European Urbanism and High-Speed Rail

Europe has a number of strong national high-speed rail networks, providing much inspiration internally as well as abroad, including in the United States. With Americans looking at an infrastructure bill including high-speed rail funding, there’s a lot of discussion about what can port, hence my proposal map. That said, caution is required when doing naive comparisons with Europe. European urbanism doesn’t work the same as American urbanism, in two ways. First, European cities are more compact and transit-oriented than most American cities, which is why I somewhat discount American lines unless at least one city connected has public transit. And second, Europe has more, smaller cities than the rest of the urbanized world. This post concerns the second issue.

French and American urbanism: an example

A few months ago I poked around European and East Asian metro area lists. The upshot is that whereas in the three East Asian democracies 70% of the population lives in metropolitan areas larger than 1 million, in France only 33% does, and the median resident sorted by metro area size lives in a metro region of 350,000.

We can apply the same analysis to the United States. At the CSA level, the median American lives in Sacramento, population 2.6 million, and 68% live in metro areas of at least 1 million; at the MSA level, the median is Milwaukee, population 1.6 million, and 56% live in metro areas of at least 1 million. American metropolitan areas are unusually weakly-centered, especially at the CSA level, but otherwise they’re pretty typical of the urbanized world; it’s Europe that’s unusual in having such small cities.

The upshot is that people who are not used to this peculiarity of Europe who look at a map of European cities focus on million-plus metro areas, which are not the whole story here, especially not in France. This makes Europe look emptier than it is, which can lead people to overrate how much ridership a high-speed rail network would have at a fixed population.

France and the Midwest

Scott Hand posted a map on Twitter superimposing France on the Midwest with Chicago taking the place of Paris, arguing that they are similar in population and area:

This is a good sanity check: your Midwestern network should be of comparable magnitude to the TGV network, rather than much larger. It’s easy to say, Lyon has 2.5 million people, Detroit has 5 million people, so clearly a line to Detroit is twice as good as one to Lyon, right? But no: French urbanism supplies many more small cities, which must be accounted for as well. At the end of the day, the populations are similar, even though, in addition to Chicago, the map has three cities (Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland) with larger metro areas than Lyon and six more larger than Marseille (Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Nashville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh).

The LGV Sud-Est

It’s tempting to compare Paris-Lyon to Chicago-St. Louis. Yonah Freemark did this in 2009, and Jarrett Walker already pointed out in comments that the LGV Sud-Est was always about much more than this. On hindsight, I’ll add that even that sells the LGV Sud-Est short. High-speed rail between Paris and Lyon unlocked fast service from Paris to not just Lyon but also the following metro areas, all with 2016 populations:

  • Dijon (385,000), demoted from the PLM mainline to a branch but still served
  • Grenoble (688,000)
  • Saint-Etienne (520,000)
  • Chambéry (225,000)
  • Annecy (236,000)
  • Valence (187,000)
  • Vienne (115,000)
  • Bourg-en-Bresse (128,000), not on any direct train but still close enough by regional connection or car

What’s more, TGVs would branch from Part-Dieu along legacy lines to serve these smaller cities, albeit at low frequency. Now, with the LGV extending as far south as Marseille, Valence has a through-station on an LGV just outside the built-up area. There’s also Lyria service to thee major Swiss cities; Geneva, a metro area of 1 million, lies on a low-speed extension of the LGV Sud-Est, 3:11 from Paris.

Other than Geneva, which is invisible on the map because it is farther away, the other cities listed are all very small. In the United States, people don’t usually think of metropolitan areas of such size as urban, because they are extremely dispersed and socially identify as not-urban, and because metropolitan America operates at much larger size classes. But they have recognizable urban cores and their populations must be put into any ridership model trying to train data on TGV ridership. In fact, a gravity model with exponent 0.8 predicts that the combined TGV ridership from Paris to all the above cities, excluding Lyon, is nearly twice the ridership on Paris-Lyon.

And in this context, Chicago-St. Louis simply doesn’t compare. St. Louis is somewhat larger than Lyon, yes, but within 60 km, within which radius Lyon has independent Saint-Etienne, Vienne, Bourg, and Mâcon, St. Louis only has its own exurbs. To find a proper Midwestern comparison for the LGV Sud-Est and its extensions toward Marseille, one must go east of Chicago, toward Detroit and Cleveland. Within 60 km Detroit too only has its own CSA plus Windsor, but that CSA has 5 million people, and the same line also reaches Cleveland (CSA population 3.5 million), Toledo (900,000), and Pittsburgh (2.6 million) and points east.

What this means

Having fewer, larger cities doesn’t make it harder to build high-speed rail. On the contrary – it’s easier to serve such a geography. Asia lives off of such geography; Japan and Taiwan serve nearly their entire populations on just a single line, and Korea does on one mainline with a branch. An Asianized France would be able to serve nearly its entire population on the LGV network as-is without needing low-frequency branches to Chambéry- and Valence-scale cities, and an Asianized Germany would be able to just build an all-high-speed network and connect nearly everyone and not just half the population.

There are small cities that happen to lie on convenient corridors between larger cities, the way Valence is between Lyon and Marseille, or Augsburg and Ulm are between Stuttgart and Munich. Other small cities are close enough to large cities that they’re decently-served by a large city-focused rail network, like Saint-Etienne. Those cities are compact, so a large share of the population has access to the train – this is the explanation for the 0.8 exponent in the gravity model of ridership. But overall, most cities of that scale are strewn haphazardly around the country: examples include Limoges, Amiens, and Caen in France, and Osnabrück, Chemnitz, and Rostock here.

However, this doesn’t mean that, in analyzing the impact of population on ridership, we should just pretend the small cities don’t exist. They do, and they supply extra ridership that isn’t visible if one thinks city = metro area of 1 million or more. It’s an understandable way of thinking, but Europe has a lot of ridership generated from intermediate cities and from cities that have a regional rail connection to a big city or a less frequent direct intercity train, and the models have to account for it.

So yes, that the US has so many large-by-European-standards cities means high-speed rail would work well there. However, it equally means that a naive model that just says “this looks like the LGV Sud-Est” would underperform. A better model has to account for specific city pairs. American city pairs still look okay, even with extreme levels of sprawl at the outer ends, but ultimately this means the US can have a network of approximately the same scope of the LGV network, rather than one that is much denser.

Zoomers Day Trip to Bielefeld on the ICE

2033-04-01

There’s a rite of passage every year in Berlin of taking a day trip to Bielefeld, an hour and a half away by ICE, every 10 minutes. The idea is to be able to retort to aging millennials who joke that Bielefeld does not exist than they’ve actually been there.

