Recession and Efficiency

Question. In what ways can a recession be useful for forcing inefficient public-sector agencies to lay off redundant workers and reduce bloat?

Answer. None.

Every recession, going at least back to the Great Depression, you get economists and others who are certain that high unemployment can discipline firms into greater productivity. Back in the 1930s, this was Joseph Schumpeter saying that there was no need to fear a depression because it was good, like “a cold douche.” Liquidating unproductive firms and forcing the rest to get leaner was supposed to improve economy-wide efficiency. Today, you can find people arguing the same for inefficient public-sector agencies strapped by budget cuts.

It doesn’t happen. Productivity decreases in bad economic times; labor-saving productivity improvements happen when wages are high, not when sales are low. Cash-strapped firms do not have the ability to invest for the long run – they just sell portions of themselves and shrink to be easier to manage, to limit the loss.

In public-sector public transportation, this really is the same. The best time for converting a metro line to driverless operation is when unemployment is 3%, not when it’s 15%. When unemployment is 3%, it’s possible to place workers in the private sector, which means they’ll work well through the transition. This goes doubly so when the productivity improvement lets one person do a job that previously took three rather than eliminating the job entirely: workers can go on strike if they’re unhappy, and transit as an industry is very amenable to unionization, to the point that unions have succeeded in organizing the tech shuttles in Silicon Valley in an otherwise union-hostile setting. (Of note, American public-sector anti-union successes have mostly been about screwing young workers, who are already the least empowered within the union, rather than doing anything to 20-year veterans who are about to retire with a full pension.)

The issue here is that very, very few workers are redundant on a next-day basis, even in severely overstaffed agencies. New York can eliminate subway conductors but requires some planning in advance to do so, for example to move mirrors around and place CCTV cameras to enable drivers to see the platform and close the doors. American commuter rail agencies can eliminate rail conductors, in what is as close to next-day redundancy as I can think of, but even that requires hiring fare inspectors for proof of payment checks and often also buying ticketing machines at outlying stations where previously passengers bought tickets directly on the train.

More often, eliminating a large amount of waste requires spending a bit more money in the short run. It can be on capital, like more ticketing machines. It can be on labor, like more dispatchers to make the buses run more regularly to reduce delays and bus driver overtime. But it’s usually not something that can be done by the Chainsaw Al school of management. It takes time, and in a lot of cases, the cooperation of the workforce is necessary.

Time and time again, we see transit managers who think in terms of just cutting avoid making long-term investments to improve efficiency. We see hiring freezes, wage freezes, reticence to engage in any long-term hiring and planning even in temporary recessions, and hostility to electrification even among American governors who propose to spend billions of dollars on parking more trains in city center between the morning and afternoon peaks. Even below the top political level, managers who develop a siege mentality never think in terms of long-term improvement. That’s not what will get them ahead; avoiding short-term controversy will, and they adapt to bad practices readily.

The workers adapt, too. If they expect sudden layoffs, their morale will tank and so will their productivity doing anything but the most routinized work. Maintenance workers will skip things – nobody will notice until it’s too late. Cleaners will slack, and if the message sent from the top is that it’s time to retrench, it will be hard to argue for aggressive standards for cleanliness. Even absent unionization, productivity will flounder, and there will not be much room to replace truly lazy workers if there is a hiring slowdown.

So what works for increasing efficiency? The answer is growth. Kopicki-Thompson’s report on best practices for rail privatization has a chapter about the history of the breakup of Japan National Railways in the 1980s, which makes the connection between growth and efficiency clear. Between 1980 and the breakup of JNR into seven constituent JRs in 1987, the company laid off two-thirds of its workforce, after complex negotiations with the unions, some of which were militant socialists. Japanese work culture is that a man is expected to work for the same firm for his entire working life, from age 22 for a university graduate to retirement at 65; JNR had to place these workers in the private sector for a mid-career layoff. This could happen because Japan’s economic growth in that era was famously high, to the point that Americans soon bought business books about how to think like a Japanese manager.

It is best to instead use weak periods to plan for the long term. If there’s stimulus spending, take it and go build things. Even if there isn’t, remember that the recession won’t last forever and plan in advance. Part of the plan should be knowing which workers are supernumerary and making a plan to place them at private-sector jobs as soon as they become available. But don’t expect to be able to send masses of pink slips in a recession; that must be saved for when jobs elsewhere in the economy are plentiful.

Overlapping Circles

I’ve been looking at a lot of big city metro maps recently while checking the construction cost database line by line, and I noticed a regrettable pattern in a number of megacities: they’re so big their metro networks have multiple circles in service or under construction, and instead of neat concentric circles they have overlaps.

What are overlapping circles?

Here is Moscow, for example. The map shows three circles: in blue is the Circle Line, or Line 5; in black is the Moscow Central Circle; and in red is the under-construction Big Circle Line, or Line 11.

The reason for this is that the Central Circle uses a legacy regional rail alignment. In isolation, with no legacy rail to speak of, circles tend to be more orderly, as in Beijing with its two concentric circles (Lines 2 and 10). However, if there is a legacy alignment, it may not be perfectly aligned with where, absent any legacy rail, it would make the most sense to place an orbital. This is the case above in Moscow: the Central Circle is close to the Circle Line in the south but abuts farther away in the north, and the Big Circle Line is built to be the opposite.

This is not unique to Moscow. Here is Tokyo:

The Oedo Line, in magenta, is a ring with a tail. The Yamanote Line, in light green, is a full ring, taller than it is wide so as to really be two north-south lines joined at both ends.

Why is this bad?

