Coronavirus and Cities

There’s a meme going around the American discourse saying that the Covid-19 outbreak is proving that dense cities are bad. Most of this is bullshit from politicians, like Andrew Cuomo. But now there’s serious research on the subject, by a team at Marron led by the excellent Solly Angel. Solly’s paper looks at confirmed infection rates in American metropolitan areas as of late March and finds a significant correlation with density, but no significant correlation between deaths and density. In this post, I’m going to look at Germany. Here, big or dense cities are not disproportionately affected by the virus.

Why Germany?

Germany has pretty reliable data on infections because testing is fairly widespread, so far covering 1.6% of the population. Moreover, testing is this high throughout the country, whereas in the US, there are vast differences in testing as well as in other aspects of response by state, e.g. New York has tested 2% of state population, Louisiana 1.9%, Florida 0.8%, California and Texas 0.4%.

I also have granular data on infection rates in Germany, thanks to Zeit. The data I’m using is synchronic rather than diachronic, i.e. I’m looking at current infection rates rather than growth. Growth rates aren’t the same everywhere – in particular, they’re lower in North Rhine-Westphalia, which was the epicenter of the German outbreak weeks ago, than in southern Germany – but they’re low enough that I don’t think the situation will change in short order.

Size and density

Within Germany, there aren’t huge gradients in density between cities. More central neighborhoods have taller buildings than less central ones and higher ratios of building to courtyard, but there are no huge differences in residential built form the way there are between American cities.

For example, look at densities by neighborhood in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart. There aren’t big differences in the pattern: the densest inner neighborhoods have about 15,000 people per square kilometer, and density falls to 3,000-5,000 in outer neighborhoods. Hamburg has a few areas with no residents, since they include the city’s immense port. Stuttgart’s densest districts are in the 5,000-6,000/km^2 range, but that’s because the districts are not very granular and the dense ring of inner-city neighborhoods just outside the commercial center is not congruent to district boundaries.

The upshot is that the big question about density and the risk of epidemics cannot be answered by comparing German cities to one another, but only to the surrounding rural areas. So the real question should be, are the major German cities more afflicted by the virus than the rest of the country?

Infection rates by city

As of the end of 2020-04-09, Zeit reports 118,215 confirmed coronavirus cases, which is 14.2 per 10,000 people. The six states of former East Germany, counting the entirety of Berlin and not just East Berlin, total only 12,873 cases, or 7.9 per 10,000. The Robert Koch Institute’s definitive numbers are slightly lower, but are also slightly outdated, as states sometimes take 1-2 days to report new cases. Going by Zeit data, we have the following infection rates by major city:

City Population Cases Cases/10,000
Berlin 3,644,826 4,357 12
Hamburg 1,841,179 3,518 19.1
Munich 1,471,508 4,123 28
Hanover* 1,157,624 1,389 12
Cologne 1,085,664 1,947 17.9
Frankfurt 753,056 730 9.7
Stuttgart 634,830 1,056 16.6
Dusseldorf 619,294 737 11.9
Leipzig 587,857 451 7.7
Dortmund 587,010 507 8.6
Essen 583,109 578 9.9
Bremen 569,352 425 7.5
Dresden 554,649 476 8.6
Nuremberg 518,365 733 14.1
Duisburg 498,590 525 10.5

*Zeit reports Hanover data for the entire region; the city itself only has 538,000 people

The sum total of the fifteen largest cities in Germany, with 15.1 million people, is 21,552 cases, which is 14.3 cases per 10,000 people. This is the same as in the rest of the country to within measurement error of total population, let alone to within measurement error of Covid-19 cases.

State patterns

Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg both have high confirmed case counts, averaging 23.6 and 21.7 per 10,000 people respectively. Munich’s rate is somewhat higher than the Bavarian average, but its suburbs are on a par with the city, as are some entirely rural areas all over the state. Oddly, the second and third largest cities in the state, Nuremberg and Augsburg, have lower rates – though both Fürth and the rural areas around Nuremberg and Fürth have very high rates as well.

The pattern around Stuttgart is perhaps similar to that around Nuremberg. The city’s infection rate is not much higher than the national average, but the infection rates in counties and cities around it are: Esslingen (24.8/10,000), Reutlingen (29.3), Tübingen (47.9), Böblingen (28.4), Ludwigsburg (22.9).

NRW’s rate is 13.9/10,000, i.e. essentially the same as the national average. The worst is in areas right on the Belgian border, like Heinsberg. Cologne has a noticeably higher rate, but Dusseldorf has a lower rate, and the cities of the Ruhr area a yet lower one. Don’t let the fact that these cities only have around 600,000 people each fool you – they’re major city centers, with the density and transportation network to boot. Dortmund alone has three independent subway-surface trunks, meeting in a Soviet triangle; total public transportation ridership in Dortmund across all modes is 130 million per year. Essen has two subway-surface trunks, one technically light rail and one technically a streetcar tunnel; total ridership there and in Mülheim, population 170,000, is 140 million per year.

What’s going on in Frankfurt?

There is some correlation between wealth and a high infection rate, since Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg have high rates of confirmed cases and the East German states have low ones. However, Frankfurt’s rate is fairly low as well, as are the rates of surrounding suburbs like Offenbach and Darmstadt. Frankfurt is not as rich as Munich, but like Hamburg and Stuttgart, it is fairly close, all three metro regions surpassing Ile-de-France and roughly matching London per Eurostat’s per capita market income net of rent and interest table.

In particular, it is unlikely that the greater international connections of rich cities like Munich explain why they have higher rates. Frankfurt Airport is the primary international hub in Germany, with many passengers standing in line at the terminal and coughing on other people. It would have been the easiest for imported infections to arise there rather than in the Rhineland, and yet it doesn’t have a major cluster.

Frankfurt also has extensive O&D business travel; Wikipedia puts it third after Berlin and Munich, but Frankfurt’s visitors are most likely disproportionately business travelers rather than tourists. This is important, since February and March are low season for tourism, whereas business travelers are if anything more likely to be going to Frankfurt during low season because during the summer high season they go on vacation in more interesting places.

So, is urban density more vulnerable to infectious diseases?

Probably not. Rural Germany has some areas with Korean levels of confirmed cases per capita, and some where 1% of the population and counting has tested positive. Overall, there isn’t much of an urban-rural difference – the 15 largest cities in Germany collectively have the same rate as the rest of the country, and moreover, where there are notable state-level patterns, they also hold for the states’ big cities. If Munich’s high infection rate is caused by its high rate of U- and S-Bahn usage, then the suburbs should have lower infection rates (they’re more auto-oriented) and the rest of Bavaria should be much lower; in reality, nearly the entirety of Bavaria has high rates.

The highest density in the developed world does not exist in Germany. German neighborhoods top at 15,000/km^2, with individual sections scratching 20,000; Paris tops at 40,000 in the 11th Arrondissement, New York scratches 50,000 on the Upper East Side, and Hong Kong has entire districts in the 50s. So the “density doesn’t matter” null hypothesis, while amply supported on German data, requires some extrapolation for the handful of world cities with the highest density.

Nonetheless, these are not huge caveats. German data is pretty reliable in the density range for which it exists; if cities today had the infection rates they did before modern plumbing, when a noticeable fraction of a city’s population might die in a single epidemic, it would be noticeable today. But there is no mass death, nor are urban hospitals here collapsing under the strain. On both the level of a basic sanity check and that of looking at the data, cities do not appear to be vulnerable to disease.

What does this mean?

There is no need to redesign the world to be less urban or dense in the wake of the coronavirus. Nor is there any need to let go of collective public transportation. The Rhine-Ruhr and Frankfurt are not Tokyo or Hong Kong in their public transportation usage, or even Paris or Berlin, but they have extensive urban and regional connections by train. And yet, the Heinsberg disaster zone and the high infection rate of Cologne have not been exported to the Ruhr, nor is southern Hesse particularly affected by German standards.

The virus has exposed serious issues with cleanliness. But even given Germany’s current levels of urban cleanliness, those issues are not enough to turn Berlin, Frankfurt, Hanover, or the Ruhr cities into hotspots. There is no danger to public health coming from urbanization, density, development, or public transportation. Cities should keep investing in all four in order to reduce the costs of transportation and environmental damage, even if the occasional failed politician blames the virus on density to deflect attention from his own incompetence.

Train and Bus Cleaning

Well before the coronavirus struck, I noticed how trains in Asia were cleaner than in Europe, which are for the most part cleaner than in the United States. There are overlaps: the elevated BTS in Bangkok is similar to the cleaner cities in Europe, like London (but the underground MRT is similar to Singapore and Taipei), while the Berlin U-Bahn is similar to the cleaner American cities, like maybe Washington. But for the most part, this holds. The issue of cleanliness is suddenly looking more important now in a pandemic.

