Quick Note: Do Costs Ever Go Down?

Bad agencies have a ratchet process in costs: they can go up, but not down. If there’s a cost saving, it does not reduce the budget, but only cancels out with unspecified cost increases. Agency heads and politicians trumpet their value engineering while costs never go down, leading to premium-cost, substandard quality projects.

Case in point: the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel replacement project. The project used to be $750 million, in the 2000s, as a two-track passenger rail tunnel. Over the next decade, this turned into a four-track system with mechanical ventilation for diesel freight trains and enough clearance for double-stacked freight; costs ran over to $4 billion. Well, two months ago Amtrak announced a scope reduction back to two tracks, which it claims would save a billion dollars, cutting cost to… $4 billion.

This is not the first time this happens. Value engineering in California has had the same effect: every attempt to reduce scope – the blended plan for Northern California, plus various design compromises in both the Bay Area and the Central Valley – has failed to reduce costs. At most, they’ve prevented further cost overruns.

And in New York, the removal of the cavern underneath Penn Station in the planning process between the canceled ARC tunnel and the Gateway tunnel did not reduce costs at all. The cost estimate was $10 billion, much of which was the cavern; the cost estimate now is $10 billion for the bare tunnel with less scope than before. ARC was canceled on the grounds of potential cost overruns, and yet as soon as it took over the project, even while descoping the cavern, Amtrak presided over further increases in costs due to extras (Penn South, etc.).

It’s as if once there’s a number circulating out there, it will be spent, no matter what. If there’s a surplus, it will be blown on unspecified extras or on sheer inefficiency. Why spend $3 billion when the political system has already indicated that $4 billion is okay? Thus, 4-1 = 4, and, no doubt, if further value engineering is identified, the cost will stay $4 billion.

At no point does anyone say, okay, if there’s a cost saving, here’s the next slate of projects that the money can be spent on. Nor is there any proactive value engineering. Costs are only a problem insofar as they prevent the political system from saying yes, but even then, if there’s a number out there, even an outlandish one that nobody will say yes to (such as $117 billion for medium-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor), then it is the number. Any cuts from that are against inherently moral workers, communities, etc., in the service of inherently immoral outsiders and experts.

Quick Note: Waste and Missed Projects

If the state spends money on a bad infrastructure project, or too much money beyond what was necessary for the project, then this is waste of money, and should be avoided. But the opposite situation can occur too: some worthwhile projects are not pursued, and that too is a waste, because society forgoes the benefits coming from such projects. This situation should be avoided equally. Moreover, there is no priority between those two types of error. Planning should treat them symmetrically and aim on balance to avoid both equally.

The reason is that just as infrastructure projects are generally not critical, the money that is spent on them is not critical. The US is spending around $1.5 trillion over the lifetime of the program on the F-35 plane, and the money is buried deep in a defense budget that by the standards I grew up with isn’t even that large – and that program consists of documented waste and suffers from poor planning, including serious cost overruns and delays. None of this is an existential threat; the problems the F-35 is intended to solve are not existential but neither are its costs, and likewise, neither infrastructure problems such as delays, capacity limitations, and congestion nor the costs of the projects that intend to fix them are existential.

And if none of this is existential, then the decision of whether to build is about comparing two finite, bounded quantities: costs and benefits. This is why one does a benefit-cost analysis and respect its conclusions, without spiking. But this is also why the state should not systematically aim to err in one direction. If a project with a BCR of less than 1 is built then there is waste, but if a project with a high BCR is not built then there is waste as well.

Note that this principle of not biasing one’s error in one direction (typically the bias is toward inaction) is separate from the question of what the best estimates for costs and benefits are. There is a real tendency to underestimate costs, which is why the minimum BCR that should be funded is not 1 but slightly more, the typical range in Europe being 1.2-1.4. But subject to that limit, decisions should still be symmetric, i.e. if the limit is 1.4, then building 0.7 is symmetrically bad with failing to build 2.8. Alternatively, some projects, like high-speed rail, have upfront costs and long-term benefits, and so it’s better to think of them in terms of financial and social returns on investment, as is done in France (source, pp. 11-12), rather than a BCR in which the discount rate is hidden in a box. But ROI analysis should still be symmetric around one’s chosen limit.

This becomes relevant especially for projects that can expect benefits to rise over time due to economic growth. It is tempting to have a bias toward inaction and only build something once its benefits are unimpeachable, a large multiple of the cost. But this means that in the interim, society has forgone the smaller-but-still-real benefits. Worse, when the BCR grows too large, surplus extraction might pull it back down through an increase in costs, and thus building later can be very risky.