The point of a circumferential line is to provide public transit in the orthogonal direction to that of city center. This has any of the following uses:

  • To provide service on strong corridors that happen to be orthogonal to the direction of city center, such as Uptown Manhattan streets, Beijing ring roads, traces of former city walls in Paris, etc.
  • To connect strong near-center neighborhoods to one another, at a radius that balances the density close to the center with the greater need for a circumferential farther away to avoid the inconvenience of walking or taking  a two-seat ride on radial metro lines.
  • To connect outlying areas with strong near-center neighborhoods that lie on different lines.
  • To facilitate interchanges between different radial lines, especially ones that are close to each other, without too much backtracking and without overloading central transfer points.

This works best if the circumferential service is at approximately equal radius from the center. If it is not, then some segment of it may be partially radial, which means it will have all of the problems of radials (peakiness) and none of the benefits (service to city center). In extreme cases, an operational circle may literally pass through city center, as is the case for the Yamanote Line, or a nominal circumferential may pass close enough to count, as is the case for the East London line at Shoreditch, and then the problem is that one side of the region doesn’t get any circumferential service, that is Shitamachi and East London.

If there are multiple circles, then all of the above aspects get better if those circles are concentric, for the same reason. Having many circumferential lines closely parallel to each other can create a local grid in an especially large city; I proposed such a system for Lagos, which is both enormous and a tabula rasa.

Why does this keep happening?

The Moscow Central Circle and the Yamanote Line are both historic legacy commuter lines. Paris is in a similar situation, except the legacy is more recent and evolved over a generation: plans for a circumferential line beyond the M2/M6 ring go back generations, but nothing was done until recently, and the first effort in that direction was the early tramways. So there’s an incomplete ring formed by T1 and T2, another incomplete ring formed by T3, and the under construction M15 ring, the M15 ring intersects the T1/T2 ring because the T1/T2 alignments were based on where convenient surface roads or rights-of-way were available.

That this is so common in the largest cities in the world does not mean it is good. Sound prior planning should figure out locations for such circles in advance. In the case of Paris, there could have been the M2/M6 ring, and then the T3 ring beyond it (as a subway, not light rail) replacing the closely parallel Petite Ceinture, which is no longer useful since the radial Métro lines don’t have stops at the correct locations, and then the M15 ring, and then the orbital tramways of the Grande Ceinture. But I’m not going to use the incompetence tag if in the 1980s a city isn’t sure what its rail network will look like in the 2030s.

In a way, it’s like missed connections between metro lines. It comes from bad planning. It’s hard to avoid – the largest metro network without missed connections is Mexico City, which is unusually poor in radial lines, and even networks that have very few of these, like Paris, Beijing, and Seoul, keep building more. Overlapping circles are likewise present in Tokyo, Moscow, and soon Paris, and absent in only one city with multiple circles, the near-tabula rasa Beijing. However, planners should still aim to avoid this network awkwardness, figuring out network designs well in advance that create neat radials with city center meets and concentric circles for circumferential service.

Eliminate Local Government

What is the purpose of having any local government? So much local activism just takes it for granted that the local is superior to the national or the global. “It’s a tight-knit neighborhood” is supposed to evoke positive feelings, and not, say, close-minded local notables whose oyster is a few square kilometers. So instead of this, let me positively propose that there should not exist government below the level of the state, or the province in a federal system. Cities like New York or Munich should just be places on a map, subject to a one state, one law principle.

Some of this comes from the realization that there is no federalism in a pandemic, and that if the EU were the leviathan state of the imagination of British tabloid readers, the EU would’ve had Japanese or Korean infection rates. (For one, in the first week of March there was widespread “it’s just Italy, it doesn’t affect us” sentiment in Germany.) But this is not really about corona. Localism causes a lot of other problems, which go away at the national and provincial levels whereas pandemics do not.

Physical issues

Progress does not come from localism. Housing, for example, is generally more plentiful when decisions are made at a higher level. Zoning is a national law in Japan, and the national government does not care about the opinions of local NIMBYs and therefore has made it easy to build more housing on your own property. (Takings, in contrast, are extremely hard in Japanese law, which has driven up urban transportation construction costs.)

Infrastructure is in theory more workable at the local level. In the past, municipalities built great public transportation and water works. But that is in decline now thanks to the growth of metropolitan areas with broader linkages. In the United States, this was already evident in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in the context of road construction: there was extensive high-income suburbanization in New York already, and each of the suburbs wanted easy road access to Manhattan jobs but did not want to be drive-through country for suburbs farther out. There were political fights over regional planning at the time, and eventually the solution that emerged, enabling regional road planning while protecting the privileges of wealthy suburbs, was Robert Moses’s arbitrary government; once the roads were built, he was no longer necessary, and it became possible to revert to empowering every wealthy community.

And that history is one of roads. Public transportation requires more coordination between different levels of government. Germany divides itself into broad metropolitan regions with their own transport associations, but in some places like Frankfurt and the Rhine-Neckar region they overlap, and even though the boundaries do not conform to state lines except in the Berlin-Brandenburg region and probably North-Rhine-Westphalia, there is no need for local government to exist either.

Tiebout’s law

The idea that people vote with their feet to choose the government they’d like is powerful, and makes a lot of sense at the national and provincial level. I can avoid Bavaria and go to Berlin’s more welfare state-oriented system. But this stops at that level. At the local level, such a broad choice makes no sense. Were the various neighborhoods of Berlin their own autonomous zones like American suburbs, with local tax base, the difference between their provision of services would not be about choice, but about resources. It’s much easier for rich people to cluster in one part of the region, be it Westchester, Hauts-de-Seine, or Charlottenburg, and then work to exclude others from living there, e.g. through restrictive zoning.

