Tokyo Construction Costs

Here is a list of Japanese subways and their construction costs, courtesy of Borners, who has been working on this as well as on a deep dive about London construction costs. I’d been looking for this data for years; someone in comments posted a link to a different sheet summarizing the same data years ago but I couldn’t find it.

Unfortunately, the list isn’t quite good enough to be used for all subway lines. The problem is that the numbers are given in nominal yen for the costs of constructing entire lines, including ones that opened in phases over many years during which inflation was significant. The table of lines and their construction costs in units of 100 million yen/km is as follows, with my best attempt at deflating to 2023 prices, still in units of 100 million yen/km; to convert to millions of dollars per km, the 2022 PPP rate is $1 = ¥94.93, so add 5.3% to all numbers in the penultimate column.

LineCost/kmFirst worksFirst openingFinal openingYear of pricesCost/km (real)Confidence
Marunouchi181951195419621956114Medium
Asakusa461956196019681961257Medium
Hibiya321959196119641961179High
Tozai411962196419691965181High
Mita911965196820001975182Low
Chiyoda691966196919791970236Low
Yurakucho1671970197419881979261Low
Hanzomon2551972197820031983336Low
Shinjuku2351971197819891976433Low
Namboku2621986199120011993291High
Oedo3111986199120001994343High
Fukutoshin2822001200820082005314High

The confidence level is a combination of the length of time it took to build the line and the inflation rate over that period. The Oedo and Namboku Lines opened in stages over a decade, but during that decade Japan had no inflation, and as a result price level adjustments are easy. In contrast, inflation in the 1960s was high but the Hibiya and Tozai Lines were built quickly, so that the uncertainty based on picking a year to deflate to is maybe 10%. The in between lines – Mita, Chiyoda, Yurakucho, Hanzomon – all opened in stages over a long period of time with significant inflation. This makes it hard to use them to answer the question, what was Tokyo’s cost history?

What the numbers suggest is that by the 1970s, construction costs were not much lower than they’d be in the 2000s; Japan having grown steadily in the 1970s and 80s, this means that its ability to afford new subways after the bubble burst in the 1990s was actually greater than in the 1970s. Construction costs have risen since – an extension of the Namboku Line to Shinagawa is budgeted at ¥131 billion/2.5 km and a branch extension of the Yurakucho Line from Toyosu to Sumiyoshi is budgeted at ¥269 billion/4.8 km. Toyosu-Sumiyoshi is in Shitamachi and has multiple canal crossings justifying an elevated cost, but Shirokane-Takanawa-Shinagawa is in easier topography, and while it has multiple subway crossings over a short length, so did the lines built in the 1990s and 2000s – the Fukutoshin Line has, over 9 km, five subway crossings and complex connections at both ends with through-running.

Cos Cob Bridge Replacement

The Northeast Corridor has eight movable bridges in Connecticut; other than one that was replaced in the 1990s, all are considered by Amtrak and Connecticut DOT to be both critical priorities for replacement and also major undertakings. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funded two, on the Connecticut and the Norwalk Rivers. The costs are enormous, beyond any justification: the Walk Bridge replacement is funded at $1 billion for a four-track bridge of 200 meters, and the replacement will still be a movable bridge rather than a fixed span with enough clearance below for boat traffic. The cost can be compared with an order of magnitude of tens of millions of dollars for comparable or longer bridges, for examples $50 million for one of the Rhone bridges on the LGV Méditerranée and $32 million for an 800 m viaduct on the Erfurt-Nuremberg line.

The goal of this post is to focus on the Cos Cob Bridge on the Mianus River. Among the eight bridges, it is the one with the least advanced plans for rehabilitation, such that no cost figure is given, but rumors put it in the mid-single digit billions for a viaduct of about 1 km, crossing about 250 m of water. Among the bridges west of New Haven, it is also the one with the most constrained alignment making replacement more necessary to fix the right-of-way geometry: the bridge itself is straight but flanked by two short, sharp curves, and replacement should be bundled with a wider curve.

The NEC Webtool outlines one alignment, with a wide curve, 2,400 meters in radius. The snag is the vertical alignment. The bridge needs to be high enough to clear boat traffic below; I-95 slightly upriver has a clearance below of 14.9 meters (Wikipedia says 21 meters but that’s the top of the deck, not the bottom), and with a typical deck thickness of 1.5 meters it means top of rail needs to be about 16.5 meters above sea level – but the Riverside station 450 meters east of the midpoint of the river has top of rail 10 meters above sea level and the Cos Cob station under the I-95 overpass 450 meters west of the midpoint is 8 meters above sea level. To build it as a high span thus requires rising 8.5 meters over 450 meters.

The current Northeast Corridor plans hew to a much lower ruling grade. The Walk Bridge is being replaced with another movable bridge and not a high fixed span because the standards call for a 1% grade. This is, frankly, dumb. The passenger trains are electric, either commuter rail EMUs or powerful intercity trains capable of climbing 4% grades over a short section, even the medium-speed Northeast Regionals. The freight trains are long enough that what matters isn’t so much the maximum grade as the maximum grade averaged over the length of a train, in which case peaking at 4% over a length of 450 meters is not at all problematic.

With a 4% standard, the question is not about the grade, but about the vertical curve radius. Standards for those are tighter than for horizontal curves. Vertical and horizontal curve radii both follow the formula ar = v^2, but the acceleration limit a is much tighter since there is no tilting or superelevation, and on a crest a high speed also reduces the effective weight acceleration and thus reduces train stability. In Germany, a is limited to 0.482 on a crest and 0.594 on a hallow, both requiring special permission; in Sweden, the German crest value is the minimum limit, with no special dispensation on a hallow. The upshot is that at 250 km/h, the exceptional vertical curve radius is 10,000 m and thus it takes 400 meters just to get to 4%; over a length of 450 meters, the maximum average gradient is 1.125% if the higher acceleration rate on a hallow isn’t used or 1.25% if is and the tracks can only rise respectively 5 or 5.5 meters. To make it 8.5, the speed limit needs to be reduced: at 200 km/h, the vertical curve radius is 6,400 meters and then over 225 meters the trains can get up to 3.5% and, if it’s symmetric, over 450 they can climb 7.9 meters, and if it’s asymmetric then they can climb more than the required 8.5%. It’s dirty but it does work.

The issue is then how this affects construction. I don’t know why the Connecticut bridge replacements are so expensive, beyond the observation that everything in Connecticut is exceptionally expensive, usually even by the standards of other Northeastern American rail projects (for example, infill stations), let alone European ones. The local press articles talk about staging construction to avoid disturbing the running track, and if this is the main difficulty, then building a new bridge 50 meters upriver should be much easier, since then the only part of the project interfacing with the existing track is the track connections on firma.