The Abitur is coming soon, and 12th-grade students are supposed to study, but Adam Mansour, Katja Brühl, Max Kleinert, and Nora Martinek are going in Bielefeld. It is not the best day to travel. Friday is a school day, even if it’s short enough it ended at 13:30, and it’s also a popular travel day so the tickets were a bit more expensive, and Adam had to convince his parents it’s worth spending 80€ and all the Germans do it. But at least today it means they don’t have to wake up at 7:00 tomorrow.

On the train going west, Katja keeps complaining about how the train bypasses Magdeburg because of 1980s-90s politics. She says she was looking for labor-related museums in Bielefeld but couldn’t find any; instead, she talks about how the mayor of Hanover is leading a red-black coalition and it’s not the SPD that she’s voting for in September or the SPD that subsidized childcare in Berlin that let her parents afford to have children.

The other three don’t find her annoying. Max and Nora come from much wealthier families, and Nora’s is scratching 10,000€/month, but when Katja talks about how thanks to education reforms pushed on the Länder by the Green-led federal government she could go to the same school as them, they don’t feel either attacked or guilty. They feel happy that they know her and Adam. They listen to what she says about Jusos and housing, the EU, feminism, or comprehensive schools, and it clicks with them because it’s their world too. They know that there are people who resent that the cities are growing faster and associate immigration with social problems; but they associate immigration with Adam’s parents, or with Nora, who only moved to Germany when she was five but who nobody ever calls an immigrant. Adam, in turn, does get called a Syrian immigrant, even though he was born in Germany, his parents having arrived just before the 2015 wave.

There are some American tourists on the train, talking about how pretty Germany is and how they wished the United States could have such a system. Max leans forward and says, “every time they’re on a train, they talk just about the train,” figuring circumlocutions because the Americans might recognize the German word Amerikaner and realize he is talking about them. Nora and Katja giggle, and Adam then joins too.

Otherwise, they try to distract themselves by talking about the exams and about university plans. All plan to go, and all have been told by teachers that they should get good enough grades to go where they want, but Max wants to study medicine and needs to get a 1.0 to get past the numerus clausus. “Do you want me to test you?” Adam asks him.

“Lol.”

They are all competitive about grades, even Katja, who told them once that neoliberal models of academic competition promoted inequality, and the Greens should do more to prevent what she calls the Americanization of German education. But Max told them when they planned the trip last week that he was treating it as his vacation day when he wouldn’t need to think about school.

—

Getting off the train, they start walking toward city hall; Bielefeld doesn’t have a bikeshare system, unlike Berlin, and bringing a bike on the ICE is not allowed. Adam insists on stopping on the way and taking detours to photograph buildings; most aren’t architecturally notable, but they’re different from how Berlin looks.

They run to the Natural History Museum and the Kunsthalle. The museum closes at 17:00 and they have less than an hour, then less an hour at the Kunsthalle until it closes at 18:00. They furiously photograph exhibits when they don’t have enough time to look at them and talk about them.

Adam is especially frantic at the archeology section, just because of the reminder of what he is giving up. He has read a lot of popular history and for the longest time wanted to go study it, but felt like he wouldn’t be able to get work with a humanistic degree and instead went for the real stream at school. When he met Katja two years ago he felt like this choice was confirmed – Katja for all her political interests is going to study environmental engineering and at no point expressed doubt about it.

Max spits on the Richard Kaselowsky memorial when the staff isn’t looking, distracted by other customers. In Berlin he might not even do this, but in Bielefeld he wouldn’t mind getting thrown out of a museum if worst came to worst. Nora and Adam didn’t know the history so as they go in he tells them Kaselowsky was a Nazi and so was the museum’s founder Rudolf Oetker, and the Oetker heirs had to return a few items that may have been stolen from Jewish owners in the Holocaust.

—

They find a döner place with good reviews and good falafel for Katja and are eating there. Normally they’d go out and get different things in Berlin, but Bielefeld is still a small city and even with Germany’s rapid immigration in the 2020s it doesn’t have Berlin’s majority-migration-background demographics.

Where they’re sitting overlooks the pedestrianized streets of the old city. There are some bikes, some pedestrians, some walking delivery drones. Berlin has a few of these zones within the Ring but they’re not contiguous and Bild accuses the Greens of promoting car-free zones for everyone except the federal government.

They talk about where they want to go, but Max and Katja are hesitant to publicly say what they feel about where they are. It’s Nora who openly says that she’s having fun and that Bielefeld definitely exists no matter what her parents say, but she wouldn’t want to live here. She doesn’t know if she wants to stay in Berlin – she wants to go to TU Munich, partly to see more places, partly because of some parental pressure to leave home – but Bielefeld feels a little too dörferlich.

They all laugh, and Adam says that judging by how his parents describe Daraa, it was a lot smaller than this. He says that they didn’t ever describe Daraa as especially lively, and always compared it negatively with Berlin when he was young and then eventually they just stopped talking about it, it stopped being important to them. Max and Katja nod and start comparing Bielefeld to parts of Germany they know well through extended family – Max’s father is from Münster and his mother’s family is in Göttingen and Hamburg, Katja’s parents are both from Berlin but her mother has family in Fürstenwalde.

And then somehow it drifts back to the election. Katja is worried the Union might win the election this time, stop free work migration, and freeze the carbon taxes at present levels. Adam doesn’t have family left in Syria but they have a few classmates who have family in India, in Vietnam, in Turkey. For the most part things are okay, but there’s always the occasional teacher or group of students who still think Neukölln and Gesundbrunnen are bad neighborhoods; they know who to avoid because people who are racist always find something negative to say to Adam specifically.

—

But for now, they have one another, and they have exams to score highly on to move on and go to university, and they have two hours to kill in Bielefeld until the ICE train they booked in advance departs to take them back home.

Queens Buses and Regional Rail

Queens needs a bus redesign, thankfully already in the works; it also needs better LIRR service that city residents can use as if it’s an express subway. A key part of bus redesign is having buses and trains work together, so that buses feed trains where possible rather than competing with them. The proposed Queens redesign incorporates subway transfers but not LIRR transfers since the LIRR is infrequent and charges premium fares. This raises the question – how does the optimal bus network for Queens change in the presence of better city service on the LIRR? And conversely, how can the LIRR be designed to be of better use to Queens bus riders?

It turns out that the answer to both questions is “very little.” The best Queens bus network in a city where the LIRR lines through Queens run every 5-10 minutes all day is largely the same as the best network in a city where the LIRR remains an exclusive suburb-to-Manhattan mode. Similarly, bus connections change little when it comes to infill stations on the LIRR for better city service. This is not a general fact of bus redesigns and regional rail – the reason for this pattern has to do with the importance of Flushing and Jamaica. Nor does it mean that regional rail is irrelevant to buses in Queens – it just means that the benefits of rerouting buses to serve additional LIRR stations are too small compared with the drawbacks.