What’s more, choosing among 16 German states is reasonable. Even choosing among 50 American states is feasible, since there are differences between various American regions and then people can pick a state within one general area. But choosing among tens of thousands of municipalities is not reasonable. At that level it’s not about exact combinations of issues but about which local government markets itself the best to various classes of people, and about micro-level locations, e.g. on one particular train line. There is no need for such fractional governance.

The democratic deficit

I brought up the issue of the local-level democratic deficit last year. Anti-EU people like complaining about the EU-level democratic deficit, but it’s easier to get informed about EU-level issues in advance of a European Parliament election and choose the right political party for one’s views than to do the same at the local level. I lived in New York through a City Council election and was Facebook friends with a lot of American voters interested in politics and had no idea who was in favor of what, and this has not changed since. Between New York’s extent of primary voter suppression and the total lack of ideological politics, there is no democratic legitimacy in the city’s local elections, and at this point I’m ready to even include the mayor and not just the council.

In Europe, things are not any better than in New York, even though voter turnout is much higher so in principle there should be more democratic legitimacy. I can’t tell you how it even mattered who I voted for in the Stockholm city and county elections, which I was eligible to vote in as an EU citizen. In Berlin I’ve talked to a number of public transportation advocates and I know a lot about Andreas Scheuer and his agenda but about the most I’ve gleaned regarding local elections is the Neukölln bike lane network, except that even there the changes seem subtle by the standards of (say) Anne Hidalgo’s streetscaping, and at any rate people in Neukölln might want to bike to other neighborhoods.

The broad issue here is that local elections are not ideological, but personal. People can pick up an ideology easily and transfer it around. Even modifications for the local situation are not too hard to pick up: people can easily transmit information like “SPD in Berlin is on the moderate side because more left-wing people can vote for Die Linke and the Greens.” I have never lived in San Francisco but could still tell you about the difference between progressives and moderates there and how it differs from same in New York. On the national level it’s even easier, because there’s prestige media covering elections and their issues.

And I suspect that to the people who like localism as it is, the fact that local elections hinge on personality contests is a good thing. If you’ve lived 40 years in one city, you know all the local notables and their petty fights and how you can us them to pass your agenda. You’re empowered. It’s people who have recently moved in who are in practice disenfranchised, but for them you have slurs: “rootless cosmopolitan,” “transplant,” “globalist,” and so on. This democratic deficit persists because powerful people enjoy their power.

This means that the destruction of local government is specifically not just about good government but also about disempowering various local notables, including ones who have sob stories of how much they matter to their communities. They are in favor of bad government, and need to no longer have any power beyond the ability to vote for a party list once in four years.

New York as a Six-Minute City

What would it take to improve public transportation in New York so that all or nearly all routes would run at worst even six minutes during midday? Today, frequencies are tailored to individual routes; a bunch of subway lines are a 10-minute city (and the A branches are a 15-minute city), and in Brooklyn, the median midday bus headway is 12 minutes, with wide variations.

The bus origin of six minutes

Six minutes is not an arbitrary number. It comes from Eric’s and my Brooklyn bus redesign; speeding up routes through stop consolidation, dedicated lanes, and off-board fare collection, and pruning and recombining some routes, lets every bus run every six minutes from 6 am to 10 pm all day every day, with higher frequency on those routes that already have it today because they are too busy for just ten buses per hour. We didn’t study the other boroughs as deeply, but a quick doodle suggested the six-minute standard could be met in Manhattan and the Bronx as well, and a Bronx bus grid could even dip into a five-minute city.

Queens is a wildcard and I’m going to disappoint readers by not talking about it. It is clearly possible given the operational treatment we propose to make most of Queens a six-minute city, but at the price of long route spacing in Eastern Queens, and I don’t know what is optimal. It’s a hard question and I’m not going to tackle it unless I’m actually working on a longer-term project to do a Queens bus redesign.

Six minutes on the subway

The subway right now is a 10-minute city. A lettered or numbered route runs every 10 minutes off-peak, sometimes every 12 on Sundays and at night; the busier routes, especially the four that do not share tracks with other routes (1, 6, 7, L), run more frequently, but 10 minutes is the base frequency on large swaths of the network. The A branches in Ozone Park and the Rockaways even run every 15 minutes, but that’s unusual enough – evidently, nowhere else does one letter or number denote a route with its own branches – that it can be excluded.

For comparison, Berlin’s rail network is a 10-minute city, with some outer S-Bahn branches running every 20 minutes. Within the Ring, Berlin is a 5-minute city for the most part, excluding just a two-hour midday dip to 10 minutes on the Ring and 10-minute frequencies on the U1/U3 branches and the practically useless U4 route. Paris makes no effort to run different routes at the same intervals – French rapid transit planning has self-contained lines with their own fleets and schedules, so for example the RER A is on 10-minute off-peak takts and the RER B on 15-minute ones. So frequency there greatly depends on where in the region one lives and on what line. The Métro is a 5-minute city for the most part, as are the intramural RER trunks; intramural buses can be ignored. The suburbs are more or less a 15-minute city.

The reason New York is a 10-minute city on the subway is partly about interlining. The trunks in theory run every 5 minutes or better, but the trains do not come evenly because sometimes trains with different frequencies share the same trunk, and delays propagate easily. Interlining really doesn’t work unless all trains come at the same frequency; this is familiar in German planning, but not in American planning (or French planning, but there’s barely any interlining in Paris).

Putting every subway route on a 10-minute takt, with double service on the four non-interlined services, is possible but would lead to a lot of crowding on the busiest lines. About the worst possible frequency that works for everything is a train every 7.5 minutes; this lets the two A branches run on 15-minute takts, and everything else run on a 7.5-minute takt. But even then, New York has so many missed connections that it’s useful to do better. The six-minute city, matching buses, turns most of Manhattan and inner Brooklyn and Queens into a three-minute city.