Whatever it is, a multi-billion dollar pricetag is not believable given the required scope. More difficult construction has been done for two orders of magnitude less on this side of the Pond. On a different mode but in the same region, the 10-lane 1.4 km long Q Bridge cost $554 million, around $790 million today, which, relative to the size of the bridge, is still around an order of magnitude cheaper than Walk and more than an order of magnitude cheaper than what Cos Cob is rumored to be.

YIMBY First, Building Reform Second

Last night I asked the American building reform advocates on Bluesky about different layouts and why developers don’t build them. I got different answers from different advocates about why the layout I’d just mocked of family-size apartments with two staircases isn’t being built in the US, some about regulations, but Mike Eliason said what I was most afraid of hearing: it’s doable but it’s more profitable to build small apartments. My conclusion from this is that while American and Canadian building regulations remain a problem and need to be realigned with European and Asian norms, they are a secondary issue, the primary one remaining how much housing is permitted to be built in the first place. Developers will keep building the most profitable apartment forms until they run out of the most profitable tenants.

The mockup

The following mockup has a scale of 1 meter = 20 pixels, so the building is overall 18 meters by 30. This is a point access block rather than a double-loaded corridor (see definitions here), but it also has two staircases, emanating from the central access block. Each floor has four apartments, each with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, the ellipses in the image denoting bathtubs. The windows are top and bottom, but not left and right; these are single-aspect apartments, not corner apartments.

On Bluesky, I said the floorplate efficiency is 94%; this comes from assuming the step width and landing length are 1.1 meters each, a metrization of the International Building Code’s 44″, but to get to 94% assumes the staircase walls are included in the 1.1 meter width, so either it’s actually 90 cm width or, counting wall thickness, the efficiency is only 92.5%. The IBC allows 90 cm steps in buildings with an occupancy limit of up to 50, which this building would satisfy in practice at six stories (a three-bedroom apartment marketed to a middle-class clientele averages closer to two than four occupants due to empty nests, divorces, guest rooms, and home offices) but not as a legal limit. Regardless, 92.5% is average by the standards of European point access blocks, whose efficiency is reduced because the apartments are smaller, and very good by those of American double-loaded corridors.

Now, to be clear, this is still illegal in many American jurisdictions, as Alfred Twu pointed out in @-replies. The building mockup above has two means of egress, but the typical American code also requires minimum separation between the two staircases’ access points. This is an entirely useless addition – the main fire safety benefits of two staircases are that a single fire can’t interpose between residents and the stairs if the two staircases are at opposite ends of the building, but that’s not legally required (quarter-point staircases are routine), and that the fire department can vent smoke through one staircase while keeping the other safe, which does not require separation. Nonetheless, this is not the primary reason this isn’t getting built even where it is legal, for example in jurisdictions that permit scissor stairs or have a smaller minimum distance between the two staircases, like Canada.

I was hoping the answer I’d get would be about elevator costs. The elevator in the mockup is European, 1.6*1.75 meters in exterior dimensions; American codes require bigger elevators, which is by itself a second-order issue, but then installation costs rise to the point that developers prefer long buildings on corridors for the lower ratio of elevators to apartments. But nobody mentioned that as a reason.

The rent issue

Mike Eliason responded to my question about why buildings like the above mockup aren’t being built by talking about market conditions. The above building, with 540 m^2 of built-up area per floor, can host four three-bedroom apartments, each around 127 m^2, or it can host 16 studios, each around 29 m^2. In Seattle, the studio can rent for $1,500/month; the three-bedroom will struggle to earn the proportionate $6,000/month.

It’s worth unpacking what causes these market conditions. The three-bedroom is marketed to a family with children. The children do not earn money, and, until they reach kindergarten age, cost thousands of dollars a month each in daycare fees; if they don’t go to daycare then it means the family only has one income, which means it definitely can’t afford to compete for building space with four singles who’d take four studios, or it has parents in the immediate vicinity, which is rare in a large, internally mobile country. The family has options to outbid the four singles, but they’re limited and require the family to be rather wealthy – two incomes are obligatory, at high enough levels to be able to take the hit from taxes and daycare; the family would also need to be wedded to living in the city, since the suburbs’ housing is designed entirely for families, whereas the singles take a serious hit to living standards from suburbanizing (they’d have to get housemates). In effect, the broad middle and lower middle classes could afford the studios as singles, but only the uppermost reaches of the middle class can pay $6,000/month for the three-bedroom.

In economic statistics, imputation of living standards for different household sizes takes this degressivity of income – $6,000/month for a family of four is a struggle, $1,500/month for a single is affordable on the average US wage – and uses a hedonic adjustment for household sizes. example by taking the square root of household size as the number of true consumption units. To INSEE, a family of four has 2.1 equivalent consumption units; elsewhere, it’s a square root, so it has 2 consumption units. A rental system that maintains a 4:1 ratio has no way for the family to compete.

The upshot is that the developers need to run out of the tenants who can most easily afford rent before they build for the rest. Normally it’s treated as a matter of distribution of units among different social classes, but here it’s a matter of the physical size of the unit. This is why YIMBY first is so important: eventually developers will run out of singles and then have to build for families.

16-Car Trains on the Northeast Corridor

The dominant length of high-speed rail platforms in China, Japan, South Korea, and Europe is 400 meters, which usually corresponds to 16-car trains. The Northeast Corridor unfortunately does not run such long trains; intercity trains on it today are usually eight cars long, and the under construction Avelia Liberty sets are 8.5 cars long. Demand even today is high enough that trains fill even with very high fares, and so providing more service through both higher frequency and longer trains should be a priority. This post goes over what needs to happen to lengthen the trains to the global norm for high-speed rail. More trains need to be bought, but also the platforms need to be lengthened at many stations, with varying levels of difficulty.

The station list to consider is as follows:

  • Boston South Station
  • Providence
  • New London-HSR
  • New Haven
  • Stamford
  • New York Penn Station
  • Newark Penn Station
  • Trenton
  • Philadelphia 30th Street
  • Wilmington
  • Baltimore Penn Station
  • BWI
  • Washington Union Station

Some of these are local-only stations – the fastest express trains should not be stopping at New London or BWI, and whether any train stops at Stamford or Trenton is a matter of timetabling (the headline timetable we use includes Stamford on all trains but I am not wedded to it). In order, allowing 16-car trains at these stations involves the following changes.

Boston

South Station’s longest platforms today are those between tracks 8 and 9 and between tracks 10 and 11, both 12 cars long. To their immediate south is the interlocking, so lengthening would be difficult.