How much cleaning is necessary overall?

It is unclear. Singapore has 56,000 registered cleaners and Taipei has 5,000; even assuming Taipei just refers to the city proper, Singapore has five times as many per capita. When I visited Taipei in December it was visibly messier, and Taipei City Mall felt more lived-in than comparable underpasses in Singapore, but the City Mall was not dirty, and the Taipei MRT did not feel any dirtier than the Singapore MRT. The infection rates in both countries are very low – Taiwan’s are much lower per capita nowadays, though this has other explanations, such as higher mask usage and less international travel.

How much cleaning is necessary for specific tasks?

In Singapore, SBS Transit announced increased cleaning levels on January 30th. Cleaners disinfect vehicles and stations at the following rates:

  • Trains: every day
  • Buses: every week
  • Train stations: three times a day
  • Bus stations: every two hours

In Japan, JR East’s Shinkansen trains are cleaned at Tokyo Station in 7 minutes. There are many pieces on the subject, describing how a crew of 22, comprising one cleaner per second-class car and two to three per first-class car (“green car”), sweeps an entire train so fast. Many of the tasks are not required for metro service, but passenger density is higher in metro service than in intercity service.

One advantage of regular cleaning, say once per roundtrip, is that there hasn’t been so much time for the train (or bus) to become grimy. Two hours’ dirt is easier to pick up, sweep, or water and dry than a day’s dirt.

How much does all of this cost?

Cleaner wages track local working-class wages, and differ greatly; a city with the per capita income of New York, Paris, or London will have to pay more than one with that of Berlin or Tokyo. On top of what the English-speaking middle class thinks is an appropriate wage for an unskilled worker the agency will need to pay a premium to account for the fact that fast cleaning is a difficult job even if the required education level for it isn’t high.

What is more controllable and comparable is staffing needs. The sources for JR East’s cleaning crew productivity differ, but the reasonable ones say it’s 20 trains per day. This already accounts for downtime, so if trains aren’t quite frequent enough for there to always be some train to occupy a cleaning crew, an agency is probably still capable of squeezing 20 trains per daily crew shift. If a roundtrip with turnaround time is two hours, then this means about one cleaning crew is needed per 2.5 trainsets operated in regular service, rising to about one cleaning crew per 1.8 trainsets taking weekend days into account; this can be adjusted if a train runs peak-only, since part-time shifts are common in this sector.

How can equipment be made easier to clean?

Some materials are easier to clean than others. Transit agencies should use these in future procurement, and look into emergency orders to retrofit existing trains and buses. Metal poles are easier to clean than leather straps, and hard plastic and metal seats are easier to clean than padded ones. I suspect that bench seating is easier to clean than bucket seating, since it is possible to run a mop down the entire bench.

As with schedule planning, cleaning planning should integrate operating and capital expense optimization. That is, public transportation agencies should budget for cleaning whenever they buy a bus or train or build a train station, and make decisions on layout and materials that reduce the spread of disease and increase the efficiency of cleaning as well as maintenance and other operating costs.

What else can be done?

Hand sanitizer! Taipei and Singapore both distribute it at stations, and if I remember correctly, so does Bangkok. It made me feel less grimy, especially after long walks in Taipei or any exposure to the outdoor air pollution of Bangkok.

In addition, fomite removal is a good idea, which means any of the following:

  • Barrier-free train stations, or if not then automatic fare barriers like those of Taipei or Singapore or London rather than ones requiring pushing by hand as in New York and Paris.
  • Automatic train doors, since implemented on newer trains in Berlin and I think in the rest of Europe as an emergency measure, without requiring button pushing.
  • Disposable chopsticks for pressing buttons on elevators, as in South Korea.

Do passengers care?

Yes. I’ve taken the Berlin U-Bahn a few times in the last few weeks, to view apartments and most recently (earlier today) to buy matzos from a kosher grocery store far from my neighborhood. I don’t sit anymore, not trusting even the hard metal seats at the stations, let alone the padded cloth ones on the trains. Neither do many other riders, so there’s about the usual number of standees on the trains, trying to distribute ourselves as evenly as possible inside the train and avoid loud or space-taking passengers, even as many seats stay empty.

Would I sit if this were Singapore? Probably. As of the small hours of 2020-04-08 Europe time, Singapore has 1,500 infections and Berlin has 4,000 on two thirds the population, but a big share of Singapore’s cases are imports, and the MRT is vastly cleaner than the U- and S-Bahn here. And then there’s Taiwan, with 400 cases on a population of 24 million.

Why is this not done already?

Managers love metrics, and the costs of cleaning are much easier to quantify than the benefits. Therefore, they cut cleaning whenever there is a budget crunch. Within the English-speaking world, Singapore is a standout in cleanliness, because Lee Kuan Yew decided it was important and launched a campaign to sweep public spaces. In Japan, one of the articles about the seven-minute cleaning process talks about the history of how JR East hired a new manager who has previously been at the safety division – within the company of course, this is Japanese and not American business culture – and said manager, Teruo Yabe, improved morale by taking worker suggestions and promoting line workers to supervisory roles.

I don’t want to dunk on Anglo business culture here too much – London has cleaner trains than Berlin, and is about comparable to Paris. Nor is this quite a cultural cleave between the West and Asia, since Singaporean business culture pilfers the most authoritarian aspects of Japan (long hours, face-time culture) and the Anglosphere (at-will employment, no unions to speak of) and melds them together.

My suspicion is that low standards in the US in particular come from a sense of resignation among managers who don’t really use their own systems, and view the passengers in contempt. New York has an added sense of grit, in which people romanticize the 1970s and 80s and think enduring trash on the street, high crime rates (no longer high), delayed trains, cockroaches, rats, and drivers who play Carmageddon is part of what makes one a Real New Yorker. Consider how the New York- (and London-)suffused urban discourse treats “antiseptic” as a pejorative, viewing Singapore as a less real city because it isn’t killing thousands of its people, soon to be tens of thousands, from coronavirus.

Can Western cities get better?

Absolutely! Especially New York, which has nowhere to go but up.

Most of the positive aspects of Continental Western Europe that awe Americans, like convenient urban public transportation and six weeks of paid vacation per year, are recent, rarely going farther back than the 1970s and 80s. The Swiss planning maxims I repeat to Americans as mantras were invented in the 1980s and implemented in the 1990s and 2000s.

This is even truer of East Asia – in the 1960s Japan was middle-income and the rest of East Asia was very poor; the Shinkansen opened in 1964, but the speed and efficiency standards as we know them only go back to the 300 Series, put into service in 1992. Moreover, the state of Shinkansen cleaning was not so good 15 years ago, before JR East put Yabe in charge. The high cleanliness levels are a recent success, not some ingrained feature that goes back to the 7th century and can’t possibly be replicated elsewhere.

New York needs to look at itself in the mirror now, when it is the global center of a pandemic with death toll that will most likely surpass even the highest-end estimates of those of Wuhan. Is “antiseptic” really a bad trait for a city? If cleaning is a priority, see above for what it takes to do it right. And if it isn’t, I’m sure New York will be more than happy to have another pandemic in the future.

Incoming Gantz-Led Government to Invest in Israel’s Infrastructure

Israel’s incoming prime minister Benny Gantz unveiled an emergency government, to take power following an upcoming confidence vote in the Knesset. The last two MKs required to give Gantz a 61-59 majority, two members of Gantz’s own Blue and White Party who were previously resolute not to go into coalition supported by the mostly Arab Joint List, relented after Gantz’s controversial attempt to enter a Netanyahu-led emergency unity government stalled due to disagreements over both security and coronavirus policy. Moreover, following revelations of government failures discovered last week by senior B&W MK Ofer Shelah, the new government announced sharp changes in policy toward both the Covid-19 emergency and broader domestic and foreign policy questions.

Of note, a major reshuffle in the state budget is expected. Some details are forthcoming, but short- and long-term reductions in settlement subsidies are expected. Moreover, reductions in subsidies to yeshiva students have been announced, delayed by a year due to the magnitude of the crisis within the Haredi community, which has 10% of Israel’s population but about half of Covid-19 hospitalization cases. Finally, a review of military procurement will be done due to the influence of the indicted Netanyahu on the process, but analysts expect that with so many former generals in the new government, including former IDF chief of staff Gantz himself, few real cuts to the IDF are forthcoming.