Running all trains on the same takt also means timed connections. Trains that run every 5 or 6 minutes can routinely be timetabled to be at predictable places at predictable times, which facilitates local/express transfers on branches, for example in Southern Brooklyn. Even trunk transfers can be timed – 3-minute trains can still run on a timetable, and the most valuable transfers are local/express ones at 96th/Broadway, 125th/St. Nicholas, and 125th/Lex, all far enough north so as to not have the huge tidal crowds of Times Square or Grand Central.

What would it take?

On the buses, just good redesign, as long as the city is willing to exclude Staten Island from the six-minute city. In Queens, some increase in bus service is probably warranted.

On the subway, this requires on the order of 110-120 million revenue train-km a year, which is 1 billion car-km. The current figure is 560 million car-km/year. There is a lot of unnecessary expenditure on the subway, but fixing that requires something a lot deeper than a bus redesign. The cut in operating costs would be to levels that are well within first-world levels, and some of it would just come from better off-peak service making crew scheduling easier, without split shifts or wasted time. But it does require serious changes, especially in maintenance.

Quick Note: Timed Orbital Buses

Outside a city core with very high frequency of transit, say 8 minutes or better, bus and train services must be timetabled to meet each other with short connections as far as possible. Normally, this is done through setting up nodes at major suburban centers where trains and buses can all interchange. For example, see this post from six months ago about the TransitMatters proposal for trains between Boston and Worcester: on the hour every half hour, trains in both directions serve Framingham, which is the center for a small suburban bus system, and the buses should likewise run every half hour and meet with the trains in both directions.

This is a dendritic system, in which there is a clear hierarchy not just of buses and trains, but also of bus stops and train stations. Under the above system, every part of the Framingham area is connected by bus to the Framingham train station, and Framingham is then connected to the rest of Eastern New England via Downtown Boston. This is the easiest way to set up timed rail-bus connections: each individual rail line is planned around takt and symmetry such that the most important nodes can have easy timed bus connections, and then the buses are planned around the distinguished nodes.

However, there’s another way of doing this: a bus can connect two distinct nodes, on two different lines. The map I drew for a New England high- and low-speed rail has an orbital railroad doing this, connecting Providence, Worcester, and Fitchburg. Providence, as the second largest city center in New England, supplies such rail connections, including also a line going east toward Fall River and New Bedford, not depicted on the map as it requires extensive new construction in Downtown Providence, East Providence, and points east. But more commonly, a connection between two smaller nodes than Providence would be by bus.

The orbital bus is not easy to plan. It has to have timed connections at both ends, which imposes operational constraints on two distinct regional rail lines. To constrain planning even further, the bus itself has to work with its own takt – if it runs every half hour, it had better take an integer multiple of 15 minutes minus a short turnaround time to connect the two nodes.

It is also not common for two suburban stations on two distinct lines to lie on the same arterial road, at the correct distance from each other. For example, South Attleboro and Valley Falls are at a decent distance, if on the short side, but the route between them is circuitous and it would be far easier to try to set up a reverse-direction timed transfer at Central Falls for an all-rail route. The ideal distance for a 15-minute route is around 5-6 km; bus speeds in suburbia are fairly high when the buses run in straight lines, and if the density is so high that 5-6 km is too long for 15 minutes, then there’s probably enough density for much higher frequency than every half hour.

The upshot is that connections between two nodes are valuable, especially for people in the middle who then get easy service to two different rail lines, but uncommon. Brockton supplies a few, going west to Stoughton and east to Whitman and Abington. But the route to Stoughton is at 8.5 km a bit too long for 15 minutes – perhaps turning it into a 30-minute route, either with slightly longer connections or with a detour to Westgate (which the buses already take today), would be the most efficient. The routes to Whitman and Abington are 7 km long, which is feasible at the low density in between, but then timetabling the trains to set up knots at both Brockton and Abington/Whitman is not easy; Brockton is an easy node, but then since the Plymouth and Middleborough Lines are branches of the same system, their schedules are intertwined, and if Abington and Whitman are served 15 minutes away from Brockton then schedule constraints elsewhere lengthen turnaround times and require one additional trainset than if they are not nodes and buses can’t have timed connections at both ends.

Planners then have to keep looking for such orbital bus opportunities. There aren’t many, and there are many near-misses, but when they exist, they’re useful at creating an everywhere-to-everywhere network. It is even valuable to plan the trains accordingly provided other constraints are not violated, such as the above issue of the turnaround times on the Old Colony Lines.

You Do Not Owe Staying to a Failed City

New York real estate media is speculating that people may want to leave the city after the total failures of the city, state, and federal governments to protect public health at the peak of corona in March and April. I do not know if this is actually happening and if people actually are moving out, as opposed to just writing about moving out and complaining that bankrupt retail and restaurant chains are closing. But a number of busybodies, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, have already complained that it is somehow immoral to leave. And the only reasonable reaction to this exhortation is, what?

It’s 100% reasonable to leave a city that cannot provide basic services. The problem with white flight is not that it’s immoral to leave; it’s that it’s stupid to treat segregation as a service the city must provide, rather than education, health care, electricity, transportation, affordable housing, and so on.

A lot of New York’s problems have been well-known for a while. It can’t provide affordable housing to anyone – middle-class renters pay $3,000 a month for an apartment that should be renting for $1,000; everyone in New York knows this, even if many (e.g. homeowners) like this arrangement and some others don’t but have the wrong explanation as for why (e.g. left-NIMBYs). Trash on the street has always been a problem, but only recently have New Yorkers begun realizing it doesn’t have to be this way. Crime was at a historic low on the eve of corona, and even with the recent spike is at sub-2000s levels. Schools in New York are as I understand it good by inner-city American standards.

