, a developmental state should subsidize production. Don’t pay money to hire more bus drivers; pay for automating subway systems, for better dispatching, for better planning around intermodal integration. Current American wages, not to mention the unemployment rate, scream “invest in labor-saving technology” and not “expand labor-intensive production.”

Free Public Transport: Why Now of All Times?

This is the second in a series of four posts about the poor state of political transit advocacy in the United States, following a post about the Green Line Extension in metro Boston, to be followed by the topics of operating aid and an Urban Institute report by Yonah Freemark.

There’s a push in various left-wing places to make public transportation free. It comes from various strands of governance, advocacy, and public transport, most of which are peripheral but all together add up to something. The US has been making some pushes recently: Boston made three buses fare-free as a pilot program, and California is proposing a three-month stimulus including free transit for that period and a subsidy for car owners. Germany is likewise subsidizing transport by both car and public transit. It’s economically the wrong choice for today’s economy of low unemployment, elevated inflation, and war, and it’s especially troubling when public transport advocates seize upon it as their main issue, in lieu of long-term investments into production of transit rather than its consumption.

Who’s for free public transit?

Historically, public transit was expected to be profitable, even when it was publicly-run. State-owned railroads predate the modern welfare state, and it was normal for them to not just break even but, in the case of Prussia, return profits to the state in preference to broad-based taxes. This changed as operating costs mounted in the middle of the 20th century and competition with cars reduced patronage. The pattern differs by country, and in some places (namely, rich Asia), urban rail remained breakeven or profitable, but stiff competition bit into ridership even in Japan. The norm in most of the West has been subsidies, usually at the local or regional level.

As subsidies were normalized, some proposed to go ahead and make public transport completely free. In the American civil rights movement, this included Ted Kheel, a backer of free public transit advocates like the activist Charles Komanoff and the academic Mark Delucchi. Reasons for free transit have included social equality (since it acts as a poll tax on commuters) and environmental benefits (since it competes with cars).

Anne Hidalgo has attempted and so far failed to find the money for free public transport in Paris, and other parts of Europe have settled for deep discounts in lieu of going fully fareless: Vienna charges 365€ for an annual pass (Berlin, which breaks even on the U-Bahn as far as I can tell, does so charging 86€/month).

In the United States, free transit has recently become a rallying cry for DSA, where it crowds out any discussion of improvement in the quality of service. Building new rail lines is the domain of wonks and neoliberals; socialists call for making things free, in analogy with their call for free universal health care. Boston has gotten in on the act, with conventional progressive (as opposed to DSA) mayor Michelle Wu campaigning on free buses within the municipality and getting the state-run MBTA to pilot free buses on three routes in low-income neighborhoods.

What’s wrong with free transit?

It costs money.

More precisely, it costs money that could be spent on other things. In Ile-de-France, as of 2018, fare revenues including employer benefits amounted to 4 billion euros, out of a total budget of 10.5 billion. The region can zero out this revenue, but on the same budget it can expand the Métro network by around 20-25 km a year – and the Métro is as far as I can tell profitable, subsidies going to suburban RER tails and buses. For that matter, the heavy subsidies to the suburbs, which pay the same cheap monthly rate as the city, could be replaced with investment in more and better lines.

The experiments with actually-free transit so far are in places with very weak revenues, like Estonia. Some American cities like it in context where public transport is only used by the desperate and no attempt is made at making service attractive to anyone else. Boston is unique in trying it in a context with higher fare revenue – but the buses are rail feeders, so the early pilot piggybacks on this and spends relatively little money in lost revenue, ignoring the long-term costs of breaking the (limited) fare integration between the buses and the subway.

What’s wrong with free transit now?

Free transit as deployed in the California proposal is in effect a stimulus project: the government gives people money in various ways. Germany is doing something similar, in a package including 9€ monthly tickets, a 0.30€ fuel tax cut, and a cut in energy taxes.

In Germany, unemployment right now is 2.9% and core inflation (without food and energy) is 3%. This is a country that spent a decade thinking going over 2% was immoral, and now the party that considers itself the most budget hawkish is cutting fuel taxes, in a time of conflict with an oil and gas exporter and a rise in military spending.

In the United States, unemployment is low as well, and inflation is high, 6.4%. This is not the time for stimulus or investments in consumption. It’s time for investments in production and suppression of consumption. So what gives?

The Green Line Extension

This is what I hope to be the first in a series of four posts about the poor state of political transit advocacy in the United States, to be followed by posts about free transit, operating aid, and an Urban Institute report by Yonah Freemark.