Moreover, the best platforms for Northeast Corridor trains to use at South Station are to the west. The best way to organize South Station is as four parallel stations, from west to east (in increasing track number order) the Worcester Line, the Northeast Corridor and branches, the Fairmount Line, and the Old Colony Lines, with peak traffic of respectively 8, 12 or 16, 4 or 8, and 6 trains per hour. This gives the Northeast Corridor tracks 4-7 or possibly 4-9; 4-7 means the Franklin Line has to pair with the Fairmount Line to take advantage of having more tracks, and may be required anyway since pairing the Franklin Line with the Northeast Corridor (Southwest Corridor within the city of Boston) would constrain the triple-track corridor too much, with 12 peak commuter trains and 4 peak intercity trains an hour.

The platform between tracks 6 and 7 is 11 cars long, but to its south is a gap in the tracks as the interlocking leads tracks 6 and 7 in different directions, and thus it can be lengthened to 16 cars within its footprint. The platform between tracks 4 and 5 is harder to lengthen, but this is still doable if the track that tracks 5 and 6 merge into south of the station is moved in conjunction with a project to lengthen the other platform.

Of note, the other Boston station, Back Bay, is rather constrained, with nearly the entire platforms under an overbuild, complicating any rebuild.

Providence

Providence has 12-car platforms. The southern edge is under an overbuild with rapid convergence between the tracks and cannot reasonably be extended. But the northern edge is in the open air, and lengthening is possible. The northern edge would be on rather tight curves, which is not acceptable under most standards, but in such a constrained environment, waivers are unavoidable, as is the case throughout urban Germany.

New London

This is a new station and can be built to the required length from the start.

New Haven

The current station platforms are only 10 cars long, but there is space to expand them in both directions. The platform area is in effect a railyard, a good example of the American tradition in which the train station is not where the trains are (as in Europe) but rather next to where the trains are.

A rebuild is needed anyway, for two reasons. First, it is desirable to build a bypass roughly following I-95 to straighten the route beginning immediately north of the station, even cutting off State Street in order to go straight to East Haven rather than curve to the north as on the current route. And second, the current usage of the station is that Amtrak uses tracks 1-4 (numbered west to east as in Boston) and Metro-North uses tracks 8-14, which forces Amtrak and Metro-North trains to cross each other at grade from their slow-fast-fast-slow pattern on the running line to the fast-fast-slow-slow pattern at the station. In the future, the station should be used in such a way that intercity trains either divert north to Hartford or Springfield or go immediately east on a flying junction to the high-speed bypass toward Rhode Island, without opposed-direction flat junctions; the flying junction is folded into the cost of the bypass and dominates the cost of rebuilding the platforms, as the space immediately north and south of the platforms is largely empty.

Stamford

Stamford has 12-car platforms. Going beyond that is hard, to the point that a more detailed alternatives analysis must include the option of not having intercity trains stop there at all, and instead running 12-car express commuter trains, lengthening major intermediate stops like South Norwalk (currently 10 cars long) and Bridgeport (currently 8) instead.

To keep the mainline option of stopping at Stamford, a platform rebuild is needed, in two ways. First, the station today has five tracks, a both literally and figuratively odd number, not useful for any timetable, with the middle track, numbered 1 (from north to south the numbers are 5, 3, 1, 2, 4), not served by a platform. And second, the platform between tracks 3 and 5 can at best be lengthened to 14 cars, while that between tracks 2 and 4 cannot be lengthened without moving tracks on viaducts. This means that some mechanism to rebuild the station should be considered, to create four tracks with more space between them so that 16-car platforms are viable; this should be bundled with a flying junction farther east to grade-separate the New Canaan Branch from the mainline.

A quick-and-dirty option, potentially viable here but almost nowhere else, is selective door opening, at the cost of longer dwell times. Normally selective door opening should not be used – it confuses passengers, for one. However, here it may be an option, as intercity traffic here is unlikely to be high; traffic today is 323,791 in financial 2023, the lowest of any station under consideration in this post unless one counts New London. The only reason to stop here in the first place is commuter ridership, in which case mechanisms such as restricting unreserved seats to the central 12 cars can be used.

New York

Penn Station has multiple platforms already long enough for 16- and even 17-car trains, including the one we pencil for all high-speed intercity trains in the proposal, platform 6 between tracks 11 and 12, as well as the two adjacent platforms, 5 and 7. (Note that unlike at New Haven and Boston, platform numbers at Penn increase south to north, that is right to left from the perspective of a Boston-bound traveler.)

Thank the god of railways, since platform expansion requires a multi-billion dollar project to remove the Madison Square Garden overbuild in the most optimistic case; in a more pessimistic case, it would also require removing the Moynihan Station overbuild.

Newark

Newark Penn Station’s platforms are in a grand structure about 14.5 cars long. Thankfully, they extend a bit south of it, producing about 16 cars’ worth of platform on the west (southbound) side, between tracks 3 and 4; as in New York, track numbers increase east to west. On the east side, PATH interposes between the two tracks, which have a cross-platform transfer from northbound New Jersey Transit trains to PATH. The platform structures and their extensions do have enough length to allow 16-car trains – indeed they go as long as 18 – but the southern ends are currently disused and would require some rehabilitation.

Trenton

Trenton has a 12.5 car long southbound platform and an 11.5 car long northbound platform. There is practically no room for an expansion if no tracks are moved. If tracks are moved, then some space can be created, but only enough for about 14 cars, not 16.

However, traffic is low, the second lowest among stations under consideration next to Stamford. The suite of Stamford solutions is thus most appropriate here: selective door opening with only the middle 12 cars (naturally the same as at Stamford) open to commuters, or just not stopping at this station at all. The only reason we’re even considering stopping here is timetabling-related: trains should be running every 10 minutes around New York but every 15 between Baltimore and Washington, or else significant expansion of quad-tracking on the Penn Line is required, and so a local stop should be added as a buffer, which can be Trenton or BWI, and BWI has twice the current Amtrak traffic of Trenton.

Philadelphia

30th Street Station has 14-car platforms. Selective door opening is basically impossible given the high expected traffic at this station, and instead platform expansion is required. There is an overbuild, but the tracks stay straight and only begin curving after a few tens of meters, which gives room for extension; from the north end to the overbuild to where the tracks begin curving toward one another to the south is 15.5 cars, and there is room north of the overbuild between the tracks.

Whatever reconstruction project is needed is helped by the low traffic at these platforms. SEPTA uses the upper level of the station, with tracks oriented east-west. The north-south lower level is only used by Amtrak, which could be easily reduced to three platform tracks (two Northeast Corridor, one Keystone) if need be, out of 11 today. Thus, staging construction can be done easily and intrusively, with no care taken to preserve track access during the work, as half the station platforms can be closed off at once.