Flushing and Jamaica

This is the present-day subway infrastructure:

This is a deinterlined map, but the infrastructure in Queens is the same

The 7 train terminates in Flushing; the E (drawn in F-orange above) and J/Z terminate in Jamaica, while the F terminates in Jamaica as well slightly farther east. As a result, the proposed Queens redesign has many buses from farther east diverting to one of these two neighborhood centers in order to connect with the subway better.

The LIRR changes the rail network situation. The Port Washington Branch, probably the easiest to turn into frequent S-Bahn service, parallels the 7 but continues past Flushing into the suburbs, with closely-spaced stations in the city from Flushing east. The Main Line likewise runs parallel to the Queens Boulevard Line and then continues east past Jamaica with additional stations in Eastern Queens, with branches for the Montauk Line and the Atlantic Line (Far Rockaway and Long Beach Branches).

The ideal bus grid is isotropic. An extension of train service in the radial direction makes it easier to run a bus grid, because buses could just go north-south on major streets: Main, Kissena-Parsons, 149th, 162nd-164th, Utopia, 188th, Francis Lewis, Bell-Springfield. In contrast, the planned redesign diverts the 164th route to Jamaica to connect to the subway, and treats 149th as a pure Flushing feeder. Moreover, the east-west buses in Northeast Queens all divert to serve Flushing.

However, in practice, all of these kinks are necessary regardless of what happens to the LIRR. Queens destinations are not isotropic. Flushing and Jamaica are both important business districts. Jamaica also has transit connections that can’t be provided at an existing or infill LIRR Main Line station, namely the JFK AirTrain and the multi-line LIRR transfer.

Southeast Queens

I can think of one broad exception to the rule that the optimal bus redesign for Queens is insensitive to what happens to the LIRR: the radial lines going from Jamaica to the southeast. These include the Merrick Boulevard routes, today the Q4, Q5, and N4, or QT18 and QT40-42 in the redesign; and the Guy Brewer Boulevard routes, today the Q111 and Q113-4 and in the redesign the QT13, QT19, QT43, and QT45. As of 2019, each of the two avenues carries slightly fewer than 20,000 riders per weekday.

Those buses are likely to lose traffic if LIRR service on the Montauk and Atlantic Lines improves. Long-range traffic is far faster by train; I expect people to walk long distances to an LIRR station, a kilometer or even more, for a direct, subway-fare trip to Manhattan coming every 10 minutes. Even lines that require people to change at Jamaica should wipe out most bus ridership, since the transfer at Jamaica is designed to be pleasant (cross-platform, usually timed).

In their stead, buses should run orthogonally to the train. Linden should get a single bus route, which in the redesign proposal is the QT7, losing the Linden-Jamaica QT40 in the process and instead running the QT7 more frequently. Farmers, running north-south crossing the Main, Montauk, and Atlantic Lines, should get higher frequency, on what is today the Q3 and in the redesign the QT68; in both cases it diverts to Jamaica rather than continuing north to Bayside and Whitestone, but as explained above, this is a necessary consequence of the job concentration in Jamaica.

LIRR infill

Integrated design of buses and trains means not just moving the buses to serve the trains, but also choosing train station locations for the best bus transfers. One example of this is in the Bronx: Penn Station Access plans should include one more infill station, built at Pelham Parkway to connect to the Bx12. By the same token, we can ask how bus-rail connections impact LIRR planning.

The answer is that, just as they only lightly impact bus route design, they do not impact LIRR station siting. Ideally, LIRR stations should be sited at major streets in order to connect with buses better. However, this is to a large extent already the case, and places where moving a station or building infill is valuable are sporadic:

  • On the Port Washington Branch, there is no station at Francis Lewis. It may be valuable to build one, or alternatively to close Auburndale and replace it with two stations, one right at Francis Lewis and one at Utopia.
  • On the Main Line, Queens Village is already at Springfield, Hollis is already at 188th/Farmers, and an infill station at Merrick is valuable regardless of what happens with the buses. A Francis Lewis station is plausible, but is so close to both Hollis and Queens Village that I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea.
  • The Montauk Line is not penetrated by many crossing arterials. Linden already has a station, St. Albans. Then to the south there is an awkward succession of three intersections within 850 meters: Farmers, Merrick, Springfield. The least bad option is probably to build an infill stop in the middle at Merrick, with the shopping center as an anchor, and with ramps leading to Farmers and Springfield.
  • The Atlantic Line has the Locus Manor stop at Farmers, and Rosedale at Francis Lewis. Laurelton may be moved a bit west to hit Springfield better, and in addition, 1-2 infill stations are valuable, one at Linden and possibly also one at Baisley. But the Linden infill, like the Merrick infill, is fully justified regardless of bus transfers

Conclusion

In Queens, the importance of Flushing and Jamaica works to permit mostly separate planning of bus and regional rail service, except to some extent in Southeast Queens. This is not true in most other places, especially not elsewhere in New York. It follows from the fact that without city-usable LIRR service, buses have to divert to Flushing and Jamaica to feed the subway, whereas with city-usable LIRR service, buses still have to divert to Flushing and Jamaica because they are important business and cultural centers.

This is useful, because transit is a complex system, so anytime it’s possible to break it into mostly independently-planned components, it gets more tractable. If the bus redesign doesn’t require dealing with Long Island NIMBYs and traditional railroaders, and if turning the LIRR into a useful S-Bahn doesn’t require simultaneously redrawing the Queens bus map, then both processes become easier. A redesigned Queens bus map already comes pre-optimized for future LIRR improvements with mostly cosmetic changes, and this is good for the process of transit modernization.

High-Speed Rail and the Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest seems like the perfect region for high-speed rail: its cities form a neat line from Vancouver to Portland and points south, grow at high rates with transit-oriented development, and have sizable employment cores around the train station. And yet, when I generated my high-speed rail maps, I could only include it as a marginal case, and even that inclusion was charitable:

  • Red means lines that should definitely get high-speed rail, blue means marginal cases, some with strong medium-speed tie-ins.

(Full-size image is available here.)

There’s been a lot of criticism over why I’m including Atlanta-Jacksonville but not Vancouver-Seattle-Portland, and I’d like to explain why the model says this.

Density

The population density in the Western United States is very low. What this means in practice is that cities are far apart – the best example is Denver, a large metropolitan area that is 537 km from the nearest million-plus metro area (Albuquerque). A high-speed line can connect two cities, maybe three, but will not form the multi-city trunk that one sees in Germany or Italy, or even Spain or France. Lines can still make sense if they serve enormous cities like Los Angeles, but otherwise there just isn’t much.

