Amtrak’s Failure

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

Amtrak ridership

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

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

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

Is this because of public support?

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

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

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

But what about construction?

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

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

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

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

Why are they like this?

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

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

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

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

Privatization is not an Alternative to the State

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Note: Rural Drivers Aren’t Being Oppressed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building for Wealth, and Point Access Blocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about the single-loaded corridor?

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

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

Point access blocks and families

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

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

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

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

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

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

Point access blocks and wealth

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

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

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

Quick Note: the Experience of Train Stations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Large Cars are a Positional Good

Americans have, over the last generation, gotten ever larger cars, to the point that the market is dominated by crossovers, pickup trucks, and SUVs and barely has sedans. Europe is not far behind, with the sedan market having collapsed and half of new sales comprising SUVs. Considerable resources are spent on these larger cars, which are more expensive to purchase, maintain, and refuel. The benefits at this point, however, are rather positional. The benefit of larger cars at this point is not about the comfort or performance of the car, but about being larger than other road users. Streets for All’s Michael Schneider described it as an arms race; this arms race that wastes resources and produces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, without benefits even to individuals writ large, precisely the kind of problem that government regulation can solve.

The benefits of larger cars

The usual benefit drivers cite for why they want a larger car is comfort. The increase in car size from (say) the Fiat 500 or the Beetle or the 1970s Civic to modern midsize cars like the Accord and Camry has led to obvious improvements in comfort: four doors rather than two, ample front and rear passenger legroom, more trunk space.

And beyond this point, the relationship between car size and comfort saturates. Luxury sedans are still larger than midsize ones, but not by much; where the 500 had a curb weight of about 500 kg, the modern Accord is 1.4 t and the Camry is 1.6 t, barely less than a C-Class at 1.7 t and not much less than a 2.1 t 7 Series. A family car does not need to be larger than this, and when I talk to people about their vehicle purchases, at least the ones who tell me they’re getting SUVs do not cite comfort, not in the 2010s-20s.

The main selling point of luxury cars is performance. It’s this high-performance segment that Tesla competes with – electric cars have better performance specs, and where the older automakers tried to base their electric car offerings on preexisting platforms (like the Leaf, based on the Tiida), Tesla instead started by building high-performance luxury cars and expanded from there. But here there is no benefit to size – the Model 3 is around 1.7 t curb weight, and that includes batteries, which together weigh nearly half a ton.

Larger cars can also haul more goods, but the SUVs and pickups are expressly designed not to do that. The F-150’s bed has decreased with every new generation of the car; the Kei truck, specialized to have a large bed relative to the rest of the car, looks so weird to Americans that Massachusetts at one point banned it for being unsafe, while Americans on social media mocked the users as trying to prove an environmental point. The minivan, specialized to carry seven to eight passengers, has been unfashionable for at least a generation, losing out to the similarly large but lower-capacity SUV.

Instead, what I do hear from people telling me why they want a big car is purely positional: “I get to see over the other cars,” or alternatively “I can’t be the shortest car on the road because then I can’t see anything.” People are also recorded modifying their cars to be taller for the same reasons. The visibility in question does not improve if all cars get bigger; only the relative size matters. In the case of car accidents, this is even worse: in a collision between two cars the larger one is safer for the occupants, but making all the cars larger doesn’t improve traffic safety, and makes it much worse for pedestrians, and there’s some evidence of risk compensation by drivers of larger cars increasing the overall number of crashes.

The discourse on social benefits tends to exclude individual ones; thus, it’s easy to say that something that provides tangible individual benefits (such as larger dwellings) does not provide social ones. But this is something different. A purely private good does not provide positive externalities or improve the usual indicators that are usually the realm of public policy, like public health, but it improves the living standards of the owner, without negative externalities. But here, the benefit of the SUV or pickup truck to the user is purely the arms race on the road; the improvement in the quality of life of the owner is entirely about externalizing a fixed or even rising risk of car crashes to other road users. There isn’t even a social benefit here in the sense of the sum total of private individual benefits.

The costs of larger cars

While larger cars do not improve societal well-being on average, they have high individual and social costs.

The social costs are easier to explain: those cars emit much more pollution and greenhouse gases. The Camry has a fuel economy of maybe 37 miles per gallon (6.35 l/100 km) in the US; the F-150 gets less than half that, around 17.5 mpg (13.4 l/100 km). The fuel consumption ratio, 2.1, is somehow larger than the mass ratio – the F-150 doesn’t weigh 3.4 t but rather not much more than 2 t depending on model. Air pollution emissions are, for modern cars with modern petrol engines, proportional to greenhouse gas emissions; a car with twice the fuel consumption is going to also emit twice the particulate matter.

Then there is the danger of crashes. The United States has seen an increase in traffic fatalities lately, especially for pedestrians. The pedestrian fatality rate, in turn, comes from the form of pickups and larger SUVs: they have larger hoods, which hit pedestrians in the chest or (for children) the head rather than in the legs, and which also reduce visibility. Here it’s not an issue of mass but one of hood shape, but these come from the same fundemantal issue of an arms race to be larger and taller than the other cars, to the exclusion of spending on personal comfort.