Wilmington

Wilmington is frustrating, in that there is platform space for 16 cars rather easily, but it’s on inconsistent sides of the tracks. Track numbers increase south to north; track 1 has a side platform, there’s an island platform between tracks 2 and 3, and then track 3 also has a side platform on the other side, extending well to the east of the island platform. The island platform and the track 1 platform are about 12.5 cars long, and the track 3 side platform is 13.5 cars long. Thus, an extension, selective door opening, or a station rebuild is required.

The island platform can be extended about one car in each direction, so it cannot be the solution without selective door opening. Both side platforms can be extended somewhat to the west: the track 1 platform can be extended to 16 cars, but it would need to be elevated in the narrow space between the track viaduct and the station parking garage; the track 3 platform can be extended in both directions, avoiding a new elevated extension over North King Street.

If for some reason an extension of the track 1 platform is not possible, then selective door opening can be used, but not as reliably as at lower-traffic Stamford or Trenton, and overall I would not recommend this solution. A station rebuild then becomes necessary: the station has three tracks but doesn’t need more than two if SEPTA and Amtrak can be timetabled right, and then the removal of either track 1 or track 2 would create space for a longer platform.

Baltimore

Baltimore Penn has seven tracks, numbered from south to north 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, F. Their platforms are 10 to 13 cars long. Northbound trains are more or less forced to use the platform between tracks 1 and 3, since the way the route tapers to a three-, then four-track line to the east forces all eastbound trains to use mainline track 1; this platform is rather narrow at its east end but has space to the west for a 16-car extension. Westbound trains can use either the platform between tracks 4 and 5 or that between tracks 6 and 7, with tracks 4 and 6 preferred over 7 as they reach the express westbound track (track 5 stub-ends). Both platforms can be extended, with the platform between tracks 6 and 7 requiring a one-car extension to the east where a ramp down to track level for track workers exists whereas that between tracks 4 and 5 has ample unused space to its west.

BWI

The two side platforms at BWI are just under 13 cars long. However, nowhere else on the corridor is an extension easier: the station is located in an undeveloped wooded area, with space cleared on both sides of the track so that tree cutting is likely unnecessary west of the tracks and certainly unnecessary east of them.

The station itself needs a rebuild anyway, due to already existing plans to widen it from three to four tracks. This is required to enable intercity trains to overtake commuter trains anyway, unless delicate timetabling on triple track is used or another part of the Penn Line is set up as a four-track overtake. The plans are rather advanced, but platform extensions can be pursued as an add-on, without disturbing them due to the easy nature of the right-of-way.

Washington

Washington is set up as two separate stations, a high-platform terminal to the west and a low-platform through-station to the east on a lower level. Track numbers increase west to east, the western part taking 7-20 (though only 9-20 are high and wired) and the eastern part 23-30. None of the western platforms is long enough, but multiple options still exist:

  • The platform between tracks 9 and 10 has room for an extension.
  • The platforms between tracks 15 and 16 and between tracks 16 and 17 look like they already have extensions, if not open for passengers.
  • The platforms between track 17 and track 18 and between tracks 19 and 20 are only 12 cars long, but tracks could be cannibalized in the open air to make a long enough platform, especially since the reason track numbers 21 and 22 are skipped is that there used to be tracks there and now there’s empty space.
  • The platform between tracks 25 and 26 is long enough, and could be raised to have level boarding.

The existing platforms that can be extended easily are sufficient in number, but probably not in location – it’s ideal for the platforms to be close together, to simplify the interlocking as trains have to be scheduled to enter and leave the station without opposite-direction conflicts. If it’s doable even with a split between platforms separated by multiple tracks then it’s ideal, but otherwise, the extra work on tracks 17-20 may be necessary, converting a part of the station that presently has six tracks and four platforms into likely four tracks and two platforms.

Conclusion

All of this looks doable. The hardest station, Stamford, is skippable if selective door opening is unviable after all and a rebuild is too expensive. Among the other stations, light rebuilds are needed at Boston, Wilmington, and maybe Washington; New Haven needs a more serious rebuild as part of the bypass, but the station platforms are a routine extension where there is already room between the tracks. The most untouchable station, New York, already has multiple platforms of the required length at the required location within the station.

Northeast Corridor Profits and Amtrak Losses

In response to my previous post, it was pointed out to me that Amtrak finances can’t really be viewed in combination, but have to be split between the Northeast Corridor, the state-supported routes, and the long-distance trains. Long-distance is defined by a 750 mile (1,200 km) standard, comprising the night trains plus the Palmetto; these trains have especially poor financial performance. The question is what level of Northeast Corridor profitability is required to cover those losses.

In financial 2024 (ending 2024-09-30), Amtrak finances per route category were as follows, in millions of dollars or passenger-km or in dollars per p-km:

CategoryRidershipP-kmCostCost/p-kmRevenueRevenue/p-km
NEC144,053.31,146.80.2831,414.60.349
State-supported14.52,972.61,110.70.374859.20.289
Long-distance4.33,505.81,261.20.36626.10.179

The long-distance trains don’t actually have higher cost structure than the state-supported ones. Their greater losses are because fares are degressive in distance, and so the longer distances traveled translate to lower revenue per kilometer. This is also observable on some high-speed routes in Europe – the fares on TGVs using the LGV Sud-Est are very degressive, with little premium on Paris-Nice over Paris-Lyon despite the factor of 2.5 longer distance and factor of almost 3 longer time.

Revenue per passenger-km in France and Germany is around $0.15, as I explain in this post with links, and revenue per passenger-km in Japan is $0.25, both with average trip lengths similar to those of the Northeast Corridor and state-supported trains. Getting operating costs for just high-speed trains in France and Germany is surprisingly tricky; the Spinetta report says the TGV costs 0.06€/seat-km without capital, which at current seat occupancy is around 0.08€/p-km or around $0.11/p-km.

The upshot is that Northeast Corridor profits need to be $886.6 million a year to cover losses elsewhere, and if the operating costs on the corridor were the same as on the TGV, this could be achieved now with no further increases in service.

Now, in reality, high-speed rail would both massively increase ridership and also have to involve reducing fares to more normal levels than $0.35/p-km. If the revenue is $0.15/p-km and the cost is $0.11/p-km, then traffic in p-km has to rise to 22.165 billion/year, a fivefold increase, to cover. This is less implausible than it sounds – my gravity-based ridership model predicts about that ridership. Potentially, operating costs could be lower than on the TGV, if the entire corridor is (relatively) fast, with no long sections on slow lines as in France, and if traffic is less peaky than in France. But to first order, the answer to the profits question should be “probably but not certainly.”