This relates to Metcalfe’s law of network effects. In a dense region, the 500-800 km radius around a city will have so many other cities that network effects are obtained as the system grows. Even Florida, which isn’t dense by European standards, has cities placed closely enough that a medium-size system can connect Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville, and then with a 500 km extension reach Atlanta. The I-85 corridor can likewise accrete cities along the way between Washington and Atlanta and get decent ridership.

In the Pacific Northwest, any intercity infrastructure has to live off Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland – that’s it. Spokane is small, orthogonal to the main line, and separated by mountains; Salem and Eugene are small and Salem is technically in the Portland combined statistical area; California’s cities are very far away and separated by mountains that would take a base tunnel to cross at speed. And Seattle is just not that big – the CSA has 5 million people, about the same as Berlin, which has within 530 km every German metropolitan area.

The model

The model thinks that with Vancouver (2.6)-Seattle (5) at 220 km and Seattle-Portland (3.2) at 280, ridership is as follows, in millions of passengers per year in both directions combined:

City S\City NVancouverSeattle
Seattle2.33—
Portland1.632.76

In operating profits in millions of dollars per year, this is,

City S\City NVancouverSeattle
Seattle33.32—
Portland52.9850.23

This is $135 million a year. It’s actually more optimistic than the official WSDOT study, which thinks the line can’t make an operating profit at all, due to an error in converting between miles and kilometers. The WSDOT study also thinks the cost of the system is $24-42 billion, which is very high. Nonetheless, a normal cost for Vancouver-Portland HSR is on the order of $15 billion, a bit higher than the norm because of the need for some tunnels and some constrained urban construction through I-5 in Seattle.

It isn’t even close. The financial ROI is 0.9%, which is below the rate of return for government debt in the very long run. Even with social benefits included, the rate is very low, maybe 2.5% – and once social benefits come into play, the value of capital rises because competing government investment priorities have social benefits too so it’s best to use the private-sector cost of capital, which is 4-5%.

This exercise showcases the value of density to intercity rail networks. You don’t need Dutch density, but Western US density is too low – the network effects are too weak except in and around California. It would be mad to build Atlanta-Jacksonville as a high-speed rail segment on its own, but once the Florida network and the I-85 network preexist, justified by their internal ridership and by the Piedmont’s connections to the Northeast, connecting Atlanta and Jacksonville becomes valuable.

Growth

The one saving grace of the Pacific Northwest is growth. That’s why it’s even included on the map. Lines in the 1.5-1.8% ROI region are not depicted at all, namely Houston-New Orleans and Dallas-Oklahoma City-Kansas City-St. Louis, both discounted because none of the cities connected has local public transportation or a strong city center. The Pacific Northwest is not discounted, and also benefits from strong growth at all ends.

The gravity model says that ridership is proportional to the 0.8th power of the population of each city connected. To get from 0.9% to 2% requires a factor of 2.2 growth, which requires each city to grow by a factor of 2.2^0.625 = 1.65.

Is such growth plausible? Yes, in the long run. In 2006-16, Metro Vancouver grew 16%; in 2010-9, the core three-county Seattle metro area (not CSA) grew 16% as well, and the core Portland metro area (again, not CSA) grew 12%. At 16% growth per decade, the populations will rise by the required factor in 34 years, so building for the 20-year horizon and then relying on ridership growth in the 2050s and 60s isn’t bad. But then that has a lot of risk embedded in it – the growth of Seattle is focused on two companies in a similar industry, and that of Vancouver is to a large extent the same industry too.

Moreover, the region’s relative YIMBYism can turn into NIMBYism fast. Metro Vancouver’s housing growth is healthy, but the region is fast running out of developable non-residential areas closer in than Surrey, which means it will need to replace single-family housing on the West Side with apartment buildings, which it hasn’t done so far. Growing construction costs are also threatening the ability of both Vancouver and Seattle to feed commuters into their central business districts by rail – Seattle may have built U-Link for costs that exist in Germany, but the Ballard/West Seattle line is $650 million/km and mostly above-ground, and the Broadway subway in Vancouver, while only C$500 million/km, is still on the expensive side by non-Anglo standards. It’s useful to plan around future growth and safeguard the line, but not to build it just on the promise of future growth, not at this stage.

New York Regional Rail (not S-Bahn)

The discussion of regional rail in New York usually focuses on through-running, with neat S-Bahn-/RER–style maps showing how lines run. But it’s also instructive to look at longer-range lines, under the rubric of RegionalBahn in Germany or Transilien in Paris. I’ve argued against segregating long- and short-range commuter trains in New York, on the grounds that its infrastructure layout is different from that of Berlin or Paris.

However, it is still necessary to conceptually plan longer-range regional rail in the New York region – that is, how to serve destinations that are too far to be really considered suburbs. I think that those lines should through-run, which makes the planning somewhat different from a standard intercity integrated timed transfer network, but the choice of where to go to, what frequency to push for, and so on is still important. This post should be seen as a pre-map version of what I drew for Upstate New York and New England, but for the Tri-State Region and satellites in Pennsylvania. It should also be seen as a companion to any high-speed rail proposal, albeit unmapped because I am still uncertain about some visible aspects.

Scope

The scope of this post is anywhere one should be able to get to from New York without resorting to high-speed rail. This covers the combined statistical area and its penumbra. In practice, this post will focus on areas that are off the Northeast Corridor than on areas that are on it. On the Northeast Corridor, I’ve talked about low-speed solutions toward New Haven putting it slightly more than an hour away from New York; instead of repeating myself, it’s better to discuss other destinations.

So what are the satellite regions around New York, excluding the city’s own suburbs? Let’s make a list:

  • Eastern Long Island far enough to be outside the commute zone, like the Hamptons
  • The Jersey Shore, likewise focusing on what’s too far for commuting, like Toms River
  • Trenton
  • Allentown and the Lehigh Valley
  • The Delaware Water Gap Region and possibly Scranton
  • The Mid-Hudson Valley on both sides of the river, i.e. Newburgh and Poughkeepsie
  • Historic city centers in Connecticut: Danbury, Waterbury, Bridgeport, New Haven

For the most part, they already have commuter rail service. But travel demand is usually not very commuter-oriented. Some of those lines have service that accommodates this fact, like express LIRR service to the Hamptons at popular weekend getaway times. Others don’t. Newburgh, Allentown, Toms River and Delaware Water Gap have no service at all, though Delaware Water Gap is on the under-construction Lackawanna Cutoff.

The need for electrification

All trains touching New York must be fully electric. This means spending not a lot of money on completing wiring the LIRR, Metro-North, and New Jersey Transit, and ensuring further extensions are electrified as well. Diesel trains are slow and unreliable: the LIRR’s mean distance between failures is around 20,000-30,000 km on the diesel and dual-mode locomotives and well into the 6 figures on the EMUs. New Jersey Transit’s diesels also tend to only serve Hoboken, which forces an additional transfer; NJT’s new dual-mode locomotives are extremely costly and low-performance.