In essence, what this means is that if there’s infrastructure out there with a very high BCR or ROI – and if you ask me, preliminarily, Northeast Corridor high-speed rail done right has a purely financial ROI of maybe 13% – then something is deeply wrong. There shouldn’t be 13% returns out of anything. If there is one, the first question to ask is “why was this not built 50 years ago?”.

In the opposite direction, what looks like building infrastructure prematurely is in fact the prudent decision. South Korea and Taiwan both opened high-speed rail in the 2000s, both underperforming initial expectations. But both have seen steady growth in ridership; at this point, Taiwan HSR returns 4% without social benefits, which is decently healthy, and KTX has somewhat higher ridership than THSR on only slightly higher total construction costs. In the mid-2000s the projects looked like white elephants, that is they were doing just better than minimum. But the 15 years of benefits since then have been considerable. The 20% of society least interested in paying for things should not have veto power; economics exists on the margin and politics on the median.

Regional Rail and Subway Maintenance

Uday Schultz has a thorough post about New York’s subway service deterioration over the last decade, explaining it in terms of ever more generous maintenance slowdowns. He brings up track closures for renewal as a typical European practice, citing examples like Munich’s two annual weekends of S-Bahn outage and Paris’s summertime line closures. But there’s a key aspect he neglects: over here, the combination of regional rail and subway tunnels means that different trunk lines can substitute for one another. This makes long-term closures massively less painful and expensive.

S-Bahn and subway redundancy

S-Bahn or RER systems are not built to be redundant with the metro. Quite to the contrary, the aim is to provide service the metro doesn’t, whether it’s to different areas (typically farther out in the suburbs) or, in the case of the RER A in Paris, express overlay next to the local subway. The RER and Métro work as a combined urban rail network in Paris, as do the S- and U-Bahns in German cities that have both, or the Metro and Cercanías in Madrid and Barcelona.

And yet, in large urban rail systems, there’s always redundancy, more than planners think or intend. The cleanest example of this is that in Paris, the RER A is an express version of Métro Line 1: all RER A stops in the city have transfers to M1 with the exception of Auber, which isn’t too far away and has ample if annoying north-south transfers to the Champs-Elysées stations on M1. As a result, summertime closures on the RER A when I lived in the city were tolerable, because I could just take M1 and tolerate moderate slowdowns.

This is the case even in systems designed around never shutting down, like Tokyo. Japan, as Uday notes, doesn’t do unexpected closures – the Yamanote Line went decades with only the usual nighttime maintenance windows. But the Yamanote Line is highly redundant: it’s a four-track line, and it is paralleled at short distance by the Fukutoshin Line. A large city will invariably generate very thick travel markets, and those will have multiple lines, like the east-west axis of M1 and the RER A, the two north-south axes of M12 and M13 and of M4 and the RER B, the east-west spine from Berlin Hauptbahnhof east, the Ikebukuro-Shibuya corridor, or the mass of lines passing through Central Tokyo going northeast-southwest.

The issue of replacement service

In the United States, standard practice is that every time a subway line is shut for maintenance, there are replacement buses. The buses are expensive to run: they are slow and low-capacity, and often work off the overtime economy of unionized labor; their operating costs count as part of the capital costs of construction projects. Uday moreover points out that doing long-term closures in New York on the model of so many large European cities would stress the capacity of buses in terms of fleet and drivers, raising costs further.

This is where parallel rail lines come in. In some cases, these can be other subway lines: from north of Grand Central to Harlem-125th, the local 6 and express 4/5 tracks are on different levels, so the express tracks can be shut down overnight for free, and then during maintenance surges the local tracks can be shut and passengers told to ride express trains or Second Avenue Subway. On the West Side, the 1/2/3 and the A/B/C/D are close enough to substitute for each other.

But in Queens and parts of the Bronx, leveraging commuter rail is valuable. The E/F and the LIRR are close enough to substitute for each other; the Port Washington Branch can, to some extent, substitute for the 7; the Metro-North trunk plus east-west buses would beat any interrupted north-south subway and would even beat the subway in normal service to Grand Central.

Running better commuter rail

The use of commuter rail as a subway substitute, so common in this part of the world, requires New York to run service along the same paradigm that this part of the world does. Over here, the purpose of commuter rail is to run urban rail service without needing to build greenfield tunnels in the suburbs. The fares are the same, and the frequency within the city is high all day every day. It runs like the subway, grading into lower-density service the farther one goes; it exists to extend the city and its infrastructure outward into the suburbs.