Amtrak’s Failure

An article in Streetsblog by Jim Mathews of the Rail Passengers Association talking up Amtrak as a success has left a sour taste in my mouth as well as those of other good transit activists. The post says that Amtrak is losing money and it’s fine because it’s a successful service by other measures. I’ve talked before about why good intercity rail is profitable – high-speed trains are, for one, and has a cost structure that makes it hard to lose money. But even setting that aside, there are no measures by which Amtrak is a successful, if one is willing to look away from the United States for a few moments. What the post praises, Amtrak’s infrastructure construction, is especially bad by any global standard. It is unfortunate that American activists for mainline rail are especially unlikely to be interested in how things work in other parts of the world, and instead are likely to prefer looking back to American history. I want to like the RPA (distinct from the New York-area Regional Plan Association, which this post will not address), but its Americanism is on full display here and this blinds its members to the failures of Amtrak.

Amtrak ridership

The ridership on intercity rail in the United States is, by most first-world standards, pitiful. Amtrak reports, for financial 2023, 5.823 billion passenger-miles, or 9.371 billion p-km; Statista gives it at 9.746 billion p-km for 2023, which I presume is for calendar 2023, capturing more corona recovery. France had 65 billion p-km on TGVs and international trains in 2023.

More broadly than the TGV, Eurostat reports rail p-km without distinction between intercity and regional trains; the total for both modes in the US was 20.714 billion in 2023 and 30.89 billion in 2019, commuter rail having taken a permanent hit due to the decline of its core market of 9-to-5 suburb-to-city middle-class commuting. These figures are, per capita, 62 and 94 p-km/year. In the EU and environs, only one country is this low, Greece, which barely runs any intercity rail service and even suspended it for several months in 2023 after a fatal accident. The EU-wide average is 955 p-km/year. Dense countries like Germany do much better than the US, as do low-density countries like Sweden and Finland. Switzerland has about the same mainline rail p-km as the US as of 2023, 20.754 billion, on a population of 8.9 million (US: 335 million).

So purely on the question of whether people use Amtrak, the answer is, by European standards, a resounding no. And by Japanese standards, Europe isn’t doing that great – Japan is somewhat ahead of Switzerland per capita. Amtrak trains are slow: the Northeast Corridor is slower than the express trains that the TGV replaced, and the other lines are considerably slower, running at speeds that Europeans associate with unmodernized Eastern European lines. They are infrequent: service is measured in trains per day, usually just one, and even the Northeast Corridor has rather bad frequencies for the intensely used line it wants to be.

Is this because of public support?

No. American railroaders are convinced that all of this is about insufficient public funding, and public preference for highways. Mathews’ post repeats this line, about how Amtrak’s 120 km/h average speeds on a good day on its fastest corridor should be considered great given how much money has been spent on highways in America.

The issue is that other countries spend money on highways too. High American construction costs affect highway megaprojects as well, and thus the United States brings up the rear in road tunneling. The highway competition for Amtrak comprises fairly fast, almost entirely toll-free roads, but this is equally true of Deutsche Bahn; the competition for SNCF and Trenitalia is tollways, but then those tollways are less congested, and drivers in Italy routinely go 160 km/h on the higher-quality stretches of road.

Amtrak itself has convinced itself that everyone else takes subsidies. For example, here it says “No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without some form of public support for capital costs and/or operating expenses,” mirroring a fraudulent OIG report that compares the Northeast Corridor (alone) to European intercity rail networks. Technically it’s true that passenger rail in Europe receives public subsidies; but what receives subsidies is regional lines, which in the US would never be part of the Amtrak system, and some peripheral intercity lines run as passenger service obligation (PSO) with in theory competitive tendering, on lines that Amtrak wouldn’t touch. Core lines, equivalent to Chicago-Detroit, New York-Buffalo, Washington-Charlotte-Atlanta, Los Angeles-San Diego, etc., would be high-speed and profitable.

But what about construction?

What offends me the most about the post is that it talks up Amtrak’s role as a construction company. It says,

Today, our nationalized rail operator is also a construction company responsible for managing tens of billions of dollars for building bridges, tunnels, stations, and more – with all the overhead in project-management staff and capital delivery that this entails.

The problem is that Amtrak is managing those tens of billions of dollars extremely inefficiently. Tens of billions of dollars is the order of magnitude that it took to build the entire LGV network to day ($65.5 billion in 2023 prices), or the entire NBS network in Germany ($68.6 billion). Amtrak and the commuter rail operators think that if they are given the combined cost to date of both networks, they can upgrade the Northeast Corridor to be about as fast as a mixed high- and low-speed German line, or about the fastest legacy-line British trains (720 km in 5 hours).

The rail operations are where Amtrak is doing something that approximates good rail work – lots of extraneous spending, driving up Northeast Corridor operating costs to around twice the fares on German and French high-speed trains, probably around 3-4 times the operating costs on those trains. But capital construction is a bundle of bad standards for everything, order-of-magnitude cost premiums, poor prioritization, and agency imperialism leading Amtrak to want to spend $16 billion on a completely unnecessary expansion of Penn Station. The long-term desideratum of auto-tensioned (“constant-tension”) catenary south of New York, improving reliability and lifting the current 135 mph (217 km/h) speed limit, would be a routine project here, reusing the poles with their 75-80 meter spacing; an incompetent (since removed) Amtrak engineer insisted on tightening to 180′ (54 m) so the project is becoming impossibly expensive as the poles have to be replaced during service. “Amtrak is also doing construction” is a derogatory statement about Amtrak.

Why are they like this?

Americans generally resent having to learn about the rest of the world. This disproportionately affects industries where the United States is clearly ahead (for example, software), but also ones where internal American features incline Americans to overfocus on their own internal history. Railroad history is rich everywhere, and the relative decline of the railway in favor of the highway lends itself to wistful alternative history, with intense focus on specific lines or regions. New Yorkers are, in the same vein, atypically provincial when it comes to the subway’s history, and end up making arguments, such as about the difficulty of accessibility retrofits on an old system, that can be refuted by looking at peer American systems, not just foreign ones.

The upshot is that an industry and an advocacy ecosystem that both intensely believe that railroad decline was because government investment favored roads – something that’s only partly true, since the same favoring of roads happened more or less everywhere – will want to learn from their own local histories. Quite a lot of advocacy by the RPA falls into the realm of trying to revive the intercity rail system the US had in the 1960s, before the bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies that led to the creation of Amtrak – but this system was what lost out to highways and cars to begin with. The innovations that allowed East Asia to avoid the same fate, and the innovations that allowed Western Europe to partly reverse this fate, involve different ideas of how to build and operate intercity rail.