This kind of completionism is especially valuable because of fleet uniformity. Boston is reticent about electrification because it likes having a fleet it can maintain all at one place, and it requires some additional resources to expand a railyard that can accommodate future electrification. In New York this works in reverse: a large majority of the network is electrified, and getting rid of the diesel tails increases efficiency through scale.

The issue of express service

All of the tails in question are far from New York, generally 100 or more km, and close to 200 km for Montauk. This introduces tension between the need to run intense local service to areas 15 km from Manhattan and the need to maintain adequate speed at longer range. The solution is always to prioritize shorter-range service and make regional rail the most express pattern that can fit within the through-running paradigm. This works well where there are four tracks allowing long-range express service, as on the Northeast Corridor and the Empire Corridor, including tie-ins like Danbury and Waterbury.

Elsewhere, this is compromised. EMUs can still beat present-day diesel trip times, but the average speeds of the 30-30-30 plan for Connecticut are not realistic. This is a tradeoff; it is possible to run express trains to the Hamptons on the Babylon Branch, but it imposes a real cost on frequency to dense suburbs and should therefore be avoided. If there’s room for timed overtakes then they are welcome, but if there’s not, then these regional trains should really run as S-Bahn trains that just keep going farther out.

This has precedent on busy lines. Trains in the exurbs of Tokyo tend to run at the same speed as an ordinary rapid train, for example on the Chuo Line; there is the occasional higher-speed liner, but usually the trains to Otsuki, Takasaki, Odawara, etc. are just ordinary rapids, averaging maybe 50 km/h. In New York the average speed would be higher because there are still fewer stops even with the infill I’m proposing, which fits since there is more sprawl in New York.

Onward connections

Some of the outer ends in question should also get service that doesn’t go to New York. There is an existing line between Danbury and Brewster that can be used for revenue moves. Allentown lies on a decent SEPTA Regional Rail extension, albeit not on a good one, as the route is curvy. If there are internal bus systems, for example in Waterbury, then whenever possible they should pulse with the train, and it goes without saying trains that do not serve New York should be timed with trains that do.

This for the most part should run on a half-hourly clockface schedule. This means that on an S-Bahn network where even individual branches run every 10-15 minutes, there should be a rule saying every train in 2 or 3, depending on base frequency, continues onward to a distant destination. This is a combination of Northern European planning (timed connections) and Japanese planning (treating long-range regional rail in a megacity as a commuter train that goes further than normal).

High-Speed Rail Followup

My high-speed rail map exploded, thanks to retweets on social media from the Neoliberal account and Matt Yglesias, who posted a cleaner map of my proposal made by Twitter follower Queaugie, who even called me a transit guru:

So, first of all, thanks to Queaugie for making this, it’s much cleaner than my drawings on an OpenStreetMap base; I keep advocating for geographically accurate maps, but schematics do sometimes have their uses. But more to the point, I’d like to give some context to why some lines are and are not included.

Some examples of past maps

Mapped proposals for American high-speed rail go back a while. On the Internet, interest exploded in the 2000s, leading to high hopes for California High-Speed Rail and the Obama stimulus. Yonah Freemark made one at the beginning of 2009, which played a role in his rise to become a superstar public transit wonk. The RPA had its own plan rooted in the concept of megaregions: see here for analysis from 2011 and here for a synthetic map. But the map that’s getting the most airplay is by Alfred Twu, which is very expansive to the point of having two transcontinental connections; it was most recently covered in Vox and tweeted by Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, which generated so much discussion that I chose to crayon US high-speed rail rather than my original intention of picking a city and crayoning urban rail for it.

How my proposal differs

My map differs from past ones in visible ways – for one, it is not connected. At the time I started to make it, I believed there would be four components: Florida, Texas, California, and the general Eastern network. It turned out late in the process that there’s decent demand for Atlanta-Florida travel, enough to justify connecting Florida to the general network. But Texas and California remain disconnected, as does the marginal case of the Pacific Northwest.

Analytically, I project traffic by a gravity model, depending on the product of two metro areas’ populations; Yonah and the RPA have different methodologies. But the emergent difference is, first of all, that I have a less connected network, and second, that there are some glaring omissions. I believe those omissions are justified and would like to explain why – in effect, why other people overrate connections that I do not include.

Amtrak and stagnating regions

New Orleans was the largest city in the South until overtaken by Houston around 1950. This means that the historic rail network of the United States served it amply, as it was large relative to turn-of-the-century America. Amtrak, formed to preserve a skeleton of the preexisting passenger rail network, retained the importance of New Orleans and gave it three distinct long-distance routes: one to Atlanta and New York, one to Chicago, one on the way between Florida and California. This way, there is more Amtrak service to New Orleans today than to Houston, whose metro area is around five times larger.

Proposals tend to build upon what exists. So most people recognize that at transcontinental scale, high-speed rail is uncompetitive, but at the scale of Atlanta-Birmingham-New Orleans it looks like a reasonable line. It should get decent modal split, if built. The problem is that not many people live in New Orleans today. The population one needs to sustain high-speed rail is large, larger than that of your typical early-20th century city. This can be done either via a megacity that drives ridership, as in France or California, or via high population density so that many midsize cities are close together, as in Germany or Florida; the best geography is when both are present, as in Japan, South Korea, China, and the Northeastern US.

The growth of the South in the last 70 years has not been even. Texas has exploded, and so have Atlanta, Nashville, and the cities of the North Carolina Piedmont. In contrast, New Orleans is stagnant. Farther north, on the margins of the South, Missouri has had about the same population growth since 1920 as New York, and has been steadily losing seats in Congress. St. Louis and Kansas City, like New Orleans, were huge hubs for early-20th century America, but their populations are just not good enough for high-speed rail. Chicago-St. Louis can squeak by, but Kansas City is too far. Memphis is in relative decline as well, but manages to piggyback on Nashville, albeit marginally.

Streaming High-Speed Rail Crayoning

People are sharing various maps of the high-speed rail network the US could build if it were interested in alternative transportation, and I promised I’d make one myself. I did this on camera on Twitch a week ago but was not finished, so I streamed it again just now – this is going to be a regular occurrence, always at 18:00 my time every Saturday. There’s a recording, but Twitch is being weird about letting me upload it, so it might make it to YouTube instead.

Here is the map:

A full-size image can be found here. Red lines are high-speed rail. Blue lines are marginal lines: New Haven-Springfield and Milwaukee-Green Bay are good legacy lines that may or may not work as full HSR (the former probably better than the latter), while Nashville-Memphis, the Pacific Northwest system, and Phoenix-Tucson are marginal between no service at all and HSR.