This way, a coordinated urban rail system works the best. Where lines do not overlap, passengers can take whichever is closest. Where they do, as is so common in city center, disruption on one trunk is less painful because passengers can take the other. The system does not need an external infusion of special service via transportation-of-last-resort shuttle buses, and costs are easier to keep under control.

New Leadership for New York City Transit and the MTA

Andrew Cuomo resigned, effective two weeks from now, after it became clear that if he didn’t the state legislature would remove him. As much of the leadership of public transportation in the state is his political appointees, like Sarah Feinberg, the incoming state governor, Lieutenant-Governor Kathy Hochul, will need to appoint new heads in their stead. From my position of knowing more about European public transit governance than the New York political system does, I’d like to make some recommendations.

Hire from outside the US

New York’s construction costs are uniquely high, and its operating costs are on the high side as well; in construction and to a large extent also in operations, it’s a general American problem. Managers come to believe that certain things are impossible that in fact happen all the time in other countries, occasionally even in other US cities. As an example, we’ve constantly heard fire safety as an excuse for overbuilt subway stations – but Turkey piggybacks on the American fire safety codes and to a large extent so does Spain and both have made it work with smaller station footprints. Much of the problem is amenable to bringing in an outsider.

The outsider has to be a true outsider – outside the country, not just the agency. An American manager from outside transportation would come in with biases of how one performs management, which play to the groupthink of the existing senior management. Beware of managers who try to perform American pragmatism by saying they don’t care about “Paris or such,” as did the Washington Metro general manager. Consultants are also out – far too many are retirees of those agencies, reproducing the groupthink without any of the recent understanding by junior planners of what is going wrong.

Get a Byford, not Byford himself

Andy Byford is, by an overwhelming consensus in New York, a successful subway manager. Coming in from Toronto, where he was viewed as a success as well, he reformed operations in New York to reduce labor-management hostility, improve the agency’s accessibility program, and reduce the extent of slow orders. Those slow orders were put in there by overly cautious management, such as Ronnie Hakim, who came in via the legal department rather than operations, and viewed speed as a liability risk. Byford began a process called Save Safe Seconds to speed up the trains, which helped turn ridership around after small declines in ridership in the mid-2010s.

The ideal leader should be a Byford. It cannot be Byford himself: after Cuomo pushed him out for being too successful and getting too much credit, Byford returned to his native Britain, where Mayor Sadiq Khan appointed him head of Transport for London. Consulting with Byford on who to hire would be an excellent idea, but Byford has his dream job and is very unlikely to come back to New York.

Look outside the Anglosphere

High operating costs are a New York problem, and to some extent a US problem. Canada and the UK do just fine there. However, construction costs, while uniquely bad in New York, are also elevated everywhere that speaks English. The same pool of consultants travel across, spreading bad ideas from the US and UK to countries with cultural cringe toward them like Canada, Australia, and Singapore.

The MTA has a $50 billion 5-year capital plan. Paris could only dream of such money – Grand Paris Express is of similar size with the ongoing cost overruns but is a 15-year project. The ideal head of the MTA should come from a place with low or at worst medium construction costs, to supervise such a capital plan and coordinate between NYCT and the commuter rail operators.

Such a manager is not going to be a native English speaker, but that’s fine – quite a lot of the Continental European elite is fluent in English, though unfortunately this is not as true in Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan. If it is possible to entice a Spanish manager like Silvia Roldán Fernández of Madrid Metro to come in, then this is ideal, given the number of Spanish-speaking New Yorkers; Madrid of course also has legendarily low construction costs, even today. Gerardo Lertxundi Albéniz of Barcelona is a solid option. Italian managers are an option as well given the growing networks in Italy, not just building new lines but also making old stations accessible: Stefano Cetti of Milan’s public works arm MM, Gioia Ghezzi of the operating company ATM, Giovanni Mottura of Rome’s ATAC, etc. Germans like Munich’s Bernd Rosenbusch or Ingo Wortmann or Berlin’s Eva Kreienkamp have experience with juggling conflicting local and state demands and with more labor militancy than people outside Germany associate Germany with. Laurent Probst may well be a good choice with his experience coordinating an even larger transit network than New York’s – assuming that he wouldn’t view New York as a demotion; the same is true of RATP’s head, the generalist Catherine Guillouard.

This is not meant to be a shortlist – these are just the heads of the transit organs of most of the larger Continental Western European systems. Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese heads should be considered too, if they speak English and if they don’t view working in the US, in a city smaller than Tokyo or Seoul, as a demotion.