But the health issue is looming. Six months ago, New York seemed like a place with genuinely good public health. Some of it was cultural (e.g. the city is anti-smoking even by American standards, let alone European or East Asian ones); some of it is selective migration of healthy workers; some of it is high physical activity levels in a city where the majority of people do not own cars, which is a policy issue but one coming from investments made in 1900-1940 and not today. But the hospitals enjoyed good reputation and there is a fair bit of public health care in the city.

And then came corona, and it turned out that the city, the state, and the country all failed at providing basic public health. De Blasio told people to go have fun at bars one last time on the day he announced forced closures in March; Governor Andrew Cuomo outdid him by sending elderly corona patients back to nursing homes, prohibiting subway employees from wearing masks early on, and taking a long time to even acknowledge that masks were useful; and the less said of Donald Trump’s response from when Taiwan first warned the world about the new virus around New Year’s to the present, the better.

The issue isn’t even so much that in the future the city is likelier to have a big second wave. The experience of having heard ambulance sirens all night made New Yorkers take the crisis more seriously than people elsewhere; daily infections are flat and higher than in Europe (36/million people, the EU average is around 23), but so much lower than in the rest of the US. But rather, the total failure of government at all levels to deal with this crisis means it will likely fail to deal with other crises in the future. The US doesn’t have the state capacity to deal with a crisis that democratic East Asia or even Western Europe has, and New York is run as a bunch of fiefdoms at both the city and state level in which the person in charge is selected for political loyalty rather than competence.

The criminal justice angle in New York is even more frustrating. It’s not even that there is crime, or police brutality. Politicians are free to run as pro-police, as Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg did. But de Blasio ran explicitly on a platform of reducing police brutality, in which capacity he failed – NYPD has killed around 10 people a year every year since the early 2000s. Losing an election is understandable, and even winning the election but then losing in negotiations is understandable and politicians often find themselves having to explain a certain compromise. But de Blasio’s response made no acknowledgment of such compromise – he has no ability to exercise civilian control of the police.

You do not owe anything to a place. Places don’t have feelings, and people who base their entire personal identity on emotional attachment to a place are not worth bothering with. If the city works for you, then great! Move there if you can, stay if you’re already there. There are a lot of great things about New York – New Yorkers are curious and diligent people, even if the people governing them are neither of these things. But if it doesn’t, just leave. It’s okay. I’ll help you with some information about how to move to Germany if you want.

The Limits of Regional Rail

I recently found myself involved in a discussion about Boston regional rail that involved a proposal to do more thorough regional rail-subway integration. Normally, S-Bahn systems mix some aspects of longer-range regional rail and some aspects of urban metro systems. They provide metro-like service in the urban core – for example, Berliners use the the three trunk lines of the S-Bahn as if they were U-Bahn lines. But, unlike proper metros, they branch in the suburbs and tend to have lower frequency and lower quality of infrastructure. However, there is a limit to this integration, coming from timetabling.

The characteristics of metro-like S-Bahn

When I call some S-Bahns, or some S-Bahn trunks, “metro-like,” what I mean is how users perceive them, and not how planners do. A metro line is one that users get on without concern for the timetable. It may run on a clockface schedule, for example on a 5-minute takt in Berlin, but passengers don’t try to time themselves to get on a specific train, and if the train is 1-2 minutes behind schedule then nobody really minds. This user behavior usually comes from high frequency. However, in New York, despite extensive branching and 10-minute frequencies, I classify the subway as fully metro-like because the trains are not dispatched as a scheduled railroad and even if they were, passengers don’t ever think in terms of “my Queens-bound N train arrives at :06 every 10 minutes.”

S-Bahn lines have trunks like this, but also branches that work like regional rail. The regional rail pattern in the sense of RegionalBahn is one in which passengers definitely look at timetables and try to make them, and connecting public transit lines are planned to make timed transfers. On lines branded as RegionalBahn service comes every half hour or every hour, and usually S-Bahn tails are every 15-30 minutes (occasionally 10), but the printed schedule is paramount either way; when I rode the RER B to IHES in the last three months of 2016, I memorized the 15-minute takt and timed myself to it.

The key aspect of S-Bahns is combining these two patterns. But this leads to a key observation: they have to interline a number of different service patterns, which requires planning infrastructure and service to permit both. They can’t run on pure headway management in the core, because the branches must be scheduled. But they have to use a timetabling system that permits high core frequency nonetheless.

Finally, observe that I am not discussing the type of equipment used. A subway train that extends far into the suburbs may qualify as regional rail – the Metropolitan line in London qualifies as an example on account of its highly branched service pattern in Metro-land. In the other direction, a train built to mainline standards that runs consistent service pattern with little to no branching at a range typical of metros is not, for the purpose of this issue, regional rail – examples include the Yamanote and Keihin-Tohoku Lines in Tokyo, which run identical trains to those that run deeper into suburbia but have literally no (Yamanote) or almost no (Keihin-Tohoku) variation in service patterns.

The limit of interlining

A large degree of interlining tends to reduce timetable reliability. Trains have to make junctions at specific times. This is compounded by a number of different factors:

1. Trunk throughput

The busier the trunk is, the harder it is to keep everything consistent. If you run 15 trains per half-hour, that’s 15 opportunities for a 2-minute delay to mess the order in which trains arrive, which has implications further down. If you run 4 trains per half-hour, that’s 4 opportunities, and a 2-minute delay is easily recoverable anyway.