Those social costs are not the tradeoff of some individual benefit. There is a benefit to the driver of the larger car, but there is no benefit to the driver of the average car on a road with larger cars. Instead, the driver of said average car incurs significant individual costs, coming from the need to buy, maintain, and refuel a larger machine. The low fuel economy costs the drivers money; most of the costs are external, but not all. The purchase price of a larger car is larger, because it is a larger piece of machinery, requiring more workers and more capital to put together; Edmunds’ price range for the F-150 is 50-100% higher than that for the Accord or Camry. Consumers routinely spend more money for better products, but here the product is not better except positionally.

The way forward

Government regulations to curb the arms race can directly limit or tax the size of cars, or instead go after their negative externalities. The latter should be preferred; in particular, a tax on car size would create a situation in which people can pay for a road that is safer for them and more dangerous for others, which is likely to lead to both much more aggressive driving by the largest cars on the road and to populist demands for large cars for everyone.

Specific taxes on large cars may still be appropriate in specific circumstances, like parking; Paris charges SUVs more for parking, justified by the fact that these vehicles don’t fit in the usual street parking spots, which are designed for the typical European car and not for the largest ones.

But outside the issue of parking, it’s better to be tighter about regulations and taxes on pollution, and about accidents. In the United States, it’s necessary to get rid of the system in which cars are perennially underinsured, with most states requiring liability coverage of $50,000 (Cid’s car accident, which was medium-term disabling but not fatal, incurred around $1 million in bills, and the insurance value of human life in the United States is $7.5 million). On both sides of the Atlantic, it’s necessary to tax or regulate pollution more seriously; the EU is ramping up fines on automakers that produce excessively polluting vehicles, but Robert Habeck, who is rather rigid on issues like nuclear power and the Autobahn speed limit, wants to suspend those fines since German automakers lag in electric cars.

On the matter of safety, it’s best to require cars to meet high standards of visibility and pedestrian safety in crashes, measured for example by survival rates at typical city speeds like 30 and 50 km/h. A car that fails these standards should not be on the road, just as cars are tested for occupant safety. If it means that the high, deep hood characteristic of the pickup truck no longer meets regulations, then fine; safety regulators should not compromise just because some antisocial drivers are acculturated to playing Carmageddon on real roads.

The key here is that regulations on emissions and personal injury liability suppress investment in larger cars, and that is good. There are other forms of capital investment in the economy competing for funding, which are not purely positional, for example housing, where German investment has been lagging due to high interest rates. Externalities are a real market failure and sometimes they get to the point that the product is, at scale, a net negative for society.

Quick Note: High-Speed Rail and Decarbonization

I keep seeing European advocates for decarbonizing transportation downplay the importance of big infrastructure, especially high-speed rail. To that end, I’d like to proffer one argument for why high-speed rail decarbonizes transportation even when it induces new trips. Namely: induced leisure trips come at the expense of higher-carbon travel to other destinations. In the 2010s discussion on High Speed 2, for example, induced trips were counted as raising greenhouse gas emissions (while having economic benefits elsewhere), and with this understanding I think that that is wrong. This becomes especially important with the growing focus on flight shaming in Europe. A 1,000 km high-speed rail link doesn’t just compete with flying on the same corridor, but also with flying to a different destination, which may be much farther away, and thus its effect on decarbonizing transport is much larger than a model of corridor-scale competition with cars and planes predicts.

Aviation emissions

A common argument for high-speed rail in the 2000s was that it would displace on-corridor flights, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the American version, this argument awkwardly coexisted with a separate argument for high-speed rail, namely that it would decongest airports and allow more flight slots to faraway destinations. In the 2010s and in this decade, this contradictory thinking fell away – the United States hasn’t built anything, China builds for non-environmentalist reasons, Europe gave up on cross-border rail construction and its activists became more interested in trams-and-bikes urbanism. This is also reflected in research: for all of the hype about high-speed rail as a substitute for aviation, researchers like Giulio Mattioli point out that aviation emissions are dominated by long-distance flights, with <500 km flights comprising only 5% of aviation fuel burn and >4,000 km ones comprising 39%. Activist response to policies like France’s ban on flights competing with <2.5 hour TGVs has been to mock it as the gimmick that it is.

For this and other reasons, on-corridor competition with air travel is no longer considered an important issue. This is now being taken in the direction of arguing against 300 km/h lines; the thinking is that high speed is only really needed to compete with flights, whereas competing with cars requires something else. But that argument misses the importance of off-corridor competition. Passengers don’t just choose what mode to take on a fixed corridor; they also choose where to travel, and transport options matter to that choice.

The limits of ridership models

Ridership models tend to be local. SNCF uses a gravity model, in which the ridership between a pair of cities with populations P_A, P_B, of distance d, is said to be proportional to about P_a^{0.8}P_b^{0.8}/d^2. I’ve used the same in my modeling, which predicts Tokyo-to-province ridership rather well but then severely underpredicts Taiwanese ridership.