And all of this requires understanding that, on a basic level, Amtrak is best described as a mishmash of the worst features of every European and East Asian railway: speed, fares, frequency, reliability, coverage. Each country that I know of misses on at least one of these aspects – Swiss trains are slow, the Shinkansen is expensive, the TGV has multi-hour midday gaps, German trains barely run on a schedule, China puts its train stations at inconvenient locations. Amtrak misses on all of those, at once.

And while Amtrak misses on service quality in operations, it, alongside the rest of the American rail construction industry, practically defines bad capital planning. Cities can build the right project wrong, or build the wrong project right, or have poor judgment about standards but not project delivery or the reverse, and somehow, Amtrak’s current planning does all of these wrong all at once.

Privatization is not an Alternative to the State

There’s a set of norms that are required for successful governance in a developed state: transparency, professional civil service with no political overclass, strong political parties, consensus that the basic functions of the state should exist. The state cannot provide public services like infrastructure, health, education, and security without these. States that lack these try to engage in workarounds, like privatization. In infrastructure, this is where the globalized system comes in: large in-house bureaucracies are dismantled or not built in the first place, and in their stead are multi-billion-dollar contracts to consultants, overseen by political staff. The system of privatization sells itself as an alternative to the state if there’s no consensus, but it isn’t one. The result is high construction costs for infrastructure and such long timelines that it’s impossible to build anything.

As we point out in the Swedish case, the distinction between the traditional and globalized systems of infrastructure project delivery can be roughly summarized as the following:

Traditional systemGlobalized system
Design-bid-build (separate contracts for design and construction)Design-build (one contract for both design and construction)
Smaller contracts, typically tens to low hundreds of millions of dollarsLarger contracts, starting in the mid-hundreds of millions of dollars (Sweden) and going up to the billions (New York)
Itemized contracts with publicly available pricesFixed-price/lump-sum contracts
Product procurement: the contracts list what there is to be builtFunctional procurement: the contracts list what the project is supposed to do, e.g. capacity, leaving the mode underspecified
Public-sector riskPrivate contractor risk

This, to be clear, needs to be nuanced. The most important nuance is that despite the name, the traditional system is better viewed as a modern evolution of how contracts done in the first three quarters of the 20th century, with an eye for far better anti-corruption mechanisms. In particular, itemization is a fairly new innovation – in Italy, item-level transparency is a 1990s innovation in the wake of mani pulite.

What’s more, quite a lot of systems are mixed. The Nordic countries have been moving toward the globalized system on the theory that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, and their construction costs have exploded in tandem. But their moves in this direction remain more halting than those of the United Kingdom or Canada, or as of late the United States; the contract sizing is well below American norms, and, at least in Sweden, Trafikverket makes sure to retain in-house capacity to oversee the contractors and consultants better. In contrast, the United States has a system of consultants supervising other consultants.

And finally, as is usually the case with privatization, the more private contractor-centric globalized system does not mean the state actually retreats from infrastructure. To the contrary, the political elements of the state have greater control. The staff of an elected mayor, governor, or prime minister are more involved in $2 billion contracts than in $50 million ones, and can influence the bidding based on criteria that are never how to do good work (they’re political staff, they don’t know what good infrastructure planning is and don’t respect people who do). This is not privatization in the sense that 19th-century railroad construction in the United Kingdom was financed and designed by entirely private actors, with the public role restricted to parliamentary approval of routes.

It just so happens that none of this works. In Sweden, there’s enough state capacity that people are questioning the globalized system, saying it is designed around the needs of multinationals rather than those of the Swedish public. The long-term attrition under which British and American civil service bureaucracies have atrophied has not happened, so Trafikverket could take a more active role if it wanted. But in Britain and the United States, it is harder, and professional bureaucracies, run by engineers and planners and not by political appointees, need to be built.

If the state can’t build, then it can cut taxes, substituting private consumption for public infrastructure. This is fine; Americans have large cars (often to protect from other large cars) and large houses. But it’s not a substitute for infrastructure and other social goods; it’s a conscious decision to lose years of life expectancy and have a less efficient transport system to avoid building up the state.

Quick Note: Rural Drivers Aren’t Being Oppressed

A new paper is making the round arguing that Spanish rural automobility is a response to peripheralization. It’s a mix of saying what is obvious – in rural areas there is no public transportation and therefore cars are required for basic mobility – and proposing this as a way of dealing with the general marginalization of people in rural areas. The more obvious parts are not so much wrong as underdeveloped – the paper is an ethnography of rural drivers who say they need to drive to get to work and to non-work destinations like child care. But then the parts talking about peripheralization are within a program of normalizing rural violence against the state and against urban dwellers, and deserves a certain degree of pushback.

The issue here is that while rural areas are poorer than urban ones, making them economically more peripheral, they are not at all socially peripheral. This can be seen in a number of both economic and non-economic issues:

  • Rural areas are showered with place-based subsidies to deal with poverty, on top of the usual universal programs (like health care and pensions) that redistribute money from rich to poor regardless of location. This includes farm subsidies, like the Common Agricultural Policy, and infrastructure subsidies in which there’s more investment relative to usage in rural than in urban areas. The automobility of rural areas is itself part of this program: urban motorways can fund themselves from tolls where they need to, but national programs of road improvements end up improving the mobility options of rural areas out of almost exclusively urban taxes. In public transport, this includes considerable political entitlement, such as when Spanish regional governors made a botched train procurement into a national scandal and demanded that the chief of staff of the national transport ministry, Isabel Pardo de Vera Posada, resign over something she’d had nothing to do with.
  • Rural poverty is culturally viewed as the fault of other people than the residents. Poor urban neighborhoods are called no-go zones; I am not familiar enough with Spanish discourse on this but I doubt it’s different from French, German, and Swedish discourses, in which poor rural areas are never so called. A German district with neo-Nazi groups and majority public sympathy with extremism is called a victim of globalization in media, even left-leaning media, and not a no-go zone.
  • Rural areas, regardless of income, are socially treated as more authentic representatives of proper values, with expressions like Deep England or La France profonde contrasting with constant scorn for London, Paris, and Berlin.
  • Rural violence is treated as almost respectable. Political and media reactions to farmer riots with tractors as of late have been to shower the rioters with understanding. In France, the government acceded to the demands, and then-minister of the interior Gérald Darmanin forced law enforcement to act with restraint. In contrast, urban riots by racial minorities lead to mass arrests, the occasional fatal shooting of a rioter, and a discourse that treats riots as fundamentally illegitimate, for example just a few months prior.

The paper denigrates rural policies formed with “barely any understanding of how they are conditioned” and says that “an understanding of socio-spatial cohesion needs to look beyond the traditional objectives of equalizing agricultural incomes to consider how these accessibility gaps affect depopulation, young people’s skills, unemployment and low incomes.” But the issue isn’t understanding. Rural areas are not misunderstood. They are dominant, capable of steering specific subsidies their way that are not available to urbanites at equal income levels.