Let the civil service work

American civil service is broken – or, more precisely, was never allowed to become an administrative state, thanks to postwar anti-state paranoia. Professionals learn to be timid and wait for the word of a political appointee to do anything unusual. Cuomo did not create this situation – he merely abused it for his own personal gain, making sure the political appointees were not generic liberal Democrats but his own personal loyalists.

The future cannot be a return to the status quo that Cuomo exploited. The civil service has to be allowed to work. The role of elected politicians is to set budgets, say yes or no to megaproject proposals, give very broad directions (“hire more women,” “run like a business,” etc.), and appoint czars in extreme situations when things are at an impasse. Byford acted as if he could work independently, and Cuomo punished him for it. It’s necessary for New York to signal in advance that the Cuomo era is gone and the next Byford will be allowed to work and rewarded for success. This means, hiring someone who expects that the civil service should work, giving them political cover to engage in far-reaching reforms as required, and rewarding success with greater budgets and promotions.

Why It’s Important to Remove Failed Leaders

Andrew Cuomo has a Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to gold, that is, shiny, expensive, and useless. Bin Laden killed 3,000 people in New York on 9-11. Cuomo, through his preference for loyalists who cover up his sexual assaults over competent people, has killed 60,000 and counting in corona excess deaths – 50% more than the US-wide average. And the state let it slide, making excuses for his lying about the nursing home scandal. Eventually the sexual assault stories caught up with him, but not before every state politician preferred to extract some meaningless budget concessions instead of eliminate the killer of New Yorkers at the first opportunity. Even now they delay, not wanting to impeach; they do not believe in consequences for kings, only for subjects.

Time and time again, powerful people show that they don’t believe in accountability. After all, they might be held accountable too, one day. This cascades from the level of a mass killer of a governor down to every middle manager who excuses failure. The idea is that the appearance of scandal is worse than the underlying offense, that somehow things will get better by pretending nothing happened.

And here is the problem: bad leaders, whether they are bad due to pure incompetence or malevolence, don’t get good. People can improve at the start of their careers; leaders are who they are. They can only be thrown away, as far as down as practical, as an example. Anders Tegnell proposed herd immunity for Sweden in early 2020 and then pretended he never did, and the country remained unmasked for most of the year; deaths, while below European averages due to low Nordic levels of cohabitation, are far and away the worst in the Nordic countries, and yet Tegnell is still around, still directing an anti-mask policy. Tegnell is incompetent; Sweden is a worse country for not having gotten rid of him in late spring 2020. Cuomo is malevolent; New York is a worse state for every day that passes that he’s not facing trial for mass manslaughter and sexual assault, every day that passes that his mercenary spokespeople who attacked his victims remain employed.

This is not a moral issue. It’s a practical issue. The most powerful signal anyone can get is promotion versus dismissal (there’s also pay, but it’s not relevant to political power). When Andrew Cuomo stripped Andy Byford of responsibilities as head of New York City Transit, it was a clear signal: you can be a widely acclaimed success, but you failed to flatter the monarch and prostrate before him and this is what matters to me. Byford read the signal correctly, resigned, and ended up promoted to the head of Transport for London, because Sadiq Khan and TfL appreciate competence every bit as Cuomo does not.

Likewise, the retention of Tegnell sends a signal: keep doing what you’re doing. The same is true of Cuomo, and every other failure who is not thrown away from the public.

If anything, it’s worse for a sitting governor. Cuomo openly makes deals. The state legislators who can remove this killer from the body politic choose to negotiate, sending a clear signal: corrupt the state and be rewarded. 60,000 dead New York State residents mean little to them; many more who will die as variants come in mean even less.

The better signal is you have nothing anyone wants, go rot at Sing Sing. This is the correct way to deal with a failure even of three fewer orders of magnitude. Fortunately, there’s only one Cuomo – never before has New York had such mass man-made death. Unfortunately, incidents that are still deadly and require surgical removal of malefactors are far more common. Many come from Cuomo’s lackeys; in my field, the subway, Sarah Feinberg is responsible for around a hundred preventable transit worker deaths, and should never work in or adjacent to this field again. But apolitical managers too screw up on costs, on procurement, on maintenance, on operations, on safety – and rarely suffer for it. But then the fish rots from the head. Chop it off and move on.

How to Build High-Speed Rail with Money the United States Has

The bipartisan infrastructure framework (BIF) just passed the Senate by a large margin, with money for both roads and public transportation. Unlike the 2009 Obama stimulus, the BIF has plenty of money for high-speed rail – not just $8 billion as in the 2009 bill, but a total of $66 billion to be spent on mainline rail. The Northeast Corridor program gets $24 billion out of this $66 billion in a dedicated program and another $6 billion out of another program within this bucket dedicated to Amtrak. This is $30 billion, which should be more than enough for high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor. Together with other buckets for other parts of the US, it can even build some non-Northeastern lines, for example serving Chicago or Los Angeles.