2. Trunk length

Longer and more complex trunks introduce their own problems. If many passengers treat trains as interchangeable and don’t care what order they arrive in, then this may not be good for timekeeping – a slight delay on a branch may lead to grossly uneven headways on the trunk, which compound on busy metro lines for similar reasons as on buses. Berlin’s Stadtbahn has 14 stations from Ostkreuz to Westkreuz counting both, and this may make the branches with their 20-minute frequencies a little too difficult to fit together – evidently, peak throughput is 18 trains per hour, hardly the cutting edge. The RER A has 7 trunk stations from Vincennes to La Défense inclusive, and around 27 peak trains per hour.

3. Branch infrastructure quality

In the limit, the branches have to have excellent infrastructure quality, to be resilient to 1-2 minute delays. Timed meets on a mostly single-trunk line, routine on 15-minute branches like some lines in suburban Zurich and Tokyo, become dicey on lines that feed very busy trunks. Tokyo does this on the Yokosuka Line, which is far from the busiest (it peaks around 20 trains per hour) and Zurich on the right bank of Lake Zurich, which feeds into an S-Bahn trunk with 4 stations inclusive from Stadelhofen to Oerlikon. The busiest S-Bahn lines tend to have all-doubled outer ends.

4. One vs. two ends

If the line is single-ended, then inbound trains can just run metro-style in city center without regard for the printed schedule, use the terminal for schedule recovery, and then go outbound on schedule. Non-through-running lines are by definition single-ended, and this includes what I believe is Tokyo’s busiest regional rail line, the Chuo Rapid Line. But even some through-running lines are de facto single-ended if demand is highly asymmetric, like the Stadtbahn, which has far more demand from the east than from the west, so that one branch even turns at Westkreuz. Double-ended lines do not have this opportunity for recovery, so it’s more important to stay on schedule, especially if the end is not just busy but also has extensive branching itself.

Case Selection

Eric and I recently sent in a list of criteria for case selection. We’re currently funded for 6 detailed case studies, of which one is the Green Line Extension in Boston due to funding from a different grant. My guess is that we need about 15-20 different cities to have near-perfect information about the institutional and geographic factors that influence infrastructure construction costs. Because different subway lines in the same city tend to cost the same to build, and even in the same country, our 500 lines in the database are more like 50 independent observations, and there are even identifiable clusters of countries.

These clusters are important, because ideally we should have 2 cases per cluster. With 6 cases in total, we’d like to have a case for at least one per cluster, even though it’s unlikely, depending on where we can find the most detailed information and the most people who will talk to us.

Clusters

1. Very low-cost countries

The first cluster is the success cases. These really come in two flavors: one is Switzerland and the Nordic countries, and the other is everywhere else with costs lower than $150 million per km, that is Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, and South Korea. The difference between the two flavors is that the first one consists of very high-wage countries with populations that trust their institutions, and the second consistent of countries with wages at the bottom of the first world or top of the second with populations who don’t believe me when I tell them their infrastructure construction is cheaper than in Germany. Even then, there are some important differences – for example, contracts in Turkey are lowest-bid, using the country’s high rate of construction and multitude of firms (a contract must have a minimum of 3 bids) to discipline contractors into behaving, whereas Spain instead has technical scoring for bids and only assigns 30% weight to cost.

2. Middle-range countries

This is countries close to the global average, which is around $250 million per kilometer for underground construction. China has about the same average cost as the rest of the world, and since a slight majority of our current database is Chinese, it falls in this category. France and Germany are definitely in this category; Austria, Czechia, and Romania are also in this category but have fewer distinct metro tunnels; Japan may be in this category but it’s unclear, since the few tunnels it’s building nowadays are both more expensive and more uniquely complicated, rather like regional rail. Big parts of Latin America fall into this category too, though they bleed with the high-cost category too. There’s a good case for separating China, France, Germany, and Japan into four separate categories (Austria should probably be institutionally similar to Germany), each of which gets different things right and wrong.

3. Countries with recent cost growth

This cluster consists of places that have high costs but didn’t until recently. Canada and Singapore are both competing for worst construction costs outside the United States but were not until well into the 2000s. Australia may be in this category too – it’s unclear, since Melbourne is extremely expensive to tunnel in but Sydney isn’t. New Zealand’s regional rail costs suggest it might be too – initial electrification was cheap but the regional rail tunnel is expensive. All of these countries share the characteristic of extreme cultural cringe toward Britain and the US, adopting recent British and American ideas of privatization of the state, and it would be valuable to follow up and see if this is indeed what happened with all of their infrastructure programs.

4. Rich countries with very high costs

This cluster is dominated by the US and UK. Taiwan is there too but is much smaller and likely has completely different institutional reasons – one person told me of political corruption. Hungary and Russia might be in this category too – they have very high costs (Budapest is scratching $500 million per km), but their wages are at the first/second world boundary, rather like Bulgaria or Turkey.

5. Countries on the global periphery with very high costs

This cluster consists of the high-cost world that is too poor or peripheral to be in cluster 4. This includes ex-colonies like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, and Vietnam, but also the never- or more-or-less-never-colonized Gulf states; these two categories, the Gulf and the rest, must form two distinct flavors, but I lump them together because both seem to have extreme levels of cultural cringe and to associate bringing in European and East Asian consultants with modernity and success. (Meanwhile, parts of Europe, at least in the less self-assured East, bring in Turkish contractors.) The higher-cost Latin American countries, like Brazil and possibly Colombia, belong here too, and may form a distinct flavor. Thailand is on the edge between this cluster and cluster 2, which may befit its liminal colonial status before and during World War 2.