The issue is that the model is local: if I live in Berlin and want to go to Munich, the model looks only at what’s between Berlin and Munich, and doesn’t consider that I can go to other cities instead if they’re more convenient to get to. One consequence of this is that the model probably overpredicts ridership in larger milieus than in smaller ones for this reason (the Tokyo resident can go to Osaka but also to Tohoku, etc.). But an equal consequence is that off-corridor competition is global.

The limits of leisure travel

Leisure travel is discretionary, and limited by vacation time. Building new high-speed lines does not mean that the country is offering workers more vacation days. The upshot is that every new line competes off-corridor with other lines, but also with other modes. A tightly integrated national high-speed rail system offers domestic tourism by rail, competing not just with flying on longer corridors like Berlin-Cologne, where the trains take four hours and are unreliable, but also with flying to places that the train doesn’t get to.

This has implications to a Europe-wide system as well. Right now, flights from Northern Europe to Southern Europe are on corridors where rail travel is only viable if you are an environmental martyr, really like 14-hour train trips, or ideally both. High-speed rail would by itself not compete on most of these corridors – those Spanish coastal cities are too far from Northern Europe for a mode other than flying, for one. But it would offer reasonable service to other places in Southern Europe with warm climate. Speeding up the Paris-Nice TGV means Parisians would choose to travel to Nice more and to islands less. Building high-speed rail approaches connecting to the base tunnels across the Alps means Germans, especially Southern Germans, could just go to large Italian cities instead of flying to islands or to Turkey. Even business travel may be affected, through replacement of flights to other continents.

One- and Two-Dimensional Rail Networks

As people on social media compare the German and American rail networks, I’m going to share two graphics from the upcoming Northeast Corridor report, made by Kara Fischer. They are schematic so it’s not possible to speak of scale, but the line widths and colors are the same in both; both depict only lines branded as Amtrak or ICE, so Berlin-Dresden, where the direct trains are branded IC or EuroCity, is not shown, and neither are long-range commuter lines even if they are longer than New Haven-Springfield.

The Northeastern United States has smaller population than that of Germany but not by much (74 million including Virginia compared with 84 million), on a similar land area. Their rail networks should be, to first order, comparable. Of course they aren’t – the map above shows just how much denser the German rail network is than the American one, not to mention faster. But the map also shows something deeper about rail planning in these two places: Germany is two-dimensional, whereas the Northeastern US is one-dimensional. It’s not just that the graph of the Northeastern rail network is acyclic today, excluding once-a-day night trains. More investment in intercity rail would produce cycles in the Northeastern network, through a Boston-Albany line for one. But the cycles would be peripheral to the network, since Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington are collinear on the Northeast Corridor, and the smallest of these four metro areas, Philadelphia, is larger than all those on the branches depicted above, combined.

The most important effect on network planning is that it turns the Northeast Corridor into easy mode. We would not be able to come up with a coherent timetable for Germany on the budget that our program at Marron had. In the Northeast, we did, because it’s a single line, the main difficulty being overtakes of commuter trains that run along subsections.

This, in turn, has two different implications, one for each place.

The one-dimensionality of the Northeast

In the Northeast, the focus has to be on compatibility between intercity and commuter trains. Total segregation of tracks requires infrastructure projects that shouldn’t make the top 50 priorities in the Northeast, especially at the throats of Penn Station, South Station, and Washington Union Station. Total segregation of tracks not counting those throats requires projects that are probably in the top 50 but not top 20. Instead, it’s obligatory to plan everything as a single system, with all of the following features:

  • Timed overtakes, with infrastructure planning integrated into timetable design so that the places with overtakes, and only the places with overtakes, get extra tracks as necessary.
  • Simpler commuter rail timetabling, so that the overtakes can be made consistent, and so that trains can substitute for each other as much as possible in case of train delays or cancellation.
  • Higher-performance commuter rail rolling stock, to reduce the speed difference between commuter and intercity trains; the trains in question are completely routine in German regional service, where they cost about as much as unpowered coaches do in the United States, but they are alien to the American planning world, which does not attend InnoTrans, does not know how to write an RFP that European vendors will respect, and does not know what the capabilities of the technology are.
  • Branch pruning on commuter rail, which comes at a cost for some potential through-running pairs – trains from New Jersey, if they run through to points east of Penn Station, should be going to the New Haven Line and Port Washington Branch, and probably not to Jamaica; Newark-Jamaica service is desirable, but it would force dependency between the LIRR and intercity trains, which may lead to too many delays.

In effect, even an intercity rail investment plan would be mostly commuter rail by spending. The projects mentioned in this post are, by spending, almost half commuter rail, but they come on top of projects that are already funded that are commuter rail-centric, of which the biggest is the Hudson Tunnel Project of the Gateway Program. This is unavoidable, given the amount of right-of-way sharing between intercity trains and the busiest commuter rail lines in the United States. The same one-dimensionality that makes intercity rail planning easier also means that commuter rail must use the same non-redundant infrastructure that intercity rail does, especially around Penn Station.