Florida High-Speed Rail

I did the calculations for Atlanta-Florida on camera. I was surprised that it turned out to work out well, even with semi-decent return on investment based on my Metcalfe’s law formulas, around 3%. The rub is that Orlando is pretty big, and even though it is sprawl hell, it is also an unusually strong tourist destination, and the rail line would serve Disney World and Daytona Beach. This makes me more confident in a formula trained on Japanese and European cities with public transit than a connection between two random no-transit medium size cities like Cleveland and Cincinnati.

This itself is an example of Metcalfe’s law in action: the Miami-Orlando-Tampa system by itself only returns 2.2% per the formula, and an extension to Jacksonville 2.6%. I also have more certainty in the figures for the larger system, because the impact of sprawl on mode choice is smaller when distances get longer, because it doesn’t affect the air/rail mode choice as much as the car/rail mode choice.

Even at medium distances, observe that the South Florida urban area is linear, around 20 km wide but more than 100 long, which makes intercity rail service more reasonable. Every county can have a stop, and if the 0.8 exponent in the gravity model formula is applied to counties separately, then the sum rises to 6.1, whereas 7^0.8 = 4.74, which means that this refinement provides a 28% boost to ridership. Orlando is not linear, but its subsidiary metro areas, Lakeside and Daytona Beach, could get stops as well.

Alignment questions

I drew the system in a zoom level 7 on OpenStreetMap, which is too high-altitude to see individual railroads. I tried to approximate existing rail alignments that are worth using, but it’s not perfect, so please do not take the map as any assertion about pixel-level alignment, and even some station decisions can be quibbled with.

However, please do take the map as a definitive assertion about macro-scale alignments. The Northeast Corridor should go via I-95 and not via Hartford. This decision is fairly close and could go either way, though the benefits of HSR in the Northeast are so great that the absolute magnitude of such decisions remains momentous. Elsewhere, the Chicago-Minneapolis line could go along I-94 via Eau Claire or via a more southerly route via Rochester and the Mayo Clinic; I’ve gone back and forth on this, and it’s a second-order question, but I think the Mayo Clinic generates more trips, probably. The Albany-Montreal route could be entirely in the state of New York or take a slight detour through easier terrain in Vermont, which is likely cheaper. Toronto-Ottawa could go via Kingston or Peterborough, but the Peterborough route looks more direct. Chicago-St. Louis is sometimes proposed to detour via Champaign rather than go straight via Bloomington, but the benefit of serving UIUC probably doesn’t justify the extra cost. North Carolina HSR could go via the Triad or direct from Raleigh to Charlotte, but the model says the benefit of serving Greensboro is much greater than that of slightly faster trips coming from bypassing the Triad. Texas is a compromise route extending the under-construction line to Downtown Houston and creating a new leg connecting this system to Austin and San Antonio.

The most contentious questions are in California. HSR there should go via a partially high-speed coastal alignment from San Diego up to Los Angeles, then up the Grapevine and Tejon Pass, then across Altamont Pass and a Dumbarton tunnel. None of these decisions is close, and the official alignment decisions to detour via the Inland Empire and Palmdale and to go via Pacheco are all bad and played a role in the failure of the project. Los Angeles-San Diego is in a way the most frustrating: it was left to a future phase, but a medium-speed rail alignment along the coast could be done relatively quickly with electrification and some strategic investments, speeding up trains to about 1:45.

Frequency

I talked about frequency a little bit in the video, but not in much detail. The biggest problem is that Philadelphia is set up poorly: ideally trains coming from New York should branch to either Washington or Pittsburgh, but instead, 30th Street Station requires New York-Pittsburgh trains to reverse direction. This can be handled through actual reversal, as is done today at Frankfurt, with 4-minute turnarounds (cf. 10 at Philadelphia), or through having New York-Pittsburgh trains skip Philadelphia, as was historically done, with a stop at North Philadelphia instead.

With that in mind, my best guess, based partly on the model and partly on intra-metropolitan fudge factors like New York-New Haven, is as follows:

  • 8 tph New York-Boston, 4 New York-Springfield
  • 8 tph New York-Washington, 4 New York-Pittsburgh-Cleveland, 4 Washington-Philadelphia-Pittsburgh-Cleveland
  • 8 tph New York-Albany, 4 short Boston-Albany, 8 Albany-Buffalo (4 short), 4 Buffalo-Toronto, 4 Albany-Montreal, 2 short Buffalo-Cleveland
  • 2 tph Cleveland-Detroit, 4 (2 short) Cleveland-Chicago, 2 Chicago-Detroit, 2 Cleveland-Louisville
  • 4 tph Chicago-Milwaukee, 2 Milwaukee-Minneapolis
  • 2 short tph Chicago-St. Louis
  • 4 tph Chicago-Indianapolis, 2 Indianapolis-Cincinnati, 2 Indianapolis-Atlanta
  • 2 short tph Nashville-Memphis
  • 6 tph Washington-Richmond, 2 Richmond-Norfolk, 4 Richmond-Charlotte, 2 Charlotte-Atlanta
  • 2 short tph Miami-Tampa, 2 Miami-Atlanta, 2 Atlanta-Tampa
  • 2 short tph Houston-DFW, 2 short DFW-San Antonio, 2 short Houston-San Antonio
  • 2 short tph Vancouver-Portland (at best)
  • 4 tph Los Angeles-San Diego, 2 Los Angeles-Phoenix, 2 Los Angeles-Las Vegas
  • 2 tph Los Angeles-San Francisco, 2 Los Angeles-San Jose, 2 Los Angeles-Sacramento, 2 San Francisco-Sacramento

Marketing Public Transport is Unlike Marketing Cars

I’ve written before about how planning public transport differs from planning cars, and how the macroeconomics of producing good public transport differ from that of exporting cars. Another difference between the two modes is marketing. I don’t usually like talking about marketing – I prefer making things to selling them – but it’s relevant, because private-sector marketing is a huge industry, and sometimes marketers end up making decisions about public transportation, and some of those lead to counterproductive planning.

The main difference is that public transportation does not have competition the way private industry does. In many travel markets, for example rush hour travel to city center, it is a monopoly. In others, it isn’t, but it remains fundamentally different from the competition, whereas private-sector marketing generally involves competition between fairly similar products, such as different brands of cars or computers or supermarkets. This also means that trying to turn public transit into a competition between similar providers is overrated: it is bad from the perspective of good planning, but it turns the industry into something private-sector marketers are more familiar with, and is therefore at risk of being adopted (for example, with EU competition mandates) despite being counterproductive.