More broadly, I think it’s difficult for critical urbanism to deal with this issue of the permission structure for rural violence, because the urban-rural dynamic is not the same as the classical dynamic between social classes, or between white and black Americans, in which the socioeconomically dominant group is also the politically dominant one. It’s instead better to analogize it in ethnic terms not to American anti-black racism, or to European anti-immigrant racism, but to anti-Semitism, in which the social acceptance of a base level of violence coexists with the fact that Jews are often a more educated and richer group, leading anti-Semites to promulgate conspiracy theories.

The permission structure for rural drivers to commit violence in demand of government subsidies and government protection from competition is the exact opposite of peripheralization. It’s not a periphery; it’s a political and cultural center that faces a fundamental challenge in that it provides no economic or social value and is in effect a rapacious mafia using violence to extract protection money from an urban society that, due to misplaced sentimental values, responds with further subventions rather than with the full force of law as used against urban and suburban rioters with migration background.

Building for Wealth, and Point Access Blocks

The biggest housing activism push in North America right now has moved on from YIMBYism to housing reforms to allow single-stair mid-rise buildings, called point access blocks. My off-hand reference to this last post ended up being the main issue debated in comments; this compounds a post by Matt Yglesias from November that I’ve been meaning to respond to, since he starts working off of some examples of double-stair buildings on corridors in an even older post of mine about the Kowloon Walled City in My Backward (KWCIMBY) meme. I strongly respect the main point access block activists pushing the issue, like Stephen Smith, so I’d like to revisit the KWCIMBY post and explain what I’m doing there, while also pushing back against some of the more iffy claims portraying point access blocks as not just more efficient but also inherently better for families. In short, both forms of housing are generally easier to build in a more affluent society with higher expectations, and some of the comparisons come from that.

What are the point access block and double-loaded corridor?

An apartment building can arrange its apartments on each floor in one of these ways. The KWCIMBY post assumes double-loaded corridors, as in the diagram below:

In each of these buildings, there are two staircases, as required by American and Canadian law; the first building has scissor stairs, forbidden in most of the US but allowed in New York, whereas the second separates the two staircases into opposite sides of the corridor. Apartments are on both sides of the corridor, with one aspect of windows except the corner units, hence the term double-loaded.

This building form is practically unheard of in European apartment buildings. Only one staircase is required per building, so architects instead slice the buildings into thinner pieces, with one staircase and an elevator and apartments radiating from the common area, called a point access block:

Each of the four access points has an elevator and a staircase; the first example has four apartments per floor, with one aspect per unit, whereas the second has two, with two aspects, both north and south. The result is more elevators and staircases per net floor area, but less corridor area; the floorplate efficiency is notably higher, 92.5% in the first case and 94% in the second case, compared with 89.5% in the first case of the double-loaded corridor and 86.67% in the second. This is one of the reasons Stephen is so focused on elevator costs.

All four buildings are 20 meters by 80, except the last, which is 14 by 80. 20 meter wide residential buildings are more or less unheard of in Central Europe – I see a few that are 18, in what look like higher-income neighborhoods to me. In contrast, 14 is standard in Central Europe, with some buildings looking like the above diagram, and others, almost always older ones, having wings that are still around 14 meters wide but end up with an area-to-external-width ratio of 8-9 meters, rather like a 16-18 meter wide building without wings. In practice, on a 100*100 block, we’d never have two buildings looking like an equal sign but rather an enclosed rectangle, with or without wings.

What about the single-loaded corridor?

A third housing typology puts all apartments on a corridor, but only in one direction. The corridor is then in the open air, and apartments have windows on both sides, to the corridor and in the opposite direction. I lived in such a place for a year in Berlin. This is not unheard of, but still rare. The width of such buildings is limited by the need for apartments to stretch all the way, limiting them to at most 14 meters and usually less.

The resulting floorplate efficiency is low, which turns this into a question of how much cheaper it is to build an external corridor than an internal one. When I asked on Bluesky, I was given ranges for the answer, from an external corridor being 25-50% cheaper to its being if anything more expensive. Temporary worker housing tends to use this form because it is built to lower standards, in which the external corridor is just some barred steel without protection from the elements above, which should reduce the cost of the corridor. This form still exists in permanent housing, with concrete corridors that offer protection from rain, but it’s less common than the other two.

Point access blocks and families

The biggest selling points of the point access block are that it has better floor plate efficiency and that it permits units with multiple aspects to allow for cross-ventilation and for strategic placement of rooms (living room facing the street, bedrooms facing the quieter internal courtyard of the euroblock). This is bundled with other issues, at the same time:

  • In Europe, buildings are almost never built out of wood, and if they are, it’s usually mass timber. This means that the cost of construction is proportional to floor area, largely linear in the number of floors for a given footprint. North American construction uses light wood on a concrete podium, sharply limiting height to six to seven stories, hence the preference for thicker buildings to increase floor area. In turn, light wood is less safe in fires – but those codes don’t exempt concrete buildings from the two staircase requirement.
  • The double-loaded corridor has units so deep that bedrooms come with their own bathrooms and walk-in closets. Absent these, the maximum usable depth of a bedroom is about 6 meters. Bathrooms cost more to build per square meter than bedrooms and living rooms, which drives up construction costs.
  • The double-loaded corridor makes it easier to build units with fewer bedrooms – it’s just a matter of how much corridor width the apartment takes, so costs are linear in the floor area of units. The point access block instead prefers larger units, in square meters, since larger apartments have higher floorplate efficiency, and it’s routine to build a cheaper three-bedroom, one-bathroom unit.

The last two points have been used by some urbanists, especially more conservative ones, to argue that the point access block is inherently family-friendlier. The argument made by Mike Eliason (who’s not at all conservative) is that Seattle, where he’s based, builds multifamily housing rapidly but all of it is studios and one- and two-bedroom units, on the expectation that families with children should eventually move to the suburbs.

More conservative people even relate that with low urban American birthrates, which always comes off as strange to me given how low European birthrates are. The one developed country with above-replacement birthrates, Israel, doesn’t use any of these forms, but instead has independent buildings, some mid-rise and some tall – and there’s consensus among European and American urbanists that tall buildings are bad for families. At any rate, the Israeli sociologists I read on the subject, like Sergio Della Pergola, attribute Israeli birthrate exceptionalism to other issues than built form, just as Singapore’s Paulin Tay Straughan attributes the very low birthrates in rich Asia to other issues.