The two-dimensionality of Germany

A two-dimensional network cannot hope to put all of the major cities on one line, by definition. Germany’s largest metro areas are not at all collinear. In theory, the Rhine-Ruhr, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Munich are collinear. In practice, not only does this still exclude Berlin and Hamburg, which is not at all like how Northeastern US collinearity works, but also the Rhine-Ruhr is a two-dimensional polycentric region, and Frankfurt is a terminal station oriented in such a way that a Stuttgart 21-style through-running project would allow for through-service from Stuttgart or from Cologne to points east but not from Stuttgart to Cologne. There’s also a tail of regions in the 1-1.5 million population range – Leipzig, Dresden, Nuremberg, Hanover, Karlsruhe – that are collectively larger than the largest single-core region (Berlin), even if they’re still smaller collectively than the eight-core Rhine-Ruhr region. The highest-demand link, Frankfurt-Mannheim, is a bottleneck between many city pairs, and is not at all dominant over other links in frequency or demand.

This makes for a network that is, by necessity, atypically complex. Train delays between Frankfurt and Mannheim can cascade as far as Berlin and Hamburg. There are timed connections, timed overtakes of slower regional trains on shared links (more or less everything in yellow on the map), and bypasses around terminal stations including Frankfurt and Leipzig as well as around Cologne, which is a through-station oriented east-west permitting through-service from Belgium and Aachen to the rest of Germany but not between Frankfurt and Dusseldorf.

Not for nothing, Deutsche Bahn has not really been able to make all of this work. The timetable padding is around 25%, compared with 10-13% on the TGV, and even so, delays are common and the padding is evidently not enough to recover from them.

The solution has to be reducing the extent of track sharing. The yellow lines on the map should not be yellow; they should be red, with dedicated passenger-only service, turning Germany into a smaller version of China. The current paradigm pretends Germany can be a larger version of Switzerland instead. But Switzerland builds tunnels galore to go around strategic bottlenecks, and even then makes severe compromises on train speeds – the average speeds between Zurich, Basel, and Bern are around 100 km/h, which works for a country the size of Switzerland but not for one the size of Germany, in which even the current 130-150 km/h average speeds are enough to get rail advocates to never take any other mode but not enough to get other people to switch.

In effect, the speed vs. reliability tradeoff that German rail advocates think in terms of is fictional. The two-dimensionality of Germany means that the only way to run reliably is not to have high frequency of both fast and slow trains on the same tracks between Berlin and Halle, between Munich and Ingolstadt, between Hanover and Hamburg, etc. Eliminating the regional trains is a nonstarter, so this means the intercity trains need to go on passenger-dedicated tracks.

In contrast, careful timetabling of intercity and regional trains on the same line has limited value in Germany. The regional trains in question have low ridership – the core of German commuter rail is S-Bahn systems that run in dedicated city center tunnels and have limited track sharing with the rest of the network, much less with the ICEs. If there’s high regional traffic on a particular link, it comes from combining hourly trains on many origin-destination pairs, in which case trains cannot possibly substitute for one another during traffic disturbances, and timetabling with low padding is unlikely to work.

Like Takt-based planning for Americans, building a separate intercity rail network for Germans comes off as weird and foreign. France and Southern Europe do it, and Germans look down on France and Southern Europe almost to the same extent that Americans look down on Europe. But it’s the only path forward. If anything, this combination of speed with reliability means that completing an all-high-speed connection on a major trunk line, like Berlin-Munich or Cologne-Munich, would permit cutting the timetable padding to more reasonable levels, which would save time on top of what is saved by the higher top speed. Germany could have TGV average speeds as part of this system, if it realized that these average speeds are both necessary and useful for passengers.

Public Transportation and Crime are not About Each Other

Noah Smith is trying to make public transportation and YIMBYism about crime, and I don’t think he succeeds. In short, he says that transit cities and higher housing growth levels would be more publicly acceptable if American central cities were more sensitive to conservative concerns about crime. In effect, he is making public transportation investment not a matter of frequency or network design or reliability or good maintenance or transit priority on streets or low construction costs or any of the other technocratic issues that distinguish the Seouls and Zurichs and Stockholms of the world from the Los Angeleses (which, to give credit, he acknowledges are important), but about crime, conceived as a culture war issue about more police and more police visibility. And in this, he ends up ignoring both the literature on this and what makes good government tick in parts of the developed world that are not the United States.

Now, Noah is a pundit, who’s more pro-transit than the average in his milieu. He’s not the reason American cities are poorly governed or the separate suite of reasons American public transit is so bad and isn’t improving. He writes as a way of trying to engage conservative NIMBYs, I just don’t think he succeeds – and the way he fails is for many of the same reasons American public transit managers fails. Chief of those is American triumphalism, of the kind that will retweet a viral tweet that pretends Europe has no biotech or advanced physics and that uses the expression “europoor” unironically in a flamewar. People who fail to recognize how Europe and East Asia work are not going to be able to learn what works here and how to adapt it; I’m less familiar with Asian discourse, but Noah’s description of Europe is unrecognizable. Even the basic thesis about urbanism and crime isn’t correct in a global perspective. This leads to serious problems in diagnosing how European cities got to have the housing and transportation policies that they do; the solutions are, by the black-and-white polarization of American politics, best thought of as a blue-and-orange spectrum, starting with lack of local empowerment and inattention to neighborhood-scale stereotypes