In lieu of these cuts, the new government is announcing a massive infrastructure investment program, funded partly by deficit spending to limit unemployment. Incoming health minister Ahmad Tibi of the Joint List, a medical doctor by training, promised that budget increases will invest in hospital capacity and hygiene, raise the wages of staff from doctors down to cleaning staff, and buy personal protective equipment (PPE) in sufficient quantities for universal mask-wearing. Outside health, energy and transportation are both on the list of budgetary winners. In energy, the collapse of the consortium of Yitzhak Tshuva and Noble Energy managing Israel’s natural gas reserves and the falling prices of solar power mean the state will invest in thermal solar power plants in the desert. In transportation, an infrastructure plan will invest in additional urban public transit capacity.

The situation of transportation is particularly instructive, because of the political element involved. Throughout most of the past 11 years of Netanyahu’s coalitions, the transport minister was the same politician, Yisrael Katz of Netanyahu’s Likud; Katz prioritized highway investments with some rail, and was viewed as the least controversial of Likud’s heavyweight politicians, many of whom find themselves embroiled in scandal following last month’s election. Nonetheless, to signify a break with the past, the new government is giving the transportation portfolio to Nitzan Horowitz, leader of the leftist Meretz party who has called for expansion of public transportation.

While car ownership in Israel is low, this is the result of car taxes and high poverty rates. Activists at Meretz, B&W, and the right-wing secular Yisrael Beitenu party all pointed out to religious laws banning public transportation and other services from running on Saturdays, promising to repeal them within months. Meretz activists as well as independent analysts expect everyday public transportation to encourage people to give up driving and rely on buses and trains more even on weekdays, requiring additional investment to cope with capacity.

Another political element identified by sources within B&W who spoke anonymously is that residents of Tel Aviv and most of its inner suburbs have long felt stiffed by state infrastructure plans; last decade, Mayor Ron Huldai clashed with Katz, demanding a subway in dense, upper middle-class North Tel Aviv. Meretz is especially strong in North Tel Aviv. However, Horowitz said that his priority was socioeconomic equality, and while he did favor subway expansion in and around Tel Aviv and would accelerate construction of the Green Line through North Tel Aviv, the budget would boost rail construction in working-class southern and eastern suburbs.

Several MKs at the Joint List added that there would also be additional funding for connections to the centers of Arab cities. One plan calls for a tunnel through Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab-majority city, which would connect it with Tel Aviv and other larger Jewish cities while also functioning as a regional rail link for the majority-Arab Galilee region. Towns too small to justify a direct rail link would get a bus to the nearest train station on the same fare system with a timed connection. One Meretz member explained, “in unbroken countries of similar size to ours, like Switzerland and the Netherlands, bus and train planning is coordinated nationally and there is no conception that buses are for poor people and trains for rich people.” Members of both Meretz and the Joint List added that there had long been underinvestment in Arab areas, calling past policies racist and vowing to correct them.

Sources at B&W stressed that there’s short and long term. In the short term, the priority will remain the coronavirus crisis, and the state will go into a large deficit in order to invest in health care and limit the death toll. Additional spending on other infrastructure will focus on planning, so that the state can begin construction after the crisis is long over, and will be funded by reducing yeshiva funding; B&W and Yisrael Beitenu plans to also reduce child credits, as Haredi families are larger than secular ones, have stalled due to opposition by the Joint List, as Arab families are poor and larger than secular Jewish ones too.

While Gantz himself stressed the pragmatic aspects of the plan, sources close to him mentioned the spirit of the 1990s. Negotiations with the Palestinians will resume shortly, they promised, and a two-state compromise will be worked out. They further promise that the peace dividend will allow Israel to grow through closer trade ties with the Arab world and reduced ongoing security spending. But other sources within the new coalition are more skeptical, pointing out Gantz and Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Lieberman’s trenchant opposition to dismantling most settlements as a red line that may scuttle future negotiations.

Nonetheless, all sources agree that a clear change in foreign and domestic policy is coming. The more skeptical sources say that the end result will be a shift in domestic spending building a more expansive urban rail network and higher-quality health care. But the more idealistic ones are saying that a new Middle East is coming, one in which a thriving Israel will be at the center, with world-class public infrastructure and private entrepreneurship.

Mixing and Matching

In public transportation as in many other aspects, an important fact of improvement is being able to mix-and-match things that work from different sources. It’s rare to have a situation in which exact importation of one way of doing things is the best in every circumstance (and the Covid-19 crisis appears to be one of these rare situations, Korea being the best). More commonly, different comparison cases, whether they’re companies in private-sector consulting or countries in public-sector policy research, will do different things better. Knowing how to mix-and-match is an important skill in competently learning from the best.

Non-transport examples

I put this up first, but want to emphasize that this is outside my skill set so I am less certain about the examples here than in transport; I bring them up because some of the sanity checks are cleaner here.

Secondary education: high-income Asia consistently outperforms the West in international math and science tests. However, two important caveats complicate “just be like Asia” reform ideas, like the popularity of Singapore math textbooks in some segments of the American middle class. The first is that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are a lot more monolingual than European countries like Germany and France, let alone smaller European countries like the Netherlands. And the second is that many things that are common to East Asia (and Singapore and Vietnam), like high social distance between hierarchs and subordinates or teachers and students, are completely absent from Finland, which is nearly the only Western country with math scores matching those of Asia. So the actual thing to learn from Asia is likely to be more technical and less about big cultural cleaves like making students wear uniforms and be more obsequious toward teachers.

Public health: whereas the Covid-19 crisis specifically still looks like a clean Asia vs. West cleave, overall public health outcomes do not. Japan has the world’s highest life expectancy, but then Mediterranean Europe follows it closely. The United States, which overall has poor health outcomes, near-ties Singapore and Sweden for lowest first-world smoking rate – and even though Singapore and Sweden both have good outcomes, they both have rather unhealthy diets by (for example) Levantine standards. Public health is a more complex issue than transportation, one that unfortunately low-life expectancy developed countries like Germany and Britain, let alone the US, aren’t meaningfully trying to learn in – and it’s not even clear how easy it is to import foreign ideas into such a complex mostly-working system, in contrast with the near-tabula rasa that is American public transportation.

Transportation in cities of different sizes

Alexander Rapp’s excellent list of metro areas ranked by what he calls frequent rapid transit ridership – that is, trains and buses that run every 20 minutes or better and are either grade separated or have absolute crossing priority with gates – showcases patterns that vary by population.

On the one hand, Tokyo is far and away the highest-ridership city in the world, even per capita. It has around 400 annual rail trips per capita. My recollection, for which I don’t really have a reliable source, is that 60% of work trips in the Tokyo region are done by rail (this data may be here but copy-paste for translation doesn’t work), a higher share than in major European capitals, which mostly top in the 40s.

On the other hand, this situation flips for smaller cities, in the 2-5 million metro population range. Sapporo appears to have maybe 120 annual trips per capita, and Fukuoka probably even less. In Korea, likewise, Seoul has high ridership per capita, though not as high as Paris, let alone Tokyo, but Busan has 100 trips per capita and Daegu 65. In contrast, Stockholm approaches 200 trips per capita (more including light rail), Vienna maybe 180 (growing to 220 with a much wider definition including trams), Hamburg 170, Prague 200 (more like 300 with trams), Munich maybe 230.

This doesn’t seem to be quite a West vs. Asia cleave. There is probably a shadow-of-giants effect in Japan leading smaller cities to use methods optimized for Tokyo; it’s visible in Britain and France, where Stockholm- and Munich-size cities like Birmingham, Manchester, and Lyon have far weaker transit systems. The US has this effect too – New York underperforms peer megacities somewhat, but smaller cities, imitating New York in many ways, are absolutely horrendous by the standards of similar-size European or East Asian cities. Nonetheless, the shadow of giants is not an immutable fact making it impossible for a Sapporo or Birmingham or Lyon to have the rail usage of a Stockholm – what is necessary is to recognize this effect and learn more from similar-size success stories than from the far larger national capital.

Construction costs and benefits

Construction costs are not a clean cleave across cultural regions. The distinction between the West and Asia is invisible: the worst country in the world is the United States, but the second worst appears to be Singapore. Excluding the English-speaking countries, there is a good mix on both sides: Korea, Spain, Italy, and the Nordic countries all have low costs, while Taiwan and the Netherlands have particularly high ones.

Moreover, countries that are good at construction are not always good at operations. As far as I can tell from deanonymizing CoMET data, Madrid has slightly higher metro operating costs than London, Paris, and Berlin, PPP$7/car-km vs. PPP$6, with generally high-construction cost Tokyo appearing to hit $5.