I say should because the current plans are to waste the money. But better things are possible, so at the Transit Costs Project, we’re planning to embark on a project to write a report on how to do this better. The construction cost report will be done in early 2022, but we can overlap to some extent. A one-year program, to debut in early 2023, will include a Northeast Corridor proposal; a two-year one will also include tie-ins and starter lines elsewhere, such as Chicago-Cleveland/Detroit or Los Angeles-San Diego.

But for this, we need funding. We’re a good deal of the way there, I think around two-thirds for the two-year option – and this isn’t quite enough for the one-year option, some of the money needs to be matched. This is not the same as my Patreon in either scale (the difference is more than an order of magnitude) or scope (my Patreon funds the blog and vlog, which are way more general); if you know grants for such projects, please let us know, we can send a fuller proposal.

What’s the project’s scope?

Lots and lots of analysis, for one, like what we’re doing for subways. Intriguingly, high-cost countries for high-speed rail tend to also have high subway costs and vice versa, and this remains true even as it is easier to explain high-speed rail costs in terms of unnecessary scope and leakage. But this is not the dominant part of the project – rather, we are going to be synthetic and make a proposal. We’re not committing to an investment figure; my guess is that in 2021 dollars it should be around $15 billion to cut Northeast Corridor trip times to about 1:45 on each of New York-Boston and New York-Washington, but some variation is possible in either direction.

If there’s $30 billion for the Northeast Corridor, and high-speed rail is doable for half that, then the other half should be spent on tie-ins, for example improving regional rail in all four major metropolitan areas. Naturally, this should only include useful spending for rail operations and connections, but the Northeast doesn’t lack for those; New York can spend $17 billion on new tunnels and that’s at the per-km cost of Citybanan, one of the cheaper city center regional rail projects in our database.

Modernizing Rail 2021 Announcement

We are happy to announce that on Sunday the 29th of August we will hold this year’s Modernizing Rail conference, on the heels of the success last year.

Please register using this form. And please give details on what you’d like to see, and if you’re willing to lead sessions – the schedule of the breakout sessions is still up in the air depending on popular demand. Even the number of breakouts depends on how many registrants we get, compared with the about 200 we had last year. Perhaps the news of the infrastructure bill will tilt the demand toward more political sessions regarding how to ensure what is built is good and less toward technical best practices.

Our keynote is certainly political: Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who represents the northern suburbs of Boston (6th district) and for years has been pushing the North-South Rail Link. He will give brief remarks at 16:00 Eastern time, or 22:00 Central Europe Summer Time, to be followed by a Q&A; if you have a question that you’d like to hear an answer to, you can mention it in the registration form, or email the organizing committee at modernizingrail@gmail.com. We will be taking questions throughout the conference, which will start 11:00 Eastern, so if your questions depend on what you hear at the breakouts, you’re in luck.

Leisure Travel by Public Transit

I’ve written before about tourism by rail, but only in an intercity context, and it’s worthwhile talking about leisure travel by rail at more local and regional scale too. Most travel is local, and this includes leisure travel.

Local neighborhood travel

A trip to dinner in a neighborhood well-known for a specific kind of cuisine is a type of local leisure trip. Ethnic enclaves abound in diverse cities and people routinely go to other neighborhoods to enjoy food; this kind of trip is so common that it’s not even treated as a leisure trip, just as ordinary consumption.

This can be done by car or by public transportation. The advantage of cars is that such trips tend to happen outside rush hour, when there’s less traffic; that of public transport is that usually ethnic business districts are in busy areas, where there’s more traffic, even if they’re not at city center. The best example of a diverse auto-oriented city is Los Angeles, where getting from one region to another takes too long even off-peak, making it cumbersome for a Westsider to have Chinese food in San Gabriel Valley or Vietnamese food in Orange County regularly. New York and London do a lot better on access to such amenities, thanks to their greater centralization of destinations and public transport networks.

Regional travel

Regional travel starts including things people conceive of as leisure trips more regularly. These can include any of the following:

  • Museums, galleries, and other cultural amenities
  • Concerts, sports games, conventions, and other special events
  • Beaches
  • Non-urban outdoor recreation such as hiking and biking trails
  • Historic towns that have fallen into the orbit of a larger city

It is striking, in retrospect, how local such travel is. For example, when I LARPed at Intercon, in 2012-6, I was almost the only person flying in from another country, and a large majority of the attendees were local to the Boston area rather than flying in from far away – and the top locations people were coming in from otherwise were New York and Albany, not Chicago or California. This is equally true of conventions in general, except for a handful of international and national ones like Worldcon or Comic Con.