Brand identity

Companies that make products that are very similar to their competition engage in extensive marketing. Coke vs. Pepsi is the most cliché example, but different brands of cookies, fast food, cars, computers, and smartphones do the same. The differences between these brands are never zero: I can generally tell different brands of bottled water by taste, Samsung- and Sony-made Androids have some differences (let alone iPhones), and so on. But it’s not large either.

Objectively, the cost of switching firms is small, so marketers first of all spend enormous amounts of money on advertising, and second of all aim to create identity markers to impose an emotional cost on customers who switch: “I am a Mac.” If the small differences involve differences in price point, then this can include a marker of class identity; even if they don’t, there’s no shortage of ways to tell people what brand of alcohol or food or video game best fits their microidentity. Establishing brand identity also involves loyalty programs, like airline miles and hotel points: why compete when you can lock passengers into your airline alliance?

This can even bleed into product development to some extent. Microsoft’s embrace, extend, exterminate strategy was designed around getting people to switch to Microsoft products from competitors. This was not a marketing gimmick – the people who developed Excel made sure everything that Lotus 1-2-3 users were used to would also feature in Excel in order to reduce the cost of switching to Microsoft, before using Windows’ power to lock people into Office.

Mass transit is not like this

Public transportation competes with cars as a system. It has a monopoly in certain travel markets, namely rush hour travel to city center, but the existence of those markets itself comes from real estate competition, in which it is necessary to entice companies to choose to locate in city center rather than in a suburban office park. Of note, the following features, all unusual for private-sector competition, apply:

  • Competition is for the most part binary: public transportation versus cars. (Bikes complement transit.)
  • The public transit side of the competition has economies of scale because of the importance of frequency of arrival, and thus is harmed by any internal competition, whereas the car industry has different automakers and works just fine that way.
  • The service has very little customization – everyone rides the same trains. Attempts to introduce product differentiation are harmful because of the frequency effect.
  • The product is completely different from the competition – useful at different times of day, in different neighborhoods, for different destinations. Switching incurs costs of similar magnitude to those of migration.
  • Much of the competition is not for customers, but for development – city center development is good for public transit, sprawl is good for cars.
  • There is competition over public resources, which cannot be divorced from the mode even in an environment of privatization – someone still has to build roads and finance subways.

The consequences of mass transit Fordism

Public transportation is and remains a Fordist product – no product differentiation, highly regimented worker timetables, one-size-fits-all construction, vertical integration. The vertical integration aspects go even farther than early-20th century industry, covering infrastructure, timetables, the equipment, and development. User choice is extensive regarding where to go within the system – I have access to far more variety of products as a consumer and jobs as a worker in Berlin (and had even more in Paris) than I would have driving in a sprawl environment, but I can’t choose what brand of train to use.

This is particularly important when preferences are heterogeneous. Different users have different walking speeds, transfer penalties, idiosyncrasies about access to wifi on board, etc. Planning has to use averages, and for the most part this works without too many seams, but it means that the standard way private businesses use product differentiation doesn’t work.

Of note, this Fordism also exists for the road network, if not for the cars themselves. It’s just far less visible. Drivers may have different preferences that translate to different costs and benefits for a cloverleaf versus a four-level interchange, but engineers can’t have two sets of interchanges, they just build one based on criteria of traffic density. However, the experience of driving on the interchange is not visible as part of the system to the drivers, who occasionally grumble about traffic at a particular intersection but don’t see it as clearly as transit riders see specific transfer stations or modal questions like streetcar vs. subway.

How private-sector marketing can harm transit

Because mass transit is a single system for everyone, standard private-sector marketing schemes involve changes to service that harm the overall system.

Creating brand identification with a specific subgroup of users, such as when some private buses market themselves to tech workers with wifi and USB chargers and charge higher fares, and still can’t make money. Public transportation has to work on an any vehicle, any place, any time principle. Only a handful of hyper-frequent routes can take multiple brands without losing passengers due to the lower frequency of each brand, but on those routes the only reliable way to timetable service is to run on headway management in which case any vehicle can substitute for any vehicle, which means you can’t brand.

This is especially bad when the brands are different modes: bus, bike, streetcar, subway, commuter train. When some modes are marketed to the rich and others are to the poor, capacity is wasted and frequency within each class is lower. Moreover, infrastructure planning is weaker with such differentiation, because often a region or subclass will be close to the wrong mode, forcing expensive additional construction. The United States fails by running commuter rail just for the rich while subways are for the rest, while India fails by doing the exact opposite; both countries build unnecessary infrastructure and underinvest in intermodal integration as a result.

Less harmful but still likely to suck oxygen out of the planning room are various gimmicks, especially at the political level. For example, a program in the mold of cash-for-clunkers to pay people to sell their car and ride public transportation is a waste of money – the main cost of switching from cars to transit or vice versa is that in either case the set of destinations one can easily travel to changes.

Finally, because public transportation is a complex system, trading the need for inter-organization and interdepartmental organization for much lower overall provision costs, people who come into it from consumer product markets may miss some of the required connections. This is especially true of development – people who sell consumer products, including cars, don’t need to think how urban design has to look for their product to succeed. Even people who have heard of transit-oriented development may get it wrong; in the United States, it is common to build some apartment buildings next to a train station but neglect retail and local services, and YIMBY as a movement is at best indifferent to city center office towers.

Streaming Crayoning

I’m going to stream on Twitch at 18:00 tonight my time (UTC+1). This is usually intended as a platform for streaming playing video games, but can also be used for other things, such as discussions that would benefit from video and screen sharing. This may turn into a regular feature, covering a different topic every time – probably monthly, I don’t see myself having enough time to do this weekly unless it’s extremely impromptu.

Today’s topic is crayons:

  • How I make maps such as these ones: how I grab the base map, how I draw lines, etc.
  • Good tips for how to figure out which lines are useful, including very rudimentary cost-per-rider analyses.
  • An example of making a map, probably a US-wide high-speed rail map based on my Metcalfe’s law posts but maybe something else if there’s popular demand.

Followup on New York Regional Rail and the Hempstead Line

I had an idea that the reaction to my last post would go along the lines it did. It was incredibly nitpicky, sometimes pointing out valid concerns, but often just asserting certain things are impossible or incompatible with Long Island culture that happen thousands of times a day in large European and Japanese cities. And it speaks to different communities in different cities – as I said in the post, I wrote that article in the style of a TransitMatters Regional Rail appendix, like the just-released Newburyport/Rockport Line appendix. This matters, in a number of different ways. The most important is this:

The complexity of regional rail

Naively, Boston should be a harder system to modernize than New York. The system is not electrified, and only around half the stations don’t even have high platforms. Most lines have single-track bottlenecks, especially the world-of-pain Old Colony system. Then there’s the need to tie everything together with the North-South Rail Link, to be built as a four-track rail tunnel underneath the Big Dig.