This is not even just costs, but also the ability to build lines that people ride. Tokyo is pretty good at that. Spain is not: the construction costs of the high-speed rail network are consistently lower than anywhere else in the world, but ridership is disappointing. There is no real integration between the AVE network and legacy trains, and there is a dazzling array of different trains each with separate fares, going up to seven incompatible categories, a far cry from the national integration one sees in Switzerland.

There is likely to be a clear answer to “who is best at optimizing construction costs, operating costs, and ridership?”: the Nordic countries. However, even there, we see one worrying issue: for one, Citybanan is expensive by the standards of the Eje Transversal (though not by those of the RER E or especially the second Munich S-Bahn tunnel), which may indicate difficulty in building the kind of multistory tunneling that bigger cities than Stockholm must contend with. Thus, while “be like Sweden” is a good guideline to costs, it is not a perfect one.

Optimizing frequency

The world leader in high-frequency public transportation is Paris. Its driverless Métro lines, M1 and M14 and soon to be M4, run a train every 85 seconds in actual service at rush hour. This is an artifact of its large size: M1 has such high ridership, especially in comparison with its length, that it needs to squeeze every last train out of the signaling system, unlike Berlin or Milan or Madrid or Stockholm. London and Moscow run at very high frequency as well for the same reason, reaching a train every 100 seconds in London and one every 92 in Moscow.

Tokyo, sadly, is not running so frequently. Its trains are packed, but limited to at best one every 120 seconds, many lines even 150, like New York. One possible explanation is that trains in Tokyo are so crowded that peak dwell times must be long, limiting throughput; long dwell times have led to reductions in RER A frequency recently. However, trains and platforms in Tokyo have good interior design for rapid boarding and alighting. Moreover, one can compare peak crowding levels in Tokyo by line with what we know is compatible with a train every 100 seconds in London, and a bunch of Tokyo subway lines aren’t more crowded than London’s worst. More likely, the issue is that Japanese signaling underperforms European systems and is the process of catching up; another aspect of signaling, automation, is also more advanced in France than in Japan (although Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore all have driverless metros).

This way, cities that are either extremely expensive to build in, like London and Moscow, or about average, like Paris, show the way forward in ways that cities that do other things better do not. It’s important to thus simultaneously learn the insights of small cities in reducing operating and construction costs and maintaining high-ridership systems, like the Nordic capitals, and those of megacities in automation and increasing throughput.

Can mixing and matching work?

Why not? In small cities with successful systems, it can’t be due to some deeply-ingrained culture – what do Stockholm, Zurich, Prague, Munich, and Budapest even have in common, other than being European? They’re not all national capitals or even all national primate cities, a common excuse New Yorkers give for why New York cannot have what London and Paris have.

Likewise, what exactly about French culture works to equip Métro lines with signals allowing 42 trains per hour per direction that cannot be adopted without also adopting real problems France has with small-city regional rail, fare integration, or national rail scheduling?

These are, ultimately, technical details. Some are directly about engineering, like Parisian train frequency. Some involve state institutions that lead to low construction costs in Spain, Korea, and the Nordic countries – but on other metrics, it’s unclear these three places have state capacity that is lacking in high-cost Taiwan, Germany, and the Netherlands. So even things that aren’t exactly about engineering are likely to boil down to fairly technical issues with how contracts are written up, how much transit agencies invest in in-house engineering, and so on.

There’s a huge world out there. And an underperforming transit agency – say, any in the United States – had better acquire all the knowledge it can possibly lay its hands on, because so many problems have already been solved elsewhere. The role of the locals is not to innovate; it’s to figure out how to imitate different things at once and make them work together. It’s not a trivial task, but every pattern suggests to me it’s doable given reasonable effort.

Europe and Asia are not Liberal or Conservative America

One frustrating thing coming from telling Americans to be more like democratic Asia, or even more like Europe, is that it is a) a political claim, that b) doesn’t neatly map onto partisanship or even intra-partisan political factions. Demographically, it appeals to more educated people, and to people who identify with more educated political movements (which in the US is solidly the left half of the spectrum), but ideologically, it doesn’t hit the main political cleaves well.

I want to emphasize that the fact that Asia is Asia rather than a neat image of any Western political faction is not by itself why Asian ideas don’t percolate to the West in time. Of note, the Nordic countries specifically have implemented most of the agenda of the center-left in the English-speaking world, and are economically successful. Canadian interest in importing Nordic policy ideas is limited, and American interest is even smaller, confined just to platitudes about health care followed by proposals developed without any curiosity as to how the health care system in Nordic countries actually works. That said, American interest in importing Asian ideas is noticeably even more limited than in importing Scandinavian ones, and European interest is very weak as well. So this lack of ideological load definitely plays a role.

An example

Let us list some relevant public policy practices in South Korea, based on major Western political cleaves. Taiwan and Japan are fairly similar in most though by no means all respects; I bring up Korea for the prosaic reason that I have more reliable immigration data there, whereas in Japan the figure tracked is foreign nationals (excluding naturalized citizens) rather than all foreign-born residents.

Labor: unions exist and go on strike, especially the historically anti-militaristic-regime KCTU (there was extensive industrial action in the early 1990s), but overall union density is low, only 10%, and a total of only 12% of workers are subject to collective bargaining. The effective minimum wage is around $10/hour, average to above average by first-world standards and very high relative to labor productivity ($40/hour, cf. $60-75 in the US and European core).

Government spending and inequality: government spending is among the lowest in the OECD, 30% of GDP at all levels combined. Inequality is somewhat above OECD average but not unusually so and is well below American levels; there appears to be extensive predistribution, that is compressed pre-tax incomes, which is also the case in Switzerland and Japan, whereas in (for example) the Nordic countries pre-tax inequality is high but an extensive welfare state brings after-tax-and-transfers inequality down to low levels.

Military and foreign policy: there is conscription for men, and the military is 2.6% of GDP, more than most NATO members (though less than the US). Foreign policy oscillates between strict Atlanticism under right-wing governments, which the liberals criticize as obsequious to the US, and something like Ostpolitik but toward the North under liberal ones, which the right criticizes as obsequious to China and North Korea.

Immigration and race: only 5% of the population is foreign-born, and much of that is ethnic Koreans migrating from China. But the immigration rate is rising steadily – per Wikipedia the rate is up by about 0.3% of the population per year in the 2010s, slightly more than the growth in the US in 1990-2015, which averaged about 0.25% (cf. 2010-9 Sweden at 0.54%). Immigrants do not naturalize easily, and their children have no automatic right to Korean citizenship. There is extensive racism against Chinese people, who form about half of immigrants to Korea by citizenship (less by ethnicity), especially from the political right.

Feminism and gay rights: there is no gay marriage, open gay service in the military, or a national anti-discrimination law, but the last one exists in many cities, including Seoul. Sex reassignment surgeries have onerous conditions (minimum age of 20, no children), but ID change is subsequently allowed. Women face one of the most severe gender gaps in the developed world, and have low labor force participation, though in the 25-29 age group the rates are practically equal.

Environmentalism: greenhouse gas emissions per capita are on the high side by Western European standards, but low by North American or Australian ones. Electricity comes from coal and nuclear power, but the liberal president wants to replace both with natural gas. Transportation policy discouraged car ownership until the 1980s, and has since involved extensive construction of all infrastructure, specifically building a huge rapid transit network in Seoul and sizable ones in the secondary cities; motorization stands at just below 500 vehicles (not just cars) per 1,000 people, one of the lower figures in the developed world, but rising at 2.5-3% per year.

Crime: the crime rate is very low. A Google search for killings by police finds a mass shooting in 1982 but nothing recent; Wikipedia’s list by country has no Korean data but gives a fairly low rate for Taiwan by European standards (let alone American ones) and an extremely low one for Japan. There is capital punishment on the books and a large number of condemned, but in practice it is no longer used. The incarceration rate is normal by Western European standards (and low by American ones) relative to population.

What this means

To the person who wants to understand where democratic Asia shines (public cleanliness standards, math education, transit-oriented development, metro-regional rail integration), it doesn’t mean much. Success is success. There’s no real connection between how a country does TOD and (say) whether it has gay marriage, a practice that did not exist in any country until 19 years ago. There isn’t even much connection with cultural aspects of high-income Asia that are not exactly about political cleaves, such as the long working hours among salaried professionals or the high social distance between hierarchs and subordinates.