These are all regional rather than local destinations. If they’re not tethered to a geographic feature like a beach or a mountain, they try to locate based on the transportation network as far as possible, so that the biggest and richest conventions are in city center. New York Comic Con is on the Far West Side, but Dexcon is in Morristown. The upshot is that such events want to be close to public transportation and the issue is then about providing both good transit and sufficient event space in central areas.

The issue of TOD

Transit-oriented development is usually thought of as permitting more residential and commercial buildings near public transport. But this is equally true of leisure destinations. The term TOD did not exist then, but early urban renewal involved building event spaces in or near city centers, for example Lincoln Center.

This is equally true of outdoor places. Of course, TOD can’t create a beach or a suitable hilly region for hiking. But it can promote growth at particular places. Historically, New York had excursion railways to Coney Island, which then became much of the subway in Southern Brooklyn, and the same companies that owned the early railways also developed beachfront hotels. Later, amusement parks developed in the area, back when the main uses of other city waterfront were industrial.

Trails, too, can be served by public transportation if it is there. Germany has patches of forest, rehabilitated in the last 200 years, and some of these patches are near train stations so that people can walk through. The Appalachian Trail has segments accessible by commuter rail from New York, even if the weekend frequency leaves a lot to be desired.

Good transit practices

Leisure travel practically never takes place during commute hours. It peaks on weekends, to the point that in areas close to regional leisure destinations, like the Museum of Natural History or Yankee Stadium or Coney Island, trains have as many riders on weekends as on weekdays or even more.

The point of running regional rail on an all-day, everyday takt is that it facilitates such travel, and not just commuter travel. The same timetable can be used for work trips, errand trips, school trips, intercity trips, and leisure trips, each peaking at a different time. Some trains from Berlin to leisure destinations like the trolleyferry are filled with commuters, others with tourists; either way, they run every 20 minus to Strausberg.

This remains best practice even if there aren’t obvious leisure destinations nearby. A transit city like New York is full of transit users, and providing better suburban service is likely to gradually create transit-oriented leisure in the suburbs catering to these millions of carless city residents. Those can be beaches near convenient train stations, or hiking trails, or historic and cultural places like Sleepy Hollow. But the transit has to be there for any such development to happen.

The Leakage Problem

I’ve spent more than ten years talking about the cost of construction of physical infrastructure, starting with subways and then branching on to other things, most.

And yet there’s a problem of comparable size when discussing infrastructure waste, which, lacking any better term for it, I am going to call leakage. The definition of leakage is any project that is bundled into an infrastructure package that is not useful to the project under discussion and is not costed together with it. A package, in turn, is any program that considers multiple projects together, such as a stimulus bill, a regular transport investment budget, or a referendum. The motivation for the term leakage is that money deeded to megaprojects leaks to unrelated or semi-related priorities. This often occurs for political reasons but apolitical examples exist as well.

Before going over some examples, I want to clarify that the distinction between leakage and high costs is not ironclad. Sometimes, high costs come from bundled projects that are costed together with the project at hand; in the US they’re called betterments, for example the $100 million 3 km bike lane called the Somerville Community Path for the first, aborted iteration of the Green Line Extension in Boston. This blur is endemic to general improvement projects, such as rail electrification, and also to Northeast Corridor high-speed rail plans, but elsewhere, the distinction is clearer.

Finally, while normally I focus on construction costs for public transport, leakage is a big problem in the United States for highway investment, for political reasons. As I will explain below, I believe that nearly all highway investment in the US is waste thanks to leakage, even ignoring the elevated costs of urban road tunnels.

State of good repair

A month ago, I uploaded a video about the state of good repair grift in the United States. The grift is that SOGR is maintenance spending funded out of other people’s money – namely, a multiyear capital budget – and therefore the agency can spend it with little public oversight. The construction of an expansion may be overly expensive, but at the end of the day, the line opens and the public can verify that it works, even for a legendarily delayed project like Second Avenue Subway, the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, or the soon-to-open Tel Aviv Subway. It’s a crude mechanism, since the public can’t verify safety or efficiency, but it’s impossible to fake: if nothing opens, it embarrasses all involved publicly, as is the case for California High-Speed Rail. No such mechanism exists for maintenance, and therefore, incompetent agencies have free reins to spend money with nothing to show for it. I recently gave an example of unusually high track renewal costs in Connecticut.