Cities and crime

The American association between high crime rates and deurbanization is not at all normal. Globally, it’s the exact opposite; Gaviria-Goldwyn-Galarza-Angel find that high risk of violence leads to higher urban density, because of the effect of safety in numbers. Simon Gaviria roots this in the history of his own country, Colombia. In Latin America, crime rates are infamously high. Noah’s post compares the American homicide rate with a selection of European and Asian countries, topping at 6.8/100,000 in Russia (US: 5.8), but in Colombia it is 25.7, and in the 1990s it ranged between 60 and 85. People can’t suburbanize the way they have in the United States, even with a GDP per capita in line with that of midcentury America, because, in a sufficiently high-crime environment, driving to work means taking the risk of being carjacked at an intersection.

Now, public transportation in Latin America is not especially good, not by European or East Asian standards. Most cities haven’t built much recently; Mexico City deserves especial demerits, but Brazil has been flagging as well, and Argentina has no money for anything. Chile and the Dominican Republic are both expanding metros, Santiago doing so rather rapidly, and both have the same order of magnitude of homicide as the US (Chile: 4.5, Dominican Republic: 11.5), rather than that of Colombia or Brazil or Mexico. But this still does not make high crime a relevant factor in deurbanization.

Now, in the history of the United States, people do associate postwar suburbanization with high crime rates. While the crime rate rose rapidly in the 1960s, and remained high until the 1990s, there was little transportation risk. The stereotype of poverty-induced social disorder as seen from a car in an American city, at least in the 1990s and 2000s, was a panhandler coming to the car at a traffic jam with a squeegee, washing it, and expecting payment; jacking was (and still is) more or less unheard of. The stereotype was, safety on the road and in the suburbs, danger in the city. But that is a feature of relatively moderate crime rates. Indeed, the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates; two thirds of the fall in New York subway ridership from its twin peaks in 1930 and 1946 to its nadir in 1982 had occurred by 1960, on the eve of the explosion in the city’s homicide rate.

And to be clear, this is a matter of stereotypes, more than reality. New York is one of the safest large cities in the United States (4.7/100,000 in 2023). San Francisco is even safer: in 2024 through December 10th, the pro-rated homicide rate was 4.3. Texan urbanists outside Austin (4.7) have to contend with higher homicide rates: 15.7 in Dallas, 12.8 in Houston, 8.4 in San Antonio, all averaged over the first six months of 2024 and pro-rated. But Dallas and Houston are perceived as far safer than New York. This can’t exactly be racism – these two cities are nearly as black as New York and considerably more Hispanic. But whatever is causing the stereotype needs to be separated from the reality; the Texan rail advocates I talk to on social media don’t treat crime as a major obstacle for finding more money for public transit, and instead cite car culture, low perceived value of rail, and high costs, and if that’s not a problem there, it shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco.

Stereotypes in Paris

Noah talks about how Europe succeeded in curbing crime rates – and to again give credit, recognizes that New York is safe – and says that this is driving greater acceptance of public transportation and housing growth here.

Except, this isn’t quite right. I don’t have comparable surveys asking people if they find Paris safe, but I do have access to French discourse at hand, and it does not at all say “Paris is safe, people who think crime is a problem there are idiots,” except maybe when an American is in the room and then the point is to pull rank on the American.

In Paris, in French, there are lists of sensitive city quarters, and there are arrondissements that are more fashionable than others. The 18th, 19th, and 20th are usually negatively stereotyped, if less so than the adjacent department, Seine-Saint-Denis, which is extremely negatively stereotyped. The 13th is negatively stereotyped, but this is likely to be missed by Americans – the population there is disproportionately Asian, and negative stereotypes of Asians by white people are worse in France than in the United States. Belleville, straddling the 10th/11th/19th/20th boundary, was listed as a sensitive quarter when I lived just outside its limits and went in frequently to buy tahini – and at the time, I saw either British or American media, I forget which, list these quarters as no-go zones.

Now, these are residential areas. The center of Paris is well to the west of these. But Paris has a low job density gradient within city limits between commercial areas (like the 1st or the 8th) and residential ones, and the Ministry of the Interior, for example, is located in the 20th, close to Nation. People commute to these neighborhoods, usually by the Métro or RER. Nation, at the 11th/12th/20th boundary, is a mixed zone, with features that connote middle-class consumption (like the farmer’s market) and others that connote poverty (like a Resto du Cœur; see citywide map here). The sort of people in France who see a black or Arab person on the street and immediately panic find the area dangerous, including at one point the minister of the interior himself, who professed to being shocked at seeing ethnic food at the supermarket.

And none of this matters to public transportation investment, or to housing. In a country where people treat the entire department of Seine-Saint-Denis as a no-go zone except for football games at the Stade de France, where the RER B has such a negative reputation for passing through this area that two different airport connectors are planned to parallel it, Grand Paris Express is still planned to make stops in Seine-Saint-Denis, and connect it better with the rest of the region, including the wealthy suburbs around La Défense. This was a bipartisan decision – there were differences between the Socialists’ and the Gaullists’ ideas of what exactly to build, but there was core agreement on a circumferential line through the inner suburbs, and it is considered a social policy to connect working-class suburbia with jobs.