The Green Line Extension in Boston opened on Monday. Or, at least, the Union Square branch did; the main line to Tufts is expected to open in a few months. I rode it with Marco Chitti in the afternoon, a few hours after the formal opening ceremony. It was incomplete, with some access points not yet open, and the station fare barriers not yet functional (ticket receipts are checked by staff). There were many railfans on the platforms taking photos, and we accidentally let the first arriving train go because of a misunderstanding over whether it was in service; at least during the first day, it was not yet intended for a general audience.

Bostonians seem to view the extension as a great success. The media’s tone is celebratory. I no longer remember what local New York media said when Second Avenue Subway opened at the beginning of 2017, but I think it was more sober, more reflective of its high costs (I was getting a lot of followers on Twitter, but I tweeted that I was looking for work in the field around that day and got a lot of boosts over that). Within a year of SAS’s opening, Brian Rosenthal’s article appeared, detailing the mess that led to the line’s $1.7 billion/km cost. And as far as I can tell, there’s no comparable look at GLX in Boston.

This is not for lack of material. The Transit Costs Project began as a case study of how GLX got so expensive – it cost $2.2 billion not including rolling stock for a total length of 7.6 km. For a subway, it’s somewhat above global average. But it’s a light rail line with a short elevated segment and the rest in existing commuter rail trenched rights-of-way.

The line isn’t even especially good for the cost. It’s still incomplete. The fare payment is especially messy. The CharlieCard system used in Boston is a legacy mid-2000s system, which the MBTA wants to replace with something called AFC 2.0 (Charlie being AFC 1.0); it gave the contract to American transit agencies’ favorite military contractor, Cubic, which recently said it’s going to have a multi-year delay because it’s prioritizing New York’s Omny contract, and there’s nothing Massachusetts can do about it. When GLX value-engineered the stations, it was expected AFC 2.0 would be done by now, so there was no need for AFC 1.0-compatible fare barriers. It isn’t, so station staff stand in front of the platform directing passengers to tap their cards to get paper receipts. Going fareless at just this station for a short period is looked down on because it’s in a rich neighborhood and it may be discriminatory.

And as far as I can tell, nobody in Boston is asking “how can we make sure it will never happen again?”. The criticism I see in the media is about gentrification; Union Square has been gentrified for at least 10 years, but local politicians like Ayanna Pressley are using the line as an opportunity to make social criticism and impose even more political restrictions, so that future lines will be even kludgier and more expensive.

The MBTA is not always like this. Small projects do not have a large cost premium in Boston. Commuter rail infill stations, designed in-house, have a cost premium over Berlin in the 1.5x area. But the MBTA lacks in-house capacity to manage larger projects; GLX is beyond its capacity, so the original project was stuck and ballooned to $3 billion, and Governor Charlie Baker restarted it as a special-purpose vehicle, rather like Crossrail, with an externally-hired project manager in John Dalton. This mirrors the other transit megaproject in the region, South Coast Rail, currently clocking around $3.4 billion for 77 km of commuter rail in existing rights-of-way, a cost in line with German greenfield high-speed rail with considerable tunneling. No in-house hires were made, and now it seems that Dalton will be let go to take his experience elsewhere; the next MBTA megaproject will start from zero.

And as far as I can tell, nobody is pointing out this pattern. Baker and his political appointees are certain that their method works, because they are ignorant of global best practices. They are not exposed to ideas outside the US, except maybe in the most globalized parts of Britain and other high-cost English-speaking countries; a European who speaks to them like a typical European does – that is, without any pretension that Americans are better people – will just never get through.

In fact, they are failures. Not Dalton, who made the project better (but who is still unemployable anywhere with low costs; Milan Metro has its own in-house team, thank you very much). But Baker, who led the privatization of the state as budget director in the Weld era 30 years ago, must be viewed as the primary villain. His secretary of transportation for much of this period, Stephanie Pollack, must be viewed in a similar way: she does not believe it is possible to compare different projects, perhaps because the ones she is involved with are deficient. People should point at them and laugh on the street and perhaps yell at them for wasting government money with their failed ideology.

The second villain, after the state capacity destroyer that is Baker, consists of Governor Deval Patrick, who let the project balloon. He did not rebuild state capacity; he instead instructed the MBTA to accept the demands of every community that wanted something – in this case, Somerville and its demand for premium-cost bike paths (“Somerville Community Path”) and oversize stations. Pressley is an heir to this tradition; unless she changes her tune, it will be best for infrastructure if she is ignored, or better yet defeated for reelection.