The connection with leakage is that capital plans include renewal and long-term repairs and not just expansion. Thus, SOGR is leakage, and when its costs go out of control, they displace funding that could be used for expansion. The NEC Commission proposal for high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor calls for a budget of $117 billion in 2020 dollars, but there is extensive leakage to SOGR in the New York area, especially the aforementioned Connecticut plan, and thus for such a high budget the target average speed is about 140 km/h, in line with the upgraded legacy trains that high-speed lines in Europe replace.

Regionally, too, the monetary bonfire that is SOGR sucks the oxygen out of the room. The vast majority of the funds for MTA capital plans in New York is either normal replacement or SOGR, a neverending program whose backlog never shrinks despite billions of dollars in annual funding. The MTA wants to spend $50 billion in the next 5 years on capital improvements; visible expansion, such as Second Avenue Subway phase 2, moving block signaling on more lines, and wheelchair accessibility upgrades at a few stations, consists of only a few billion dollars of this package.

This is not purely an American issue. Germany’s federal plan for transport investment calls for 269.6 billion euros in project capital funding from 2016 to 2030, including a small proportion for projects planned now to be completed after 2031; as detailed on page 14, about half of the funds for both road and rail are to go to maintenance and renewal and only 40% to expansion. But 40% for expansion is still substantially less leakage than seen in American plans like that for New York.

Betterments and other irrelevant projects

Betterments straddle the boundary between high costs and leakage. They can be bundled with the cost of a project, as is the case for the Somerville Community Path for original GLX (but not the current version, from which it was dropped). Or they can be costed separately. The ideal project breakdown will have an explicit itemization letting us tell how much money leaked to betterments; for example, for the first Nice tramway line, the answer is about 30%, going to streetscaping and other such improvements.

Betterments fall into several categories. Some are pure NIMBYism – a selfish community demands something as a precondition of not publicly opposing the project, and the state caves instead of fighting back. In Israel, Haifa demanded that the state pay for trenching portions of the railroad through the southern part of the city as part of the national rail electrification project, making specious claims about the at-grade railway separating the city from the beach and even saying that high-voltage electrification causes cancer. In Toronto, the electrification project for the RER ran into a similar problem: while rail electrification reduces noise emissions, some suburbs still demanded noise walls, and the province caved to the tune of $1 billion.

Such extortion is surplus extraction – Israel and Toronto are both late to electrification, and thus those projects have very high benefit ratios over base costs, encouraging squeaky wheel behavior, raising costs to match benefits. Keeping the surplus with the state is crucial for enabling further expansion, and requires a combination of the political courage to say no and mechanisms to defer commitment until design is more advanced, in order to disempower local communities and empower planners.

Other betterments have a logical reason to be there, such as the streetscape and drainage improvements for the Nice tramway, or to some extent the Somerville Community Path. The problem with them is that chaining them to a megaproject funded by other people’s money means that they have no sense of cost control. A municipality that has to build a bike path out of its own money will never spend $100 million on 3 km; and yet that was the projected cost in Somerville, where the budget was treated as acceptable because it was second-order by broader GLX standards.

Bad expansion projects

Sometimes, infrastructure packages include bad with good projects. The bad projects are then leakage. This is usually the politically hardest nut to crack, because usually this happens in an environment of explicit political negotiation between actors each wanting something for their own narrow interest.

For example, this can be a regional negotiation between urban and non-urban interests. The urban interests want a high-value urban rail line; the rest want a low-value investment, which could be some low-ridership regional rail or a road project. Germany’s underinvestment in high-speed rail essentially comes from this kind of leakage: people who have a non-urban identity or who feel that people with such identity are inherently more morally deserving of subsidy than Berlin or Munich oppose an intercity high-speed rail network, feeling that trains averaging 120-150 km/h are good enough on specious polycentricity grounds. Such negotiation can even turn violent – the Gilets Jaunes riots were mostly white supremacist, but they were white supremacists with a strong anti-urban identity who felt like the diesel taxes were too urban-focused.

In some cases, like that of a riot, there is an easy solution, but when it goes to referendum, it is harder. Southern California in particular has an extreme problem of leakage in referendums, with no short- or medium-term solution but to fund some bad with the good. California’s New Right passed Prop 13, which among other things requires a 2/3 supermajority for tax hikes. To get around it, the state has to promise somthing explicit to every interest group. This is especially acute in Southern California, where “we’re liberal Democrats, we’re doing this” messaging can get 50-60% but not 67% as in the more left-wing San Francisco area and therefore regional ballot measures for increasing sales taxes for transit have to make explicit promises.