Stereotypes and local empowerment

The stereotypes of crime in parts of the Paris region do not affect urban rail investment plans. Where they do matter is at the level that doesn’t matter: the local one. Anne Hidalgo is a committed leftist (and NIMBY), but centrist and center-right politicians in the region have long wanted an urban renewal project around Gare du Nord, which they consider a poor area, not because it’s especially poor, but because it’s where the commuter trains from Seine-Saint-Denis go and thus young black and Arab men congregate there, and the station’s facilities could genuinely use some modernization. Occasionally the negative stereotypes of the station even get to British media. But whether Paris engages in a wholesale renewal project around the station to make it more upscale is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things to either its public transport ridership or its overall level of housing production.

The difference between Paris and New York or San Francisco is not that it has lower crime, although its homicide rate is certainly lower. It’s that it doesn’t derail its social policy discourse by turning technocratic issues into culture wars. Paris has unstaffed sanisettes; in a handful of areas there’s drug use, seen as used syringes. San Francisco, like Paris, has a handful of areas with drugs in its sanisettes, but the moral panic got to the point that the city decided to staff all sanisettes 24/7, with two attendants at night. Paris’s 435 sanisettes cost 11 million € a year to operate, 25,300€ per unit; San Francisco’s annual operating costs are on the order of $1 million per unit because of staffing.

This isn’t because of crime, because San Francisco is not sufficiently more dangerous than Paris to explain this, or even the perceptions thereof. The difference is that European governance is, across the board, better than American governance at disempowering local actors, who are driven by stereotypes. Anne Hidalgo doesn’t want to build housing in significant quantities, but does want to build some public housing in rich neighborhoods to own the libs (French definition of libs), and she’s the mayor and the residents of the 16th are not; Ile-de-France writ large wants to do more transit-oriented development, and so it builds some, even with some local grumbling about how redeveloping a disused factory brings gentrification.

And the way forward is to build institutions that bypass and disempower those local actors. People almost never stay within a neighborhood, but the small minority who do are overly empowered in the system of councilmanic prerogative that governs American cities. This does not involve treating their perception as if it is based in reality; this does involve passing preemption laws at the level where democratic politics is possible, such as the state, and doing much more than the weak bills California allows.

Ideology and reform

I think Noah is uncomfortable with American YIMBY praxis, because the rhetoric in a place like New York or California aims at the median Democrat in the state, to activate liberal political ideology as a substitute for the failures of non-ideological localism. This ideology is not especially radical, but does violate maxims that liberal pundits who specifically pitch to a conservative audience have learned to follow, like the taboo on calling people racist. The mainstream of political YIMBY advocacy has, I think, chosen better, understanding that at the end of the day, an upzoning bill in a safely blue state passes without Republican votes, and cutting deals with state Democratic actors, which can be localist (like exempting certain NIMBY suburbs with low transit-oriented development value) or more left-wing (like bundling with some left-wing elements, like Oregon’s introduction of weak rent controls).

And in a way, this is also how YIMBYism and public transportation investment work here, politically. As of late, social democratic parties have leaned on YIMBYism as a reason for non-pensioners to vote for them, calling for more housing permits; Olaf Scholz even called for redeveloping Tempelhofer Feld. Because it lives within a party, rather than among people who try to acknowledge culture war paranoias, the policy is clear, and sometimes can even be enacted – Germany would have built more housing if interest rates hadn’t simultaneously risen for unrelated reasons (namely, the combination of inflation and the Ukraine war). In France, it was a bipartisan effort in the sense that there wasn’t much daylight between the center-left and the center-right on the need for more housing in Ile-de-France, but the enactment did not involve the sort of horse trading that Noah envisions. This is not too different from infrastructure investments with bipartisan support elsewhere, such as the Madrid Metro, or Crossrail.

I think it’s telling that the greatest successes in the United States have not been in the most liberal places, but in swing states with liberal governance but competitive elections, like Minnesota. The barrier is not that the cities have crime or are negatively stereotyped (suburbanites around Minneapolis have plenty of those against the city), but that safe states have developed such a democratic deficit that they can’t govern. I’m fairly certain Noah is aware of this (Matt Yglesias certainly is). It just implies that this really is about seizing control of state government through ideological persuasion – in other words, reminding the Democrats of safely blue states that they are Democrats – and not about telling people way to the right of the median in these states that they are valid. We don’t do that here and American YIMBYs don’t need to do it on their side of the Pond.

Consultant Slop and Europe’s Decision not to Build High-Speed Rail

I’m sitting on a series of three trains to Rome, totaling 14 hours of travel. If a high-speed rail network is built connecting those cities, the trip can be reduced to about 7.5 hours: 2.5 Berlin-Munich (currently 4), 2 Munich-Verona (currently 5.5), around 2.75 Verona-Rome (currently 3.5), around 0.25 changing time (currently 1). The slowest section is being bypassed with the under-construction Brenner Base Tunnel, but not all of the approaches to the tunnel are, and Germany is happy with its trains averaging slightly slower speeds than the 1960s express Shinkansen.