Right now, I do not see any political group in the Boston area that is interested in making things better. High costs to them are just “it’s our turn to hog the trough.” This has implications for federal funding: the feds should choke funding to the region if it stays like this.

The G Train

The G train is bad. I say this, 16 years after I moved to New York, 11 years after I left, and I know it’s what every New Yorker knows. Tourists walk too slowly, rent is too high for small apartments, and the G train sucks. What I want to highlight in this post is how the subway’s scheduling paradigm is especially bad for the G train and leads to a vicious cycle making the train less frequent and less useful for passengers.

The role of the G train

The G train is the only mainline subway service in New York that does not enter Manhattan; see map here. It connects what are now the region’s two largest non-Manhattan business centers, Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, running vaguely parallel to the East River on the Queens and Brooklyn side of it. To the south of Downtown Brooklyn, it has a tail serving the wealthy neighborhoods collectively called South Brooklyn, such as Carroll Gardens and Park Slope.

I’ve criticized the G before for its poor construction. It misses critical transfers, like the other lines built in the IND program in the 1920s-30s. In Queens it misses Queensboro Plaza and the transfer to the N/W trains on the Astoria Line, and in Brooklyn it misses every single non-IND line except the L (and, at a suboptimal location, the R). This already makes it less useful as a circumferential line – such lines live on convenient transfers to radial lines, because direct O&D service is less valuable to secondary destinations than to primary ones.

But what I realized last week, commuting from Long Island City to Downtown Brooklyn, is more delicate. My hotel was near Queensboro Plaza, which the G doesn’t serve, but the station is served by the 7, which connects to the G one stop away at Court Square; Marron’s new office is in Downtown Brooklyn right on top of the Jay Street station, on the IND-built A/C and F trains, which is either a cross-platform connection or a short walk from the G. So for my trip, the connections worked. And yet, I was regularly facing 10-minute waits on the shoulders of rush hour, and on the subway countdown clock I saw a 15-minute gap.

To explain what went so wrong that the G should have such low frequency at 10 in the morning, it’s necessary to explain how New York City Transit decides the frequency of each service during each time of day.

New York City Subway frequency

In New York, the system for deciding the frequency of each subway service at each time of day is based on average peak crowding. This means that for all trains using the service in a given time period, the crowding level at the peak crowding point of the journey is averaged; frequency is adjusted so that off-peak the peak crowding level is 125% of seated capacity, and at rush hour it is based on published standing capacity per car that works out to about 300% of seated capacity depending on car design.

This system is done per numbered or lettered service. Thus, for example, the 2 and 3 trains run on the same track most of the way, but where they diverge, the 2 is considerably busier, and therefore the 2 runs slightly higher frequency (most ridership on the 2 and 3 is on the shared segment, not the tails). As a result, on the shared trunk, there cannot be perfect alternation of 2 and 3 trains; a few times an hour, a 2 train is followed by another 2 train, which means that on the tail, the frequency is uneven. When two 2 trains follow each other with no 3 between them, the leading 2 train is more crowded than the trailing one; this variation is averaged out in the guidelines – it is not the busiest train that sets the frequency guidelines.

These guidelines are not a good way to timetable trains. The above example of how it can create uneven crowding on the 2 is one problem with this system; if instead there were regular alternation of 2 and 3 trains then the 2 would be persistently slightly more crowded than the 3, just as today there is uneven crowding whenever two 2 trains run with no 3 in between, but the frequency on both the shared trunk and the branches would be more regular. This is especially important on more complexly interlined parts of the network, where the current system leads to large programmed gaps between trains occasionally.

The G is not very heavily interlined; the issue there relates to another criticism of the guidelines, which is that they assume travel demand is fixed. If the ridership on a train is independent of frequency, which it is if the headway between trains is very short compared to the trip time (say, if the trains run every 2-3 minutes), then the sole purpose of service is to provide the capacity the passengers need, and so the guidelines make sense as a way of rationing service convenience. However, in reality, the elasticity of ridership with respect to service provision is not zero. Three years ago I did some analysis of New York’s situation and the existing literature on ridership-frequency elasticity, suggesting it is equal to about 0.4. So the low frequency of the G deters ridership, which then appears to justify the low frequency.

But 0.4 < 1. And I believe that there are two reasons why on the G, and on circumferential lines in general, the elasticity of ridership with respect to frequency should be higher.