However, all these differences provide ample excuses for people who do not want to understand. I have noticed for a few years that most (though not all) Americans denigrate Germany politically either way, liberals viewing Germany as a land of austerity and conservatives viewing it as a land of open immigration rather than the reverse. This exists in Asia in much greater intensity: it is sexist, racist, closed to immigrants, and stiffly hierarchical – or bureaucratic, unitarist, anti-gun, hostile to small business, and stiffly hierarchical. Who wants to learn from that? Free Westerners don’t need to learn from Asiatic despots and their hiveminds, never mind recent anti-authoritarian mass movements in South Korea and Hong Kong or the state of civil liberties in Japan.

The lack of partisan load within Western politics means that small-minded people who have little interest in learning can easily excuse their disinterest. No broad political movement will say “let’s learn from Korea” because Korean government policy and practice do not match any Western movement well. For the same reason there is no learning from France or Germany in the Anglosphere; from Scandinavia there is a little, but it’s halting, stymied by the lack of a dedicated social democratic party that can propose a coherent program.

In such an environment, learning from elsewhere is a powerful tool, but not for broad party politics, which is how most people politically identify. Rather, it can be used in the following more limited ways:

  • By civil servants, bureaucrats, and issue activists who are not formally affiliated to a political faction. (Of note, TransitMatters is pretty heavily Democratic, but Massachusetts is not a state with much interpartisan competition, nor one with coherent factions within the Democratic legislative caucus.)
  • By politicians promising a specific solution on a specific issue, which from time to time does happen in the United States with respect to Europe, just not Asia (for example, YIMBYs in the Bay Area are trying to import the building typology of historic Continental city centers, relying on pleasant connotations of these cities among Americans who visited them as tourists).
  • As a potential toolkit, especially for people who identify as worldly or educated, without a direct political load. The analog here is that Nordic countries learn from one another at all times, across the entire political spectrum, which means that a left-loaded policy in one Nordic country will inspire the left in the others while acting as a cautionary tale to avoid for the right and vice versa. No such learning happens from Asia anywhere I’ve seen in the West, not in mass politics – when was the last time an American politician, or an American pundit not named Matt Yglesias, pointed to high housing growth rates in Japan and South Korea and said “let’s be like that”?

Is there a future for learning from other places?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve said in interviews that one of my motivating examples for this blog was Ezra Klein’s international comparisons of health care systems in 2005, which he called The Health of Nations. He covered a few countries, writing maybe 2 pages about each, but with American health costs high and rising, this was enough to raise him to superstardom. I’d already been thinking comparatively before because that’s how Israelis think with their cultural cringe, but 2005-6 was when I finally saw an American do that and succeed.

Of course, The Health of Nations was in an extremely politically-loaded context – all countries Ezra surveyed have universal health care paid mostly (but never exclusively) by the government. Moreover, in 2007-9, the work done that created Obamacare was purely domestic, with little interest in the details of implementation in peer countries, such as the Jospin cabinet’s universal health care bill from 2000 or the second Rabin administration’s from 1995.

And yet. I think a comparative approach has a future, looking both at politically-loaded countries like Sweden and unloaded ones like Korea. Just as the fact that American health care expenses reached about 15% of GDP in the mid-2000s while the rest of the first world was happy with about 9% motivated the efficiency arguments behind The Health of Nations, the fact that New York can’t expand the subway and other American cities can barely build any transit motivates looking into countries that are capable of building better infrastructure. Similarly, the total lack of a good example of transit-oriented development in the United States (though not in Canada – Vancouver is pretty good), with accordant rent explosions in just about every urban neighborhood with sidewalks and a semi-reasonable crime rate, is motivating YIMBYism.

Fundamentally, the slave learns the master’s language but not the reverse. The US, so long the self-styled master of the world, is slowly learning to live in a world in which it cannot look down on everyone else. It’s taking at least a generation, possibly two, but a growing minority of Americans notice this – they notice that other countries are sometimes better, and that there is nothing in American history that they can look back to wistfully, forcing a forward and sideways look.

New York is Shrinking

The US Census Bureau has just released 2019 population estimates by county. Metro New York, after slowly rising for decades more than making up the 1970s losses, went down by 60,000 people, or 0.3% of the population. The city is down 53,000 people.

Why?

The city chooses stagnation and ignorance. In the 1970s, the city was losing an average of 80,000 people per year, but the situation now is profoundly different. Incomes are up: the metro area’s per capita income as a proportion of the US average went from 126% in 1970 to 118% in 1980; but more recently it went from 135% in 2010-5 to 141% in 2018, the last year for which the BEA has data. Crime is down, the murder rate falling below the national average starting in 2013. Rent is up, sending a strong signal: more people want to live here.

But the entire political constellation of the city chooses not to grow. Housing growth is anemic, permits averaging around 21,000 per year in 2010-9, maybe 2.6 per 1,000 New York residents. It accelerated over the decade but not by much, reaching 26,500 in 2019, or 3.2/1,000. In the in-state suburbs, growth is even lower, less than 1 unit per 1,000 in each of Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester Counties. New Jersey has somewhat higher growth rate, around 4/1,000, thanks to the Mount Laurel doctrine requiring high-cost municipalities to approve some affordable housing, which they typically do in the most out-of-the-way place they can find. The metro area overall approves about the same amount of housing as the city proper, around 2.5/1,000.

The most recent data I have for Korea is from the first half of 2019. In six months, Seoul, a shrinking city of 9.5 million, approved 38,000 dwellings, and the metro area writ large approved 129,000 on a population of about 26 million, an annualized rate of 10/1,000 (less in the city, more in the suburbs). This is a suburbanizing region, but suburbanization often means moving to a planned new town built on top of a subway or commuter rail line, like Ilsan, Bundang, and Anyang.

It’s not Tokyo that has high housing growth. It’s Tokyo, and Seoul, and to a lesser extent the metro area of Taipei (more suburbs than city proper), and Paris. In the presence of a strong economy and a state that doesn’t choose stagnation the way rich American regions choose with local empowerment, housing growth in a large city should be high, as more people want to move there to take advantage of its higher incomes and opportunities.

But New York chose differently. It chose stagnation and eventually decline. It chose to be expensive.

Why are they like this?

The US has an unusual system of governance, in which not only is there a separation of federal and state governments, as in Germany or Canada or Australia or Switzerland, but also the states delegate unusual powers to local governments. Education, policing, and housing are largely local responsibilities. Even when states do get involved, there is usually no partisan competition (most states are safe), leading to empowerment of local representatives on what are considered local issues, and even when there is people vote based on national issues.

But even that raises questions. For example, why do locals consider new development bad? Even YIMBY activists let NIMBYs whip them into thinking this way – they talk about sharing the burden, as if new buildings and new people are a burden that everyone must endure for some grand moral reason.

What if the reason people take it for granted that growth is bad is that the people who are most locally empowered are a specific anti-growth lobby? People who work for a living don’t have time to go to a citizen engagement meeting at 3 in the afternoon. They work and socialize with people from other neighborhoods, so they have little interest in neighborhood rags that report individual counts of parking spaces lost to a bus lane. They are far more interested in job growth than in hobby community gardens. A political system that requires very high levels of local social capital for one’s opinions to count will naturally undervalue their opinions and overvalue those of idle people and professional intermediaries.

The high levels of Covid-19 infection in New York are part of this system. The specific cause is not hyperlocalism, but rather the murky authority of the state. The city is plagued by the feud between Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo. Both enjoy unlimited executive power, I think Cuomo more so than de Blasio. Both need it for their higher political aspirations. But neither can have it while the other exists as an independent political entity, nor is there a clear delineation of state and local authority. Thus, they are obligated to sabotage each other’s ideas, to the detriment of the city that has the misfortune to be governed by them. The entire West delayed its reaction to the virus, but New York especially so, as Cuomo and de Blasio tried denying each other credit.

Professional ignorance

I’ve been writing a lot about the role of incuriosity in high construction costs in the English-speaking world in general, and New York in particular – see for example this recent coronavirus-tainted piece, or this more random piece about Metro-North’s executives’ ignorance.

But this can apply more generally, as it did to the virus. Americans are quite provincial when it comes to the rest of the world, and New Yorkers especially so – go ahead, try telling a New Yorker that some other city does something better than New York. The out-of-town comparison, a powerful tool that places that view themselves as more peripheral (like Israel) use to correct errors, dos not work in a place like New York. New York literally made the collective decision to die and not to learn from the rest of the world. Mass death is not making New Yorkers demand the immediate removal of their mass manslaughterers who are their governor and mayor; why would a dip in population?

Part of it is related to local empowerment. Acquiring local social capital comes at the expense of worldliness; those years one spends learning foreign languages, living abroad, and socializing with foreigners are dead years for most political ambitions, including all ambitions that start locally.