I bring this up because it’s useful background for a rather stupid report by Transport and Environment that was making the rounds on European social media, purporting to rank the different intercity rail operators of Europe, according to criteria that make it clear nobody involved in the process cares much about infrastructure construction or about what has made high-speed rail work at the member state level. It’s consultant slop, based on a McKinsey report that conflicts with the published literature on intercity rail ridership elasticity, which makes it clear that speed matters greatly. Astonishingly, even negative discourse about the study, by people who I respect, talks about the slop and about the problems of privatization, but not about the need to actually go ahead and build those high-speed connections, without which there are sharp limits to the quality of life available to the zero-carbon lifestyle, limits that make people avoid that lifestyle and instead fly and drive. In effect, Europe and its institutions have made a collective decision over the last 10 or so years not to build high-speed rail, to the point that activism suggesting it reverse course and do so is treated as self-evidently laughable.

The T&E study

The T&E study purports to rank the intercity rail operators of Europe. There are 27 operators so ranked, which do not exactly correspond to the 27 member states, but instead omit some peripheral states, include British and Swiss options, and have some private operators, including inexplicably treating OuiGo as separate from the rest of the TGV. The ranking is of operators rather than infrastructure systems; there is no attention given to planning infrastructure and operations together. Trenitalia comes first, followed by a near-tie between RegioJet and SBB; Eurostar is last. Jon Worth had to pour cold water on the conclusions and the stenography in various European newspapers about them.

In fact, the study fits so perfectly into my post about making up rankings that it is easy to think I wrote the post about T&E – but no, the post is from 2.5 years ago. The issue is that it came up with such bad weighting in judging railways that one is left to wonder if it specifically picked something that would sound truthy and put SBB at or near the top just to avoid raising too many questions. The criteria used are as follows:

  • Ticket prices: 25%
  • Special fares and reductions: 15%
  • Reliability: 15%
  • Booking experience: 15%
  • Compensation policies: 10%
  • Traveler experience (speed and comfort): 10%
  • Night trains and bicycle policy: 5%

None of this is even remotely defensible, and none of this passes any sanity check. No, it is not 1.5 times as important to have special reductions in fares for advance bookings or other forms of price discrimination as to have a combination of speed and comfort. The Shinkansen has fixed fares and is doing fine, thank you very much; SNCF’s own explanations of its airline-style yield management system portray it as a positive but not essential feature – its reports from 2009 recommending high-speed rail development in the United States cite yield management as a 4% increase in revenue, which is good but not amazing.

But more broadly, it is daft to set a full 50% of the weight on fares and fare-related issues (i.e. compensation), and 15% on the booking experience, and relegate speed to part of an issue that is only 10%. That’s not how high-speed rail ridership works. Cascetta-Coppola find a ridership elasticity with respect to trip time of about -2, but only -0.37 with respect to fares. Börjesson finds a much narrower spread, -1.12 and -0.67 respectively, but still the same directionally. Speed matters.

And yet, T&E doesn’t seem to care. The best hints for the reason why are in the way it compares operators rather than national networks, and relies on a McKinsey report pitched at private entrants and not at member state policymakers, who do not normally outsource decisionmaking to international consultants. It doesn’t think in terms of systems or networks, because it isn’t trying to make a pitch at how a member state can improve its rail network, but rather at how a private competitor should aim to make a profit on infrastructure built previously by the state.

The need for state planning

Every intercity rail network worth its name was built and planned publicly, by a state empowered to do so. In East Asia, this comprises the high-speed rail networks of China, Japan, Korean, and Taiwan, all funded publicly, even if Japan subsequently privatized Shinkansen operation (though not construction) to regional monopolies that, while investor-owned, are too prestigious to fail. In Europe, some networks have high-speed rail at their core, like France, and others don’t, like Switzerland or the Netherlands, but the latter instead optimize state planning at lower speed, with tightly timed connections, strategic investments to speed up bottlenecks, and integration between rolling stock, the timetable, and infrastructure.

This feature of the main low-speed European rail network frustrates some attempts at disaggregating the effects of different inputs on ridership and revenue. At the level of a sanity check, there does not appear to be a noticeable malus to French rail ridership from its low frequency at outlying stations. But then France relies on one-seat rides from Paris to rather small cities, which do not have convenient airport access, and in its own way integrates this operating paradigm with rolling stock (bilevels optimized for seating capacity, not fast egress or acceleration) and infrastructure (bypasses around intermediate cities, even Lyon). Switzerland, in contrast, has these timed connections such that the effective frequency even on three-seat rides is hourly, with guaranteed short waits at the transfers, and this provides an alternative way to connect small cities with not just large ones but also each other.