Trip length

Circumferential lines in general tend to have shorter average trip time. Between two nearby spokes, say between Downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg, they are the only real option; between two farther away ones, a direct radial may be an alternative.

The G is different from (say) the Ringbahn in that it misses most transfers, but this should not impact this pattern too much. The missed transfers in Downtown Brooklyn weaken the G for short as well as long trips involving a connection there. In contrast, in the middle the G does make the most important transfer, that with the L, and only misses the weaker J/M/Z.

The 0.4 estimate for ridership elasticity with respect to frequency assumes average behavior for trip length. But if trips are shorter, then the impact of frequency is larger. The 0.4 estimate comes out of an estimate of about -0.8 of ridership with respect to generalized trip time, which includes in-vehicle time, walk time, and wait time, the latter two given extra weight to account for transfer penalty. If one of the three components of trip times is shortened, the other two grow in importance.

The role of options

The G is not usually passengers’ only choice for making the trip. They can connect in Manhattan, or, in some cases, go directly via Manhattan, for example taking the N or R from Downtown Brooklyn to Queens (in the opposite direction, they serve separate station so it’s a harder choice, leading to asymmetric demand). Going between Marron and the East Village, Eric Goldwyn could connect to the L via the A/C/F or the G; I never once saw him use the G, only the lines via Manhattan.

I have not seen the impact of different transit paths on demand elasticity in the literature. It is likely that the elasticity in such case must be higher, because it is standard in economics that demand is more elastic for goods sold on a competitive market than by a monopolist.

Note also that it is to the overall system’s benefit to convince passengers to switch from radial lines to the G. The G is less crowded, so such a switch distributes ridership better on the system. And the G starts out much less frequent, so that even on a fixed operating budget, the impact of a service increase on the G on ridership is larger than on an already frequent trunk.

How High-Speed and Regional Rail are Intertwined

The Transit Costs Project will wrap up soon with the report on construction cost differences, and we’re already looking at a report on high-speed rail. This post should be read as some early scoping on how this can be designed for the Northeast Corridor. In particular, integration of planning with regional rail is obligatory due to the extensive track sharing at both ends of the corridor as well as in the middle. This means that the project has to include some vision of what regional rail should look like in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. This vision is not a full crayon, but should have different options for different likely investment levels and how they fit into an intercity vision, within the existing budget, which is tens of billions thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework.

Boston

In Boston, commuter rail and intercity rail interact via the Providence Line, which is double-track. The Providence Line shares the same trunk line into Boston with the Franklin Line and the Stoughton Line, and eventually with South Coast Rail services.

The good news is that the MBTA is seriously looking at electrifying the trains to a substantial if insufficient extent. The Providence Line is already wired, except for a few siding and yard tracks, and the MBTA is currently planning to complete electrification and purchase EMUs on the main line, and possibly also on the Stoughton Line; South Coast Rail is required to be electrified when it is connected to this system anyway, for environmental reasons. If there is no further electrification, then it signals severe incompetence in Massachusetts but is still workable to a large extent.

Options for scheduling depend on how much further the state invests. The timetables I’ve written in the past (for an aggressive example, see here) assume electrification of everything that needs to be electrified but no North-South Rail Link tunnel. An NSRL timetable requires planning high-speed rail in conjunction with the entirety of the regional rail system; this is true even though intercity trains should terminate on the surface and not use the NSRL tunnel.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia is the easiest case. Trenton-Philadelphia is four-track, and has sufficiently little commuter traffic that the commuter trains can be put on the local tracks permanently. In the presence of high-speed rail, there is no need for express commuter trains – passengers can buy standing tickets on Trenton-Philadelphia, and those are not going to create a capacity crunch because train volumes need to be sized for the larger peak market into New York anyway.

On the Wilmington side, the outer end of the line is only triple-track. But it’s a short segment, largely peripheral to the network – the line is four-track from Philadelphia almost all the way to Wilmington, and beyond Wilmington ridership is very low. Moreover, Wilmington itself is so slow that it may be valuable to bypass it roughly along I-95 anyway.

The railway junctions are a more serious interface. Zoo Interlocking controls everything heading into Philadelphia from points north, and needs some facelifts (mainly, more modern turnouts) speeding up trains of all classes. Thankfully, there is no regional-intercity rail conflict here.

Washington

In some ways, the Washington-Baltimore Penn Line is a lot like the Boston-Providence line. It connects two historic city centers, but one is much larger than the other and so commuter demand is asymmetric. It has a tail behind the secondary city with very low ridership. It runs diesel under catenary, thanks to MARC’s recent choice to deelectrify service (it used to run electric locomotives).