The explicit promises for weak projects, which can be low-ridership suburban light rail extensions, bond money for bus operations, road expansion, or road maintenance, damage the system twice. First, they’re weak on a pure benefit-cost ratio. And second, they commit the county too early to specific projects. Early commitment leads to cost overruns, as the ability of nefarious actors (not just communities but also contractors, political power brokers, planners, etc.) to demand extra scope is high, and the prior political commitment makes it too embarrassing to walk away from an overly bloated project. For an example of early commitment (though not of leakage), witness California High-Speed Rail: even now the state pretends it is not canceling the project, and is trying to pitch it as Bakersfield-Merced high-speed rail instead, to avoid the embarrassment.

The issue of roads

I focus on what I am interested in, which is public transport, but the leakage problem is also extensive for roads. In the United States, road money is disbursed to the tune of several tens of billions of dollars per year in the regular process, even without any stimulus funding. It’s such an important part of the mythos of public works that it has to be spread evenly across the states, so that politicians from a bygone era of non-ideological pork money can say they’ve brought in spending to their local districts. I believe there’s even a rule requiring at least 92% of the fuel tax money generated in each state to be spent within the state.

The result is that road money is wasted on low-growth regions. From my perspective, all road money is bad. But let’s put ourselves for a moment in the mindset of a Texan or Bavarian booster: roads are good, climate change is exaggerated, deficits are immoral (German version) or taxes are (Texan version), the measure of a nation’s wealth is how big its SUVs are. In this mindset, road money should be spent prudently in high-growth regions, like the metropolitan areas of the American Sunbelt or the biggest German cities. It definitely should not be spent in declining regions like the Rust Belt, where due to continued road investment and population decline, there is no longer traffic congestion.

And yet, road money is spent in those no-congestion regions. Politicians get to brag about saving a few seconds’ worth of congestion with three-figure million dollar interchanges and bypasses in small Rust Belt towns, complete with political rhetoric about the moral superiority of regions whose best days lay a hundred years ago to regions whose best days lie ahead.

Leakage and consensus

It is easy to get trapped in a consensus in which every region and every interest group gets something. This makes leakage easier: an infrastructure package will then have something for everyone, regardless of any benefit-cost analysis. Once the budget rather than the outcome becomes the main selling point, black holes like SOGR are easy to include.

It’s critical to resist this trend and fight to oppose leakage. Expansion should go to expansion, where investment is needed, and not where it isn’t. Failure to do so leads to hundreds of billions in investment money most of which is wasted independently for the construction cost problem.

Quick Note: PPP Adjustments

All construction cost figures that I sign my name to adjust currencies for purchasing power parity, or PPP. In other words, I convert currencies across countries in PPP terms, not exchange rate terms. This is not how everyone else does this; the World Bank analysis of global high-speed rail costs converts currencies by exchange rate, and, since the yuan is undervalued, concludes Chinese construction costs are below world average, whereas in fact they are above average.

Why PPP?

Because nearly all of the costs of the construction of infrastructure are local. Labor is almost entirely local, and materials are as well, since concrete is made locally rather than imported. Foreign expertise and machinery are internationally traded; in those cases, currency devaluations can lead to cost overruns, but the proportion of the cost that is traded remains low.

India: an indigenization plan from the 2000s was quoted as reducing costs by 10-15%. The rupee’s exchange rate value is lower than its PPP value by a factor of about 3.3; indigenization reducing costs by 10-15% is compatible with around 20% of the total value of the original contract being imported.

Philippines: I spoke with a DOTR planner, who said that 90% of the value of civil works is local, and only 10% is imported, such as foreign expertise and imported material; the planner said that rolling stock is imported, but our construction cost estimates exclude rolling stock when possible.

Why not wages?

Because while the bulk of costs are domestic, they are not labor in developing countries. In Turkey, which is not much poorer than Southern Europe, costs split as 20% labor (US: 55%), 40% permanent materials, 10% construction materials, 30% construction equipment. The 80% non-labor costs are mostly domestically-produced, at local wages, but also at local productivity. If Turkey could produce everything at the same productivity as a richer country, it would just be a richer country. This goes even more so for actually poor countries like India and the Philippines.

The impact of PPP

With PPP adjustment, GDP per capita ceases to be a significant correlate of construction cost per km, except through the tendency of poor countries to build more elevated and fewer subway lines. This was not the original intention of the adjustment, which was to smooth dollar-euro difference, but it’s suggestive that it’s correct and meaningful.