The difficulty of relating the issue of housing forms with that of apartment sizes is that housing a family requires a lot of apartment space to go to people who are not working, because they are children. If housing is expensive due to high construction costs, restrictions on building, or both, then housing will be built for the rich, which means not just high-income earners, but also households with a high income per person, which are almost always ones without children. A developer building a double-loaded corridor making a choice between a one-bedroom, say 6*9 meters, and a three-bedroom, say 12*9 meters, will choose the former if two independent households can outbid a family. This is getting to the point that in urban America, it’s normal for unmarried adults to live with housemates, because there are a lot more three- than one-bedroom apartments in cities that don’t build much housing, like New York or Boston.

The family could outbid the single person, but not in all circumstances. A two-income family can do well, and the working adults are likely to be older than the single person and thus higher earners. A landlord of a fixed apartment choosing who to rent to would also prefer the family to the group of three to four housemates – the family is more stable, divorce being far less common than housemates leaving with little prior notice. But not all families have two earners (and the social conservatives who are most anxious about family housing tend toward one income, not two), or two middle-class earners, and so far American developers haven’t yet run out of demand for single people and childless couples to build for.

Point access blocks and wealth

In a way, the point access block has benefits that aren’t yet unlocked in Europe. Higher wealth is spent on, among other things, bigger dwellings. The double-loaded corridor in a way bakes in assumptions of private bathrooms, essentially spending income on higher-cost elements. But it’s possible to do the same with a point access block. The point access block ends up more efficient when apartments are bigger, because it’s limited by number of units per floor, and the bigger the units, the smaller the proportion of the unrentable common areas.

Speaking of common areas, higher wealth doesn’t necessarily demand of them. If the expectation is that people should have a washing machine and a drier at home rather than in a common area, then the demand for such an area shrinks. Trash rooms take up more space, but then higher wealth, as opposed to higher inequality, means not just that the demand for trash rooms is higher but also that the supply of workers to staff them is scarcer, and at the end of the day people can just haul trash bags to a collection point in the courtyard or a side room on the ground floor. Trash chutes are an innovation that doesn’t take up common space (for one, they can be installed in-unit, especially if there are only two units per floor anyway). High-end condo amenities like private gyms are usually provided at the scale of an entire building rather than a floor, and a complex of interconnected buildings is likely to have just one either way.

In the examples I posted above, in a way I baked in a wealth assumption, in that the option with two units per access point assumes those units average 132 m^2, which is very high for Europe; the norm for high-end buildings here is three units, with slightly lower combined floor area than 264 m^2, and the same or a hair higher circulation area to allow for a third door, with the smaller apartment usually only having one aspect of exposure. A 132 m^2 unit, in effect 10*14 with slight recessing at one end, would generously have four bedrooms, likely configured as three actual bedrooms and a private office or guest room. The intended users would be families of means, but then again new housing tends to be built for this class, and over time, growth and abundance make the standards that today mark middle-class wealth more widespread across classes. The working class once didn’t have indoor plumbing.

Quick Note: the Experience of Train Stations

I was at a ReThink event about Penn Station the other day; it didn’t talk about through-running but about Penn Station redesign, as Richard Cameron presented options for rebuilding the station in-place, of course without expansion a block to the south. The presentation was interesting, and I have no strong opinions about the architecture, certainly no objection. But something said in there, I forget if by Richard or one of the other presenters, irked me: the presenter was complaining about the Penn Station rebuild of the 1960s saying that the station makes people feel irritated, whereas European train stations are grand and make people feel like they stepped through a gateway into the country. And that part lost me, because my experience of train stations in Europe is rather utilitarian, and so is the experience of rail riders here who I speak with. In fact, in a key way – namely, connections to the subway – I do not see a difference between those stations and Penn Station as it exists today, as an entirely subterranean complex without natural light.

Case in point: three weeks ago, I was visiting Rome for 2.5 days. I wrote about the train trip, which was rather slow as long sections have not been upgraded to high-speed rail standards, but not about the stations. Now that I saw the ReThink presentation, it’s worthwhile talking about the stations – Berlin, Munich, Rome. (I also connected at Verona and Bolzano but these are small stations in small cities.)

Roma Termini, in particular, is supposed to be a gateway station, exactly the kind in a European capital that Americans are supposed to love. Except, I didn’t get to experience any of the façade, because my ultimate destination was not within walking distance, so I connected to the metro, entirely indoors and underground. Lines A and B meet at Termini, and I spent far longer between when I got off the Frecciarossa and when I got on the subway navigating the passageways to this station than getting to appreciate any grandeur. Most of the other people in my car didn’t even do that, but rather hopped off one station before, at the more utilitarian Tiburtina, saving themselves the slow terminal approach and connecting more directly to Line B.

Berlin and Munich, which I’m more familiar with, are rather utilitarian. These are large complexes, in which it’s well-known that passengers can take some time getting from one set of platforms to another. They are also extensively daylit, and Berlin in particular has good sight lines for a five-level cruciform station, but their purpose isn’t to make people feel at ease; in fact most users scramble for a connection to the U- and S-Bahn, where form entirely follows function.

This experience also generalizes to the Parisian stations I’ve used. Gare de l’Est looked nice, in the one minute I spent there between getting off the Métro and getting on my train to Saarbrücken; I appreciated how fast this was, especially since I had booked a nonrefundable day trip and showed up at the station four minutes before my train departed, but I wouldn’t say any of this experience put me at ease. At none of these stations did the architectural details matter very much, and at none of them did the main entrance matter at all, because like virtually everyone else in Paris, I got there by Métro. Berlin Hauptbahnhof, at least, is modern enough that it understands this and doesn’t try to build the entrances as a cathedral to the power and wealth of the institution that built it.

Rather, what I think makes Americans feel differently about Europe is that when they’re here, they’re on vacation. The train stations make them feel relaxed, because they’re on vacation and relaxing anyway. The architecture puts them at ease, because they’re on vacation and have time to stop and admire the details. The walkable cities are pleasant, because they’re on vacation and their goal is to find things they don’t get at home to buy or eat or photograph; this way, I see American urbanists extoll the walkability of small towns with farmers’ markets even when those towns have rather American modal splits and the local residents do all of their shopping at hypermarkets. Europeans can be pretty solipsistic, but I at least don’t see people here talk about some aspect of Florida or Las Vegas is inherently psychologically relaxing.

This matters, because there are real advantages to European rail and urban planning. These aren’t just operational; for example, Stephen Smith and Mike Eliason have more or less singlehandedly imported single-stair point access blocks into American policy discussion. In rail planning, I wish the agencies using Penn Station came to Berlin and saw how a 21st-century major city station looks. But none of this can come from trying to psychologically project one’s own vacation experience. Europe is a place of production and not just consumption, and it’s critical to see what this production looks like from the inside.