But an even greater part of it is that New York self-perceives as the center of the world, which is not true elsewhere. Korea self-flagellates all the time: about its legal system (it adopted a limited jury system in 2009), about its engineering (see e.g. here), about its elevated air pollution levels (it’s adopting EU standards). The United States instead views all variations with the rest of the world as evidence of America’s unique greatness, and New York does the same both internationally and domestically. The city brims with immigrants, and yet it tells them, your home country is deficient and you must become a real New Yorker, that is someone whose world does not extend past city limits, to be a whole person. Until that changes, the government of New York will remain managed by dregs and incompetents and housing, transportation, and as we see health care will earn the mockery of other big first-world cities.

This is not World War Two

Entrenched hierarchies do not like outside criticism, especially when it’s right. They fight off knowledge that they don’t have or can’t control. In a business setting, the main way out is to found a competing company and drive the one that won’t change out of business. But when it’s not possible, the way out involves a massive crisis – something like a total war, in which people can rapidly rise through the ranks through demonstrating success in battle.

I bring this up because the coronavirus crisis in not such a total war. Branko Milanovic compares it with World War Two, contrasting economists who view it purely as an economic crisis akin to the 2008 crisis or the Depression. That comparison is apt when it comes to looking at non-economic aspects of it, namely the need to centrally plan a public health response. But the scale of the crisis is much smaller, it seems. The rich countries of Asia are emerging only somewhat battered, and even in the West some places seem to be over the hump judging by growth rates in the last few days, especially the Nordic countries but possibly also France. This isn’t the next Spanish Flu, a crisis so big that it would force Westerners to reckon with the fact that the West needs to learn from other places. Even in the United States, where things look worse, the solipsistic population looks for internal comparisons (e.g. between blue and red states) more than international ones, let alone international ones with Asia.

A small crisis is not going to nudge the hierarchy in a more open direction. I see this often in public transportation – institutions that feel embattled respond by entrenching and refusing any reform. The standard excuse is “we’re too busy fighting fires,” often by people that fires seem to erupt around regularly. The virus seems to have the same effect so far – less openness, less sanity checking proposals by looking at what works elsewhere, more digging in around traditional social hierarchies.

American nationalists are saber-rattling with the Chinese government, as in the “Chinese virus” dysphemism and Tom Cotton’s blaming the entire death toll on the PRC. But they still do this on the usual American terms, that is without any assurance that Taiwan is a success story to learn from, or even South Korea and Japan, two American allies that unlike Taiwan the US formally recognizes. If a virus that demonstrates to starkly that Taiwan governs itself better than the PRC won’t get American nationalists to start speaking favorably of Taiwan, what will? To people like Cotton, a crisis is a perfect time to proclaim American superiority, no matter what reality is.

Domestically, too, the American response seems to be to repeat old wives’ tales – for example, traditional American hostility to big cities. Governor Andrew Cuomo went as far as saying that New York is too dense; Seoul, a bigger and denser city, has 700 infections as of 2020-3-22 out of a metro population of 26 million, maybe a factor of 20 better than New York. But he’s the governor and he keeps giving speeches and appearing on television, and a few hundred and even a few thousand dead New Yorkers is not enough to make people ask questions about his and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s squabbling. After all, when nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11, few asked why Mayor Rudy Giuliani had put the city’s anti-terrorism response center at World Trade Center against the advice of security experts who pointed out the Twin Towers were a likely target; 9/11’s effect on Giuliani’s popularity was an unmixed blessing.

In an environment in which more national pundits say Cuomo is looking presidential than say he should resign in disgrace, it’s unlikely the crisis will lead Americans in a more open direction. The magnitude of the crisis isn’t enough to create a new crop of leaders. It’s a good thing in the sense that the death toll will not be apocalyptic, but it just underscores what I mean when I say this isn’t World War Two.

Budget-cutting administrations, demanding reform before revenue, have not produced any reform. American state building stalled in the middle of the 20th century when various white middle-class interests realized localism could protect them from too much racial and economic equality. Then around the 1980s and 90s it went into reverse, with a continued assault on state capacity through public-private partnerships, outsourcing planning to consultants, and impositions of managers whose experience was in the private sector in unrelated industries. American construction costs were already high beforehand, but in Canada and Singapore, both of which seem to have had the same trend, costs exploded in the 2000s and 2010s.

The question remains: how come the reform-before-revenue mentality never produced any reform?

I bring this up because I believe the answer is the same as what we are seeing right now with the response to the coronavirus crisis. Budget-cutting or timid politicians are not an existential crisis to the civil service. They can scare off ambitious people the way Cuomo ran Andy Byford out of New York City Transit leadership; they can create a hostile work environment; they can force managers to contend with scarcity; they can force the unions to agree to wage reductions for entering workers. But they do not have the power to close entire departments, to stop running schools or public transportation or firefighting entirely, and the managers and workers both know this.

Just as the Covid-19 crisis is not World War Two, all attempts at privatizing the state in the Anglosphere have amounted to much less than a total war of extermination. It’s a cold war. Like the original Cold War, it has the same stupefying effect as a hot war – hierarchs are all too happy to be unaccountable to the broad public and to pretend their cloak-and-dagger politics achieve any results. Unlike a hot war, it is too low-intensity for people who disagree with the hierarchy but are right to demonstrate competence – nor is the other side going to be destroyed at the end.

The construction cost crisis in the United States, particularly New York, might actually be a big enough crisis to have the same effect on the established order as a total war. It’s unclear, but before the virus came to the United States, there was a lot of genuine interest in making things better, though not in every city.

I suspect the mechanism for costs is that they are so high that there must be a significant enough reduction to make a career without screwing some politically necessary constituency. I don’t know; I don’t yet know the drivers of high New York costs in sufficient detail. But the magnitude and breadth of the problem point to many different explanations each increasing costs by a significant but not apocalyptic amount. Moreover, the fact that there must be many causes seems to be accepted in the local political ecosystem. Thus, people can afford to make reforms, perhaps focusing on the politically low-hanging fruits.

This is less cynical than it may sound. A small success story, such as if Ned Lamont had figured out a way to build 30-30-30 or if the MTA manages to noticeably reduce the cost of some project, creates a visible trail of success, creating more pressure to keep the reforms. Nothing succeeds like success.

A New York that can build subways even at $300 million per kilometer, let alone $100 million per kilometer, and builds housing at a pace befitting a rich global city with considerable immigration, is a completely different place from the failed city that it is today. That New York is a dynamic, rapidly growing city in which there is far more kvetching about how it’s sucking in jobs and people from more static places than kvetching about how it’s exporting jobs and people to cheaper places. I’m using analogy here because low costs by themselves do not protect a city from disease (Italy and Switzerland both have low costs and high coronavirus infection levels), but the same kind of public-sector resurgence can presumably be done for public health, ensuring New York will respond to the next pandemic like Seoul or Tokyo or Taipei.

Eurail?

Here’s one potential pan-European high-speed rail map, incorporating existing and likely future high-speed lines in France, Spain, Britain and Italy; the lines I’ve argued Germany should be building; and plausible and semi-plausible extensions into Eastern Europe.

Here’s a small version of the map:

For full-size 56 MB link, click here. Blue lines exist or are under construction, red ones are either under planning or proposed solely by me or by local activists.

The Polish network is fairly optimized, but the rest of Eastern Europe isn’t, relying on long-range international connections that may or may not flop due to a possible international trip penalty. I only took it up to a point, so yes, there’s that link via (North) Macedonia and Kosovo, but I drew the line at some point and did not add a line from Warsaw up the Baltics and under sea to Helsinki; the Baltic capitals just aren’t big enough, and the light at the tunnel, Helsinki, isn’t big enough either.

Note also that some cities gain through-tracks on this map that they don’t currently have, especially Paris. This is to be a four-track system connecting Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon and Gare de l’Est to Gare Montparnasse; since there’s no chance of building the main station under Les Halles this side of the 1970s, the station would have to be at a somewhat skew location relative to city center, most probably around where Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est are now. Additional cities with notable through-tracks: Milan, Rome, Munich, Florence; Madrid gets through-tracks but those are already under construction as part of the third Cercanías axis, at typically low Spanish costs, and Marseille gets through-tracks as is the plan for the mixed classical/LGV system for Provence.

The trip times are always net of station dwell times and short timed connections at major junctions, so they can be added across the map. In Germany I sat down and figured out frequencies, running consistent stopping patterns every half hour; this doesn’t work Europe-wide, as some places are too low-density and have to make do with hourly patterns, like Eastern Europe (and, if it keeps its baroque fare system, Spain).

Who Do You Learn From?