Where we struggle

We’ve been sending feeler messages to people in a number of places. This is far from perfect coverage – so far none of these countries is poorer than Turkey. In general, we’ve had early success in the lower-income range in cluster 1 (Italy, Spain, Korea, Turkey) and in cluster 4. Cluster 3 seems reachable too, especially since Stephen Wickens did much of the legwork for Toronto’s cost growth; we may be able to look at Sydney as well, and Singapore and Auckland seem like it shouldn’t be too difficult to find sources, nor to get people to listen if our conclusion ends up being “your government reforms in the last 15 years are terrible and should be reversed.”

Within the rich world, so far getting sources in Germany and Scandinavia has proved the hardest. I don’t know if it’s random or if it’s the fact that in countries that believe their standards of living are higher than those of the US and UK people are less likely to be forthcoming to someone who writes them in English. I’ve seen a decent amount of written material about rail capital construction projects in Germany, though not about the one I’m most interested in, that is the U5-U55 connection here in Berlin; but the rail advocates I’ve talked to are not quite in metro construction, though I have learned a lot about public transportation issues in Germany from them.

In Scandinavia things are even harder. Costs there seem pretty consistently low. A common explanation is that the rock in both Stockholm and Helsinki is gneiss, which forms a natural arch and makes tunnel boring easy, but a short tunnel in Oslo, the Løren Line, was even cheaper in softer rock. Moreover, the planned Helsinki-Turku high-speed rail is currently budgeted at €2 billion for 94 km of which 10 are in tunnel, so maybe equivalent to 140 km of at-grade line; this is noticeably below French costs, let alone German ones.

The low-income world is an entirely different situation. My suspicion is that the same cultural cringe that makes India build turnkey Shinkansen at something like 3 times its domestic cost (correcting for tunnel length) would make India eager to talk to us – if we were covered in the first-world discourse first. People in India, Nigeria, etc. know their countries are poor and are desperate to absorb the knowledge of richer places; they don’t understand the US as well as Americans do, but they understand it better than Americans understand the third world.

Cluster curiosities

The reasons I’d ideally like to have 20 case studies are that there are a lot of questions about internal differences, and that things that look like clusters from cost data may not actually be similar. There are a lot of questions that doing more cases might explain.

  • South Korea and Japan share many institutional similarities, and many of those are also shared with Taiwan. How come South Korea near-ties for lowest costs in the world, Taiwan near-ties for highest costs in the non-Anglophone first world, and Japan is somewhere in the middle?
  • What explains why different Eastern European countries with similar histories and institutions have such cost divergence?
  • Why does Italy have low metro construction costs (more in the North than in Rome and the South, but Rome is at worst average) and high costs of high-speed rail construction?
  • Why does Japan have high metro construction costs where it builds and low costs of Shinkansen tunneling?
  • Turkey seems similar in costs to Southern Europe, but it does things very differently – for one, it uses lowest-bid contracting. To what extent this is about Turkey’s very high rates of construction recently, and does this generalize elsewhere? Of note, there are extremely high construction rates all over middle-cost China, and also decently high rates in high-cost India, Singapore, and California.
  • The Netherlands is institutionally within the same range of what’s seen elsewhere in Northern Europe, and yet its construction costs are high. Is this just a matter of alluvial soil tunneling? If so, why did HSL Zuid cost so much?

The US Leads the Way in High Costs

Our current project timeline includes posting the dataset of urban rail lines and their construction costs in a month. This means looking at various spreadsheets and checking them item by item. Part of it is checking for mistakes, which do unfortunately occur for some items. Sometimes even the sources have mistakes – for example, most sources for the Sinbundang Line in Seoul say it cost 1.169 trillion won (e.g. here, a bit higher in PDF-p. 60 here, and my now-linkrotted original source), but one says 1.69 trillion, which I’m fairly certain is a typo. However, the biggest source of errors in my file is that the majority of lines I included were under construction as of 2018, so cost overruns and schedule slips remain possible. And unfortunately, while a number of projects have significantly higher costs, the US is especially rich in cost overruns.

The case of Los Angeles is the most infuriating. It is not the highest-cost American city, not even close – nothing is within a factor of 2 of dislodging Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 from its throne. However, it’s making a strong bid for the second highest. The third phase of the Purple Line extension in the Westside, connecting Century City (reached in the second phase) with UCLA and the VA Hospital in Westwood, is $3.6 billion for 4.2 km. Costs have been creeping up from what used to start with a 2, and now this is $857 million per kilometer. This is in year-of-expenditure dollars, so in 2020 money it’s more like $800 million per km.

The contrast to what LA looked like in the 2000s is huge. In 2010-11, it looked like the lowest-cost US city; it was still really expensive to tunnel in, but it seemed more like $300-400 million per km. But things keep getting worse. If Canada and Australia and Singapore and Britain today are like the US 10-15 years ago, the US is pulling ahead, eager to be #1 in everything.

Of note, this is an environment with high and stable funding levels. Transit funding in Los Angeles is bonded through 2060. Contracts in Los Angeles are let on a lowest-cost basis; sometimes there’s a technical score, but officials at LA Metro told Eric and me that unless the weight of the technical score is very high, around 70%, then in practice the contract will go to the lowest bidder. Now, it is not true that all low-cost countries have high technical score weights like Spain does; Turkey in particular uses lowest cost, and uses its high construction rates to discipline bidders into behaving, since shoddy work will risk their ability to get future contracts. Nonetheless, in Los Angeles the great extent of construction does not involve any such discipline. Metro prefers dealing with familiar contractors, even if their record is poor.

Americans, as a culture, would rather die than be more like another nation. Taiwan’s last domestic corona infection was on April 12th, the US averages 60,000 such infections a day. The sort of change required to make Americans forget about 2 generations of learned public-sector helplessness is immense, and will not come spontaneously (and no, your chosen revolutionary movement won’t do it – revolutionaries are selected for incompetence).