But in both cases, the operating paradigm is connected with the infrastructure, and this was decided publicly by the state, based on governmental financial constraints, imposed in the 1970s in France (leading to extraordinarily low construction costs for the LGV Sud-Est) and the 1980s in Switzerland (leading to the hyper-optimized operations of Bahn 2000 in lieu of a high-speed rail system). A private operator can come in, imitate the same paradigm that the infrastructure was built for, and sometimes achieve lower operating costs by being more aggressive about eliminating redundant positions that a state operator may feel too constrained by unions to. But it cannot innovate in how to run trains. Even in Italy and Spain, where private competition has led to lower fares and higher ridership, all the private competitors have done is force service to look more like the TGV as it is and less like the TGV as SNCF management would like it to be internationally. Even there, they do not innovate, but merely imitate what the TGV already had purely publicly, on infrastructure that was designed for TGV or ICE service intensity all along.

The idea that the private sector can innovate in intercity rail comes from the same imitation of airline thinking that led to the failure of Eurostar, with its high fares and airline-style boarding and queuing. In the airline business, integration between infrastructure and operations is weak, and private airlines can innovate in aircraft utilization, fast boarding, no-frills service, and other aspects that led low-cost carriers to success. Business analysts drawn from that world keep trying to make this work for trains, and fail; the Spinetta Report mentions that OuiGo tanked TGV revenues, and ridership did not materially increase when it was introduced due to inconveniences imposed by the system of segmenting the market by fare.

Europe’s decision not to build high-speed rail

In the 2000s, there was semi-official crayon, such as the TEN-T system, for EU-wide high-speed rail, inspired by the success of the TGV. Little of it happened, and by the 2010s, it became more common to encounter criticism alleging that it could not be done, and it was more important to focus on other things – namely, private competition, the thing that cannot innovate in rail but could in airlines.

At no point was there a formal decision not to build high-speed rail at a European scale. Projects just fell aside, unless they were megaproject tunnels across mountains like the Brenner Base Tunnel or water like the Fehmarn Belt Tunnel, and then there is underinvestment in the approaches, so that the average speed remains shrug-worthy. The discourse shifted from building infrastructure to justifying not building it and pitching on-rail competition instead. This, I believe, is due to factors going back to the 1990s:

  • The failure of Eurostar to produce high ridership. It underperformed expectations; it also underperforms domestic city pairs. SNCF is happy to collect monopoly profits from international travelers, and, in turn, potential travelers associate high-speed rail with high fares and inconvenience and look elsewhere. One failed prominent project can and does poison the technology, potentially indefinitely.
  • The anti-state zeitgeist at the EU level. This can be described as neoliberalism, but the thoroughly neoliberal Blair/Brown and Cameron cabinets happily planned High Speed 2. The EU goes beyond that: it is too scared to act as a state on matters other than trade, and that leads people in EU policy to think in terms of government-by-nudge, rather like the Americans.
  • SNCF and DB’s profiteering off of cross-border travelers in different ways turns them into Public Enemies #1 and #2 for people who travel between different member states by rail, who are then reluctant to see them as successes domestically.

For all of these reasons, it’s preferred at the level of EU policymaking and advocacy not to build infrastructure. Infrastructure requires there to be a public sector, and the EU only does that on matters of trade and regulatory harmonization.

Jon Worth has done a lot of work on getting a passenger rights clause into the agenda for the new EU Parliament, to deal with friction between DB and SNCF when each blames the other when a cross-border passenger is stranded (roughly: DB blames SNCF for running low frequencies so that if DB’s last train is delayed the passenger is stranded, SNCF blames DB for being so delayed in the first place). This is a good kind of regulatory harmonization. It reminds me of the EU’s role in health care: there’s reciprocity among the universal health care systems of Europe, for example allowing EU immigrants but not non-European ones to switch to the Kasse upon arrival; but at the same time, the EU has practically no role in designing or providing these universal health care system or even, as the divergent responses to corona showed in 2020, in coordinating non-pharmaceutical interventions for public health in a pandemic.

But health care does not require large coordinating bodies, and infrastructure does. Refugee camps tended to by UN agencies that have to pay bribes and protection fees to local gangs can have surprisingly good health care outcomes. Cox’s Bazar’s Rohingya camps have infant mortality rates comparable to those of Bangladesh and Burma; Gaza had good if worse-than-Israeli life expectancy and infant mortality until the war started. But nobody can build infrastructure this way. Top-down state action is needed to coordinate, which means actual infrastructure construction, not just passenger rights.

The thinking at the EU level is that greater on-rail competition can improve service quality. But that’s just a form of denial. The EU has no willingness to actually build the high-speed rail segments required to enable rail trips across borders, and so various anti-state actors, most on the center-to-center-right but not all, lie to themselves that it’s okay, that if the EU fails to act as a state then the private sector can step in if allowed to. That’s where the T&E study comes in: it rates operators on how to act like a competitive flight level-zero airline, going with this theory of private-sector innovation to cope with the fact that cross-border rail isn’t being built and try to salvage something out of it.

But it can’t be salvaged, not in this field; the best the private sector can do is provide equivalent service to a good state service on infrastructure that the state built. The alternative to the state is not greater private initiative. In infrastructure, the political alternative is that people who are not Green voters, which group comprises 92.6% of the European Parliament, are going to just drive and fly and associate low-carbon transportation with being contained to within biking distance of city center. The economic alternative is that ties between European cities will remain weak, to the detriment of the European economy and its ability to scale up.