When a city or country decides how to go about solving some problem, it will usually learn from somewhere else – either consciously as a set of best practices, or unconsciously as a sanity check. The “who do you learn from?” question is then what that somewhere else is. This is true of the ongoing corona pandemic, but also of infrastructure, which is why I want to draw this analogy.

Covid-19

In the Covid-19 outbreak, it has become obvious that Western countries do not learn from non-Western ones. I’ve heard people say that high-income Asia has responded better to the crisis before it was used to from the SARS outbreak of 2003. But SARS affected primarily China and Hong Kong, and secondarily Taiwan, Canada, and Singapore. Korea and Japan barely had any cases. And yet, Korea’s response to the crisis has drawn praise for reducing the daily infection rate through aggressive monitoring and testing. Daily growth in Korea is maybe 1%, slower than the rate of recoveries.

There is a clean cleave between rich Asian countries’ response to the virus and Western countries’. It’s not SARS, and it’s not whatever racist mythology Westerners tell themselves about Asian collectivism (in what way is the Hong Kong democracy protest movement collectivist?). What it is, is that Asians are happy to learn from other Asians. SARS normalized mask wearing in high-income Asia as a solution to poor air quality or to a contagious disease, and Koreans and Japanese picked it up from nearby countries.

Europeans and Americans, in contrast, wouldn’t stoop to learn from a civilization they look down. My American Twitter feed talked about the virus somewhat when it was raging mostly in China and then in Korea, but as soon as it hit Italy, most of it transitioned to talking about Italy. The rest of Europe didn’t think it would affect it, and even the strategies for how to deal with it are entirely European. Masks are nowhere to be found, tricks like Korea’s use of disposable chopsticks at elevators to avoid finger-pressing are nowhere to be found, testing capacity is low even in countries with strong civil service and good health care, metro stations and public buildings have no hand sanitizer. If it wasn’t invented here, it isn’t worth implementing, never mind how many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Europeans will die for their civilization’s pride.

Public transportation

I went over a few national or supranational traditions of metro construction around a year to a year and a half ago, covering the United States, the Soviet bloc, and Britain. There are a few more traditions I could go over by popular request – Japanese (with influence across Asia, especially Korea), French, German, Chinese, increasingly Indian. These traditions do not neatly divide the world into spheres of influence – rather, there are places with multiple influences, like a combination of British and Japanese influence in Singapore and Hong Kong, and the Chinese system synthesizing some Soviet principles in addition to engaging in extensive domestic innovation.

I bring this complication up because when it comes to high costs, the Anglosphere seems mainly to learn from the rest of the Anglosphere, and the US almost exclusively from the US (very rarely from Canada and Britain, never from other English-speaking countries).

The Anglosphere shares certain institutions like common law, but Israel uses common law as well, and yet the Israeli rail electrification project’s communications and media coverage constantly emphasized “like Europe,” not like the English-speaking world; when it comes to how to build trains, Israel’s notion of the ideal functioning country is a pan-European medley.

Rather, the shared characteristics in the Anglosphere seem to be that these countries mostly learn from each other. The idea of road pricing was introduced to the world by the Smeed Report in 1962-4, then actually implemented in Singapore in 1975, then failed to make it to Hong Kong, then got back to London in 2003, and only then became a well-known idea in the American discourse. Moreover, in the Bloomberg-era discourse, London figured heavily, and few people mentioned Singapore and Stockholm; subsequently Milan adopted congestion pricing as well, and the American discourse has ignored it just as it has Stockholm.

Certain governance features that seem relevant to construction costs, like the privatization of state planning, are endemic to the Anglosphere. The use of public-private partnerships is widespread, more so than in other developed countries. Planning is routinely outsourced to consultants. What’s more, my vague understanding of Singapore is that for all its supposed state capacity, it’s headed in that direction too, no doubt thinking that if the US and UK are doing something then it must be good.

Obviously the importation of British and American ideas to Singapore has its limits, as we’re seeing now with the outbreak, but this importation remains widespread. In contrast, importation of Continental ideas is limited. One possible explanation is that Singaporeans view the entire West as a single culture, much as Westerners can’t tell Chinese people apart and often group the entirety of Asia together; if you don’t think there’s much of a difference between different European countries, then you will import ideas from the one that speaks English.

Why are they like this?

The West is a solipsistic civilization, and a lot of Europeans and Americans are going to die in the next few months as a result. But within the West, the United States is especially solipsistic. This does not mean it will necessarily fare worse in the outbreak than Europe – the virus reached it later, so it does have more time, measured in perhaps two weeks, to implement social distancing, ramp up testing capacity, and build emergency hospitals to reduce the death rate from infection. More fundamentally, when it comes to learning from Korea and Taiwan, the US isn’t any worse than Europe.

However, the virus is just my motivating example; my actual work is about public transportation, and there, the US is worse, because Europe has good test cases to learn from that other European countries look at and the US does not. I have seen multiple examples of this even among reformers, like the RPA report on construction costs or the GAO one, let alone among state governments (Massachusetts will simply not learn from anything outside North America).

The explanation, I think, has to do with who the process is empowering. Senior management in big American cities does not understand anything about how things work in other countries, nor do the managers have any social relationships with their peers abroad. Domestically, and sometimes even across the northern border, it’s different – a senior manager in New York has gone to national conferences and met peers from Los Angeles and Chicago and Boston and Seattle and probably also Toronto. A best practices effort that’s restricted to North America empowers such managers.

In contrast, a best practices effort that goes global disempowers the most powerful people in politics and the bureaucracy. They are monolingual, so they can’t easily contradict what people say in a report that talks about how things work in Paris or Tokyo or Madrid or Stockholm. They are unlikely to have lived abroad, or if they did, it was so long ago their knowledge is no longer relevant. They have no established relationships with their peers. They are useless in such a process, and they know it.

I was on a diversity panel at Intercon called Gaming as the Other, I believe in 2015. There were me as the immigrant (just about the only 1st-and-not-1.5th-generation immigrant in a community numbering in the low hundreds), a second-generation Chinese-American, and two black Americans. We discussed different issues relevant to this 95% white community, and at some point, someone from the audience asked me a very good question: “Alon, do you feel excluded when we talk about American pop culture references?” I thought about it a little and said no, I can usually fill in the gaps – I don’t feel excluded when the Americans know something I don’t but when I know something they don’t, because I know they will not respect my knowledge. The two black Americans did not connect to this; the Chinese-American did, bringing up a school in Chinatown in Manhattan that split over traditional vs. simplified characters, a distinction few non-Chinese people would understand.

It’s likely that the single biggest institutional barrier to improving public transportation in the United States is not exactly bureaucratic inertia, but rather than the improvements do not tap onto the agreed-upon skillset of the most powerful people. The political appointees are of no use. Some managers are, but not many, especially not at the top levels. At planning agencies it’s often the junior people who are most useful. Why should a manager listen to an underling?

Public Transport and Infectious Diseases

This is a rough set of guidelines for how to make public transport networks more resilient to infectious diseases. While this post is inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic, some of what I’m going to discuss here is relevant to infections in general, both seasonal flu and future generational epidemics.

I’m aiming mainly at people who work for public transport authorities and can act to epidemic-proof their systems in the future, but some of the guidelines may be helpful for riders. The key takeaway is that public officials probably should not want to shut down the system or discourage people from riding it; thus, as a rider you probably shouldn’t avoid the trains except insofar that you should avoid most places you’d take them to, like crowded offices and events.

Finally, let me be clear: my expertise on public health approaches zero. I have a fair amount of general knowledge of how different urban rail systems operate, but more about network design and costs than public health. To the extent I’m ahead of anyone else on this issue, it’s that I’ve seen so much wanton incuriosity in the West (especially the US) toward Asian practices, and therefore asked around for East Asian practices rather than trying to learn worst industry practices from Europe and North America.

The scope of this post

The scope of what best industry practices are on epidemic prevention is, roughly, the high-income major cities of East Asia, plus Singapore. China is excluded on purpose: a country that arrests doctors for telling the public about the coronavirus isn’t really where you want to get disease prevention tips from. Instead, the low infection rates so far in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and South Korea’s ability to control the infection through mass testing after the explosion in cases at the Shincheonji church, suggest that those countries should be the models. Japan may be a good example as well, but the state is undertesting, so the full extent, while apparently lower than in Western countries, may be understated.

I have talked to people in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Seoul to understand the situation on the ground there. In Taipei and the cities of Japan I have not, and am relying on media report; I know I have commenters who live in Japan, so if you have anything to say about the efforts there then please do speak up and contribute, regarding both the measures taken and current infection rates.