The upshot is that the share of current senior managers who have anything to contribute to improving public transportation in the US is very low. Not zero, but still very low. The process selects the least imaginative, least technically apt, and least curious people. Whether it’s best practices that do not look outside the Boston-Seattle-San Diego-Miami quadrilateral, or grants that have language that makes it clear foreign knowledge is unwelcome, or hiring practices that exclude immigrants on visas, everything about the process in the US screams it. It’s not a coincidence that the US has the world’s highest construction costs, and when other countries begin to catch up often thanks to adoption of American practices, the US keeps staying ahead.

Incrementalism in Infrastructure

I was recently asked about the issue of incrementalism in infrastructure, with specific reference to Strong Towns and its position against big projects (e.g. here). It’s useful to discuss this right now in context of calls for a big infrastructure-based federal jobs program in the United States. The fundamental question to answer is, what is the point of incremental projects?

The issue is that the legitimate reason to prefer less ambitious projects is money. If a new subway tunnel costs $5 billion, but you only have the ability to secure $1.5 billion, then you should build what you can for $1.5 billion, which may be a tram rather than a subway, or surface improvements to regional rail instead of a new regional rail tunnel, etc.

A secondary legitimate reason is that even if there is more money, sometimes you get better results out of building something less flashy. This is the electronics-before-concrete approach – in a developed country it’s almost always cheaper to invest in signaling, electrification, and platform upgrades than to build new tunnels. This can look incremental if it’s part of a broader program: for example, if there’s already investment in electrification in the region then extending wires is incremental, so that completing electrification on the commuter rail lines in New York, reopening closed suburban branches in Philadelphia with new wires, and even completing electrification in a mostly-wired country like Belgium and the Netherlands would count.

But the example of electrification in a mostly already electrified place showcases the differences between cost-effectiveness and incrementalism. The same investment – electrification – has a certain cost-effectiveness depending on how much train traffic there is. There’s a second-order effect in that the first line to be electrified incurs the extra cost of two train fleets and the last line has a negative cost in no longer needing two fleets, but this isn’t relevant to first order. Nonetheless, electrifying a system where electrification is already familiar is considered incremental, to the point that there were extensions of electrification in suburban New York in the 1980s and there remain semi-active projects to build more, whereas electrifying one that is currently entirely diesel, like Boston, is locally considered like a once-in-a-generation project.

And that is the real problem. American cities are hardly hotbeds of giant flashy construction. They barely are in highways – big highway construction plans are still done but in suburbs and not anywhere where public transit is even remotely relevant. And transit construction plans are always watered down with a lot of reconstruction and maintenance money; most of the money in the Los Angeles sales tax measures that are sold to the urbanist public as transit measures is not about rail construction, which is why with money programmed through 2060 the region is going to only have one full subway line; an extension of the Red Line on South Vermont is scheduled to open in 2067, partly because construction costs are high but mostly because there are maintenance projects ahead in line.

So in reality, there are two real reasons why incrementalism is so popular in the United States when it comes to transportation, neither of which is legitimate. Both are types of incompetence, but they focus on different aspects of it.

The first reason is incompetence through timidity. Building something new, e.g. rail electrification in Boston or in California, requires picking up new knowledge. The political appointees in charge of transit agencies and the sort of people who state legislators listen to do not care to learn new things, especially when the knowledge base for these things is outside their usual social networks. Can Massachusetts as a state electrify its rail network? Yes. Can it do so cheaply? Also yes. But can the governor’s political appointees do so? Absolutely not, they are incurious and even political people who are not beholden to the governor make excuses for why Massachusetts can’t do what Israel and Norway and New Zealand and Austria and Germany do.

In that sense, incrementalism does not mean prudence. It means doing what has been done before, because the political people are familiar with it. It may not work, but it empowers people who already have political clout rather than sidelining them in favor of politically independent technocrats from foreign countries who might be too successful.

The second reason is incompetence through lack of accountability. This is specific to an approach that a lot of American urbanists have backed, wrongly: fix-it-first, or in its more formal name state of good repair (SOGR). The urbanist emphasis on SOGR has three causes: first, in the 1980s New York had a critical maintenance backlog and neglected expansion in order to fix it, which led to positive outcomes in the 1990s and 2000s; second, in highways, fix-it-first is a good way to argue against future expansion while hiding one’s anti-car ideology behind a veneer of technical prudence; and third, Strong Towns’ specific use case is very small towns with serious issues of infrastructure maintenance costs and not enough residential or commercial demand to pay for them, which it then generalizes to places where there’s more market demand for growth.

In reality, the situation of 1980s’ New York was atypical. Subsequently, the SOGR program turned into a giant money pit, because here was an opportunity to spend enormous sums of capital construction money without ever being accountable to the public in the form of visible expansion. Ask for a new rail line and people will ask why it’s not open – California got egg on its collective face for not being able to build high-speed rail. Ask for SOGR and you’ll be able to brush away criticism by talking about hidden benefits to reliability. Many passengers may notice that trains are getting slower and less reliable but it’s easier in that case to intimidate the public with officious rhetoric that sounds moderate and reasonable.

Incrementalism is fundamentally a method of improving a legitimate institution. The EU needs incremental reform; China needs a democratic revolution. By the same token, in infrastructure, incrementalism should be pushed when, and only when, the status quo with tweaks is superior to the alternatives. (Note that this is not the same as electronics-before-concrete – what Switzerland did with its rail investment in the 1990s was very far-reaching, and had tangible benefits expressed in trip times, timed connections, and train frequency, unlike various American bus redesigns.) Strong Towns does not believe that there’s anything good about the American urban status quo, and yet it, and many urbanists, are so intimidated by things that happened in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s that they keep pushing status quo and wondering why there is no public transportation outside about eight cities.