And yet, it’s still easy mode. Boston has four commuter lines on each side: Fitchburg, Lowell, Haverhill, Eastern; Worcester, Providence, Fairmount, Old Colony. There are some alignment questions in that the Franklin Line can get to Boston via the Providence Line (that is, the Northeast Corridor) or the Fairmount Line and that the outer Haverhill Line can be turned into a branch off Lowell, but otherwise the eight lines are independent. The North Station approach has a six-track pinch point, but a schedule that is optimized for short turnarounds is a schedule that automatically avoids at-grade conflicts in the throat. So each system can be planned independently; the line-by-line appendix structure comes from this technical fact.

Moreover, on the level of ridership and social planning, the lines’ sheds are mostly disjoint too. It makes complete sense to speak of jobs on the Providence Line: Providence, for one, has 30,000 jobs within 1 km of the station, which is a near-tie with Ruggles for #4 in the system after the two Boston terminals and Back Bay; and there is never much of an overlap between different lines’ sheds. This also leads to some socioeconomic targeting – the Eastern Lines appendix linked at the top of this post goes into the economic justice implication of service to working-class suburbs on the line, like Chelsea and Lynn.

New York is not like this, at all. The lines are too dense: the Hempstead Line is closely parallel to the Main Line, and it matters that Garden City and Mineola’s walk sheds overlap, albeit only marginally. The branching structure is such that one must treat each system as a whole from the start, with only a handful of plausible cleaves. My Hempstead Line post winks at that by briefly talking about how to schedule Babylon trains, but the reality is that the technical complexity of timetabling New York-area commuter railroads is genuinely high, especially once through-running comes in. (Our Boston Regional Rail timetables are pre-NSRL, so without through-running.)

None of this should be taken to mean that this is not possible. Nor does this mean it is only possible with the sort of expenditures the MTA and Port Authority are used to. Surface improvements should be budgeted in the billions of dollars, but that is equally true of Boston, with New York’s greater size trading off against the mostly-electrified, mostly-high-platform character of its network. The real difference is that Boston can do this in $1-2 billion chunks and each chunk has meaningful improvements on a few lines, whereas in New York there are more moving parts and planning has to be more integrated.

In a way, this shouldn’t surprise. Big cities trade off greater efficiency for greater needs of social organization. New York’s efficiency means that most of it can have every bus and train run every six minutes, but then someone has to plan these bus networks and train connections. At metro area scale, it has enormous potential transit ridership – I think Metro New York beats every other American metro region for how much extra transit ridership it can get in absolute numbers through better capital construction and operations, even Los Angeles – but this doesn’t easily lend itself to line-by-line planning.

Line by line in New York

New York plausibly has the weakest directionality of any city I’m familiar with. Its directional identities are New Jersey vs. in-state suburbs, and to some extent North vs. South Shore of Long Island but city vs. suburbs is the dominant distinction, so social targeting on one commuter line is completely pointless.

This also has an implication for infrastructure. The Hempstead Line is also really two different things – the Hempstead Line proper and the local tracks within the city, with different needs. The East Garden City branch is a way to fit them together, using the jobs around East Garden City to really look for ways to create more local service within Eastern and Central Queens. The upshot is that in New York, a large fraction of the missing ridership on regional rail – the difference between the region’s 800,000 daily riders and Ile-de-France’s 3.5 million on a smaller population – comes from within the city. This matters; the suburbs have a strong not-the-city identity, manifesting itself in resistance to school integration, to densification, to transit fare integration.

Essentially, the correct structure of a New York regional rail proposal is to start from generalities, as we did at TransitMatters, but then transition not to line-by-line, but to topical aspects: scheduling, extensions of electrification, near-city infrastructure (new interlockings, etc.), transit-oriented development, in-city and inner-suburban service, the Gateway tunnel, further through-running tunnels.

What does it mean to be technical?

The first Boston Regional Rail report came out three years ago. We started working on the appendices immediately; things slowed down because of juggling of priorities. We spent much of 2019 trying to address a certain technical commentary gallery that would ask about South Station capacity concerns, back when there was real risk of Massachusetts funding the completely pointless South Station Expansion project; this led to the proof of concept, released at the same time as the Worcester appendix. But that essentially led to trust in TM’s technical acumen, meaning the remaining appendices have been written to a broader audience. This is why we talk about the destinations one can go into near the stations, which I reproduce in a shorter form in my Hempstead writeup.

New York is different. Its size makes it parochial, and thus there is an enormous base of people who know the minutiae of its various pieces and only them – and thanks to its size, they respond extremely aggressively toward any outside knowledge. There are too many things that people on Subchat and New York City Transit Forums, which communities include a fair number of insiders, treat as obvious and yet are incorrect. This is worse when it comes to mainline rail – the insularity is worse, the not-regular-transit identity means that even things that are unremarkable on the subway are treated with suspicion on commuter rail.

Essentially, this forces a dialogue that we didn’t really need to have in Boston about the items (about costs, yes, but that’s a separate matter). Keolis knows what a clockface timetable is, thankfully. Enough insiders are reasonable that the only real technical need was to rebut the idea of South Station Expansion. New York, in contrast, is full of people who think the city is on top of the world and not just in corona death rates, and has capital plans that spend $40 billion in a cycle to do what other cities get done on more than a full order of magnitude less.

How special is New York?

New York is uniquely large, just like all other large cities. What this means is that there are always little places where it needs more. For example, regional rail planning in New York needs to be able to reliably run 24 trains per hour on a two-track line; this is routine, but this is not something seen in every city, because most cities don’t need this. Tokyo, Paris, and London of course all have this, even on fairly fast lines – the RER A averages 49.5 km/h, a hair less than the LIRR, and the Tokaido Main Line scratches 60 km/h. Munich has this, but is a fairly special case for a city that’s objectively kind of small. But Berlin for example tops at 18 tph on the Stadtbahn and even short-turns some trains that really should be going through.

But precisely because the number of examples, while solid, is finite, it’s easy to excuse them away. People who are committed to making New York better can figure out how to modify things as necessary – where the signal blocks need to be shortened, where a track needs to be moved, etc. Learning from Spain should be especially easy given the large number of Spanish-speaking New Yorkers. However, that requires a willingness to learn, and as Sandy points out in his master’s thesis, American commuter rail encourages insularity. New York’s size then means it’s easier to be insular there than elsewhere, to the point of not even noticing advances in other American cities, let alone actually good regional rail networks outside North America. This, in turn, forces every plan to degenerate into either accepting incorrect service assumptions, or getting into too much detail about why those assumptions are wrong.