This is necessarily a volatile situation. It’s possible that in a month, Germany and France will have controlled the infection while the rich countries of Asia will look as dire as Lombardy looks right now. I don’t think such an inversion is at all likely, but ultimately, I am describing the best information available as of 2020-3-11.

Do people need to stop taking mass transit?

Probably not. I emphasize probably because the different in-scope cities are reacting differently, and we don’t yet know for certain whether avoiding the trains is correlated with greater safety from infection.

In Singapore, life goes on. I have family there; I’m told that the MRT is not less crowded than the usual at rush hour, but the buses are definitely less crowded. The estimate I heard is that 1/3 to 1/2 of the population on the street is wearing surgical masks. Instead of shutting down schools and offices, the state imposed a mandatory quarantine on people arriving from early-infected countries including China, and went as far as revoking the green card of a permanent resident who violated the quarantine.

Update 2020-3-12: my sibling reports that, first, the mask-wearers are largely Chinese, not ethnic minorities like Malays and Indians, and second, ridership on the MRT is noticeably down at rush hour, with some empty seats where normally trains are standing-room only.

In Hong Kong, it is exactly the opposite. The state is not terribly relevant – the population does not trust it. There was early caution due to social memory of SARS, leading to rapid social distancing, closing down schools, offices, and public events. I’ve asked Lyman Stone and Trey Menefee for their impressions. They both said the MTR is empty nowadays, and Lyman reminded me that ridership was down even before the epidemic on account of a popular boycott in response to the company’s collaboration with regime security. The total social distancing means people travel little, but when they do, it’s often by TNC, leading to a lot of Uber traffic; drivers even put hand sanitizer in the back of their cars and make an effort to clean the interior well, to attract passengers afraid of catching the disease.

In Seoul, the situation is different, in that there was a big flare of the epidemic thanks to the so-called patient 31, a member of Shincheonji, who transmitted the virus around the group. Until a few days ago, Korea was the #2 country in the world in confirmed cases, after China, but Italy and Iran have since overtaken it and the US is poised to overtake it soon too. But new infections are down thanks to an aggressive regime of testing. Public transportation is still in operation – Min-Jae Park, an NYU student from Korea who has been working with me and Eric Goldwyn on our construction costs project, said that there is noticeably less ridership according to family but also,

Yesterday, there has been a group of confirmed cases in a same workplace including commuters via transit to and from Seoul. The government did declare that it is almost impossible track back individual patients to show if transit is a hazardous environment. However, since the early stages, the national and local  transit authorities has been aggressively sanitized the public realm especially in transit. Additionally, the ridership of the transit decreased overall, as the remote working culture started to become naturalized.

So far, there has not been a substantial case that proves that transit needs to be reduced or shut down, but we shall see how the yesterday’s case turns out. I will update to you if any policy change comes up relating to the virus, but I think that is probably the last thing the government want to do in scale of national lockdown Italy did.

My other source on Korea’s response is Nick Plott, a.k.a. Tasteless, a popular esports caster. In a short video about the virus and its effect on esports, he mentions the effect on Korea, and says that public transport in Seoul is deserted. My hunch is that Min-Jae’s take, although second-hand, is more accurate than Tasteless’s, and public transport in Seoul still has a fair amount of ridership, if not nearly so much as before the pandemic.

Update 2020-3-12: Min-Jae clarifies that as of the morning of the 13th Korea time, there is a shift to private transport even though the government says public transport is safe; he guesses ridership is down 20-30%.

In the big cities of Japan, ridership is down, though not by much relative to the magnitude of the crisis. The media quotes 10-20% declines in ridership on the Yamanote Line and on lines around Osaka, and 20-30% declines in ridership on the Nagoya subway. Maciej Ceglowski is visiting Japan and reports that the trains in Kyoto “are not crowded at all,” adding that about 3/4 of the people wear masks. Japanese office culture is resistant to working from home, as is I think office culture elsewhere in Asia-Pacific, and this has hampered social distancing efforts.

Finally, in Taipei, I do not have any information regarding public transport usage during the pandemic. That said, some circumstantial evidence that it is still going on is that the region has just opened a new circumferential line, the Yellow Line, and even let passengers ride for free for the first month, getting more than a million riders in 25 days, which is low but not outrageously so for a new circumferential line.

How can mass transit be made less infectious in the future?

There are two ways passengers can infect other passengers in public. The first is directly, through coughing, sneezing, or casual touching combined with touching one’s own face. The second is through intermediate surfaces, called fomites in epidemiology, such as poles, seats, door handles. Neither disease vector can be eliminated, but there are design elements that can greatly reduce both.

Infrared sensors for temperature checks

It’s possible to take people’s temperatures passively using infrared sensors. Taipei installed such sensors at one MRT station and is about to do so at six additional central stations. People with fever above 38 degrees will not be allowed into the station, and people with temperature between 37.5 and 38 degrees will have to undergo an ear temperature check to confirm that they do not have a fever. I saw this system at the airport when I visited Taipei three months ago, where it was used to screen passengers with fever.

This system requires all station entrances to be staffed. This may be expensive in smaller cities, but as a temporary measure during an epidemic, it’s fully justified. If you’re the government, you can afford to bust the budget in an emergency to make sure people can travel around the city without contracting a fatal disease.

Temperature checks will miss asymptomatic cases, but this is fine. The epidemiologist-turned-data-scientist Maria Ma summarizes the best available research on Covid-19: while asymptomatic transmission is possible, it requires much closer contact than being together on a train.

Hand sanitizer

Every station entrance should have hand sanitizer in sufficient quantities for the expected passenger traffic. Some office and university buildings already have this solution, even in the West; this is especially common in Singapore. My recollection of Taipei is that it had hand sanitizer at stations even in December, but I am not completely certain this was from Taipei and not Singapore or Bangkok.

Fomite reduction

Seoul offers disposable chopsticks for pressing elevator buttons. In the short run, transit agencies that use button-operated doors, such as those of Berlin and Paris, should do the same at stations and inside train cars, space permitting. In the long run, European agencies should be more like Asian (or North American) ones and have automatic doors opening at every stop.

In the long run, it’s also beneficial to design train interiors to inhibit the spread of viruses and bacteria. Some materials catch bacterial and viral infections more than others – for example, a 2015 study by Biranjia-Hurdoyal, Deerpaul and Permal finds that synthetic purses have far more bacteria than leather or cloth ones; this should be equally true of train seats. Moreover, the poles should be coated with copper, as it has biocidal and antiviral properties – a 2013 study by Salgado et al finds that coating ER surfaces with copper reduces the risk hospital-acquired infections, from 12.3% to 7.1% when all infections are included or from 8.1% to 3.4% excluding MRSA and VRE.

Fare barriers and station entrances should be designed to minimize fomites. The best option here is not used in Asia: no fare barriers at all, with proof-of-payment fare enforcement. But the smartcard systems and automatic fare barriers so common around Asia are a good second best, as they do not involve physical contact with foreign objects. The worst options are metal turnstiles that passengers turn with their hands, cage-style turnstiles, or heavy doors that passengers must push on their way out; these are found in New York and Paris, and should be replaced to reduce the spread of disease in the future.

Regular cleaning

Transport companies should clean their vehicles and stations regularly. This may not be realistic at bus stops, but is realistic on buses and trains and at all train stations. That ten-year-old piece of gum stuck to the floor of your New York subway station is not by itself a vector for a virus that only spread to humans three months ago, but if it’s still there, then so is the tissue thrown yesterday by someone who just got sick.

Seoul is using drones to spray disinfectant on hard-to-reach surfaces, such as playgrounds. This can also be used at railyards and elevated rail stations to speed up the process.

Employee safety

The guidelines above are designed for passenger safety. What about employee safety? This, I believe, is a smaller problem, at least in countries that are advanced enough to have good sick leave. It is notable that even in Hong Kong, trains are running, albeit the buses run at lower frequency as people are staying home.

A train driver works sitting alone in a cab separated from where passengers are is not at great risk, and neither is a bus driver separated by a glass screen. There is risk of worker-to-worker infection, especially if drop-in crews are common to control turnaround times, but it’s easier to test workers for fever and send sick ones home with pay than to deploy infrared sensors at every station entrance. As an additional layer of safety on top of temperature checks and generous sick leave, agencies should clean train and bus driver cabs between every crew change.

It’s workers who are together all the time who should not be going to work – that is, the head office. Planners, schedulers, managers, and clerical workers can work remotely, albeit at reduced productivity. Making regular plans to reduce infections during flu season, and planning how to respond to bigger epidemic threats in advance, is therefore useful since it doesn’t stress planning capacity at a time when productivity is the lowest.