What Does Private Affluence, Public Squalor Mean?

I’d like to compare three cities: Paris, New York, Boston. They’re about equally wealthy, and I’ve lived years in two and spent a lot of time in the third. Americans dismiss New York and Boston too often as Not Real America, but they’re both excellent examples of how the US differs from Europe.

Private affluence and squalor at home

Visit the home of a middle-class person in the city. (I mean “middle-class” in the European sense of “reasonably educated professional,” not the American one of “not homeless.”) If you’re used to a certain suburban American standard of normality then the New York apartment will look small to you, but the one in Boston will not, and a few years seeing how Europeans live will disabuse you of any notion that New York apartments are small.

Parisian apartments are tiny. I had 40 square meters near Nation, but the citywide average is 31 per person; in New York, it’s 50 if I understand the Census Factfinder correctly. There are studios in Paris well below 20 m^2 – even Stockholm tends to stick to micro-units in the 20-25 m^2 area. There is something called studettes going down to 9 m^2 in the most extreme cases, many inherited from servant attic units built in the Second Empire and Belle Epoque. In New York it’s more or less prohibited by regulation, with the attendant high rents, but the regulations are about bedrooms, not unit size, hence the common experience of living 3 or 4 people to a large apartment, one that in Continental Europe is largely restricted to lower-income cities like Lisbon or Berlin.

In the 1950s, when John Galbraith coined the expression private affluence and public squalor, the American home had amenities unheard of in Europe, like universal ownership of appliances. This is not as stark a distinction today. Europeans have televisions and fast Internet connections for cheaper prices than in the US. But Europeans don’t have driers or air conditioning and don’t have dishwashers as commonly as Americans. I don’t want to exaggerate the difference in housing quality – for one, insulation is a lot better in Paris (and Berlin) than in New York and Boston, so the experience of living on the 3rd floor facing a city street is a lot noisier west of the Pond than east of it. For another difference, American air conditioning is window units in all but the highest-end apartments, which would have central air in Europe too. But the difference exists, and is noticeable.

Public affluence and squalor on the street

Let’s leave the inside of our houses now. How does the public sphere look?

The recent reporting of New York as trash city can make people think that this is literally about the street. To some extent, this is – but it’s not just about trash. For one, the street lighting is better in Paris, and better in Manhattan than in Cambridge, in what I think is an artifact of high density and not just wealth. For two, I don’t remember having to dodge puddles in the rain in Paris; in New York and Boston it’s a common occurrence whenever there’s heavier rain than a drizzle. For three, in the snow, Cambridge becomes mostly impassable to pedestrians, and while Paris does not get serious enough snow for shoveling to ever be a big issue, Stockholm does and the sidewalks in Central Stockholm are shoveled just fine.

The importance of Paris’s wealth and density is that Berlin is not this nice. The street lighting in Berlin is not great by Parisian standards (or, as I recall, by Stockholm ones?). Walking around Bernauer Strasse (let alone Neukölln, one of inner Berlin’s poorest neighborhoods), one never gets the feeling the area is as well-off as Nation, which is itself lower middle-class by Parisian standards. I’m saying this knowing the comparative income levels of Berlin and Paris, and perhaps it’s unfair, but from what I’ve seen, it’s fairly easy to compare France and Germany, their relative levels of public and private affluence are similar.

Public services

Most Americans know, on some level, that various public services are better in Western Europe. Life expectancy in France is higher than in the US by 3-4.5 years depending on source, and life expectancy in Germany is higher by 2-3 years. New York and Massachusetts are wealthy states and outlive the rest of the country by a margin, but they’re still not French, let alone Parisian.

Public health is there in various statistics, but the same is true of transportation. This is not even just public transportation – my recollection of the handful of times I’ve found myself in a taxi in Paris is that it’s a much more pleasant experience than the potholed American streets I’ve taken taxis or ridden with other people on. But it’s much more glaring in public transit than on roads, because public transit inherently requires more public competence. Parisians do not think the RER is particularly good, but it’s a marvel compared with any American commuter rail network, and involves a level of interagency coordination in fares, schedules, and services that is unheard of in the United States.

Worse, public transit in the United States has the reputation of a social service. In metro New York the incomes of transit and car commuters are very close, and in metro Boston transit commuters slightly outearn car commuters, but in both areas, anything that is not a segregated suburban middle-class commuter line is treated as a social service, run by managers who do not use their own system and do not consider use cases beyond their own 9-to-5 work travel.

Squalor and incompetence

Squalor and incompetence feed each other. This does not mean poverty is a moral failing or a result of weakness or stupidity. But it does mean that someone who is denied access to good work will, over a lifetime, learn to do lower-value things and, even if the job denial at 18 was entirely random or a matter of discrimination, be worse at high-value jobs by 50. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that countries with more income mobility and less persistent poverty – for examples, Canada, Australia, and the Nordic countries – do not determine people’s careers by how they did at 18 at the university admissions the way the US, UK, and France do. Talented Canadians who get worse grades in high school because of obstructive teachers will have opportunities to shine at 23 that their French or American counterparts, denied the ability to go to the most prestigious universities, will simply not get.

I bring this up because the US has a cycle of public squalor. Public-sector wages are uncompetitive, so workers are either nerds with particular personal or social interest in the field (sanitation, public transit, etc.), or people who couldn’t get better private-sector work – and this is particularly acute at the management level, especially senior management, since the best managers can leak to the private sector and get better pay there. Weak civil service in turns reduces the political will to pay civil servants high salaries, especially among politicians, who encounter senior managers much more often than they do hard-working train drivers, sanitation workers, and individual teachers.

There’s perhaps an analog of private affluence and public squalor, in which Americans are individually diligent and collectively lazy. Some of this has to be political: ambitious politicians get ahead by doing nothing and packaging it as bravery. I can name multiple national Republicans who became nationally famous by saying no to spending, and not a single Democrat who became nationally famous by successfully pushing through a major government program, such statewide universal health care or a green transition. But it’s not just politicians and their political appointees – there’s punch-clock behavior and agency turf battles below that level.

Is there a solution?

Unambiguously, yes. It’s not evident from just reading about the history of the Anglosphere, since Britain took forever to develop its civil service and thus assumes the process would be equally long in South Korea or Finland (“first 500 years are hardest“). It requires political will, and often a good model – I suspect Finland was able to develop good government so quickly because it consciously imitated Swedish governance. It doesn’t even require setting everything on fire first – South Korea and Taiwan engaged in land reform but did not kill