But the Penn Line has significant sections of triple- and quad-track, courtesy of a bad investment plan that adds tracks without any schedule coordination. The quad-track segment can be used to simplify the interface; the triple-track segment, consisting of most of the line’s length, is unfortunately not useful for a symmetric timetable and requires some strategic quad-track overtakes. The Penn Line must be reelectrified, with high-performance EMUs minimizing the speed difference between regional and intercity trains. There are only five stations on the double- and triple-track narrows – BWI, Odenton, Bowie State, Seabrook, New Carrollton – and even figuring differences in average speed, this looks like a trip time difference between 160 km/h regional rail and 360 km/h HSR of about 15 minutes, which is doable with a single overtake.

New York

New York is the real pain point. Unlike in Boston and Washington, it’s difficult to isolate different parts of the commuter rail network from one another. Boston can more or less treat the Worcester, Providence+Stoughton, Fairmount, and Old Colony Lines as four different, non-interacting systems, and then slot Franklin into either Providence or Fairmount, whichever it prefers. New York can, with current and under-construction infrastructure, plausibly separate out some LIRR lines, but this is the part of the system with the least interaction with intercity rail.

Gateway could make things easier, but it would require consciously treating it as total separation between the Northeast Corridor and Morris and Essex systems, which would be a big mismatch in demand. (NEC demand is around twice M&E demand, but intercity trains would be sharing tracks with the NEC commuter trains, not the M&E ones; improving urban commuter rail service reduces this mismatch by loading the trains more within Newark but does not eliminate it.)

It’s so intertwined that the schedules have to be done de novo on both systems – intercity and regional – combined. This isn’t as in Boston and Washington, where the entire timetable can be done to fit one or two overtakes. This isn’t impossible – there are big gains to be had from train speedups all over and there. But it requires cutting-edge systems for timetabling and a lot of infrastructure investment, often in places that were left for later on official plans.

Quick Note: the LaGuardia Transit Connector

It’s amazing how much good can happen when an obstacle like Andrew Cuomo is removed. In lieu of his backward air train proposal, hated by just about everyone not on his payroll, Governor Kathy Hochul is moving forward on a better set of alternatives for a mass transit connection to LaGuardia. It’s interesting to see what the process is looking at but also what it isn’t; so far this looks better than the alternatives analysis for Interborough Express (ex-Triboro).

So far I have not seen analysis, only drawings of 14 alternatives. As with the IBX study, the LGA plan distinguishes different modes of public transit – there are bus, light rail, subway, and even ferry options. But it doesn’t stop there. It looks at multiple alignments: the scope is how to connect LGA to the rest of the city the best, and this can be done from a number of different directions – even a backward train (as light rail) along an alignment similar to Cuomo’s is present, and will likely not advance further because of its circuitous route.

Among the 14 alternatives, I think the obviously best one is a subway extension (slide 12 above); another subway option, a branch following the Grand Central Parkway (slide 11), is inferior because of branching splits frequencies and ridership at the cut off Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard station is high. A subway extension promises a connection in around 30 minutes to Times Square, every 5 minutes all day, with good connections to other destinations via the transfers at Queensboro Plaza and in Midtown.

The one thing that I’m sad the analysis hasn’t looked at is intermediate stations. It’s around 4.5 km from Ditmars to the main LGA terminal along the proposed alignment, passing through redevelopable industrial land and through residential land in Astoria Heights awkwardly tucked between airport grounds and Astoria proper. The same quality of service that the airport could get, these neighborhoods could get as well, except a hair faster because they’re closer.

Extending the Astoria Line is especially useful since it is short and not especially crowded until it hits Queensboro Plaza and inherits the crowding of the 7 train and its riders. In the context of deinterlining the subway, this is especially valuable: right now 60th Street Tunnel carries the N and W from Astoria but also the R from Queens Boulevard, and under deinterlining the tunnel would carry only Astoria riders, and so to match the high demand to 60th Street it’s valuable to create as much ridership as possible on the Astoria Line past Queensboro Plaza.

I hope that the alternatives analysis considers multiple stopping patterns in the future – that is, not just a nonstop route from Ditmars to the airport, but also an option with intermediate stations. (This does not mean local and express trains – either all trains should run locals, or all should run nonstop.) The cost of those stations is not high as it’s an elevated line, and the stop penalty on the subway is less than a minute since the top speed is so low (it looks like 45 seconds in practice comparing local and express trains on the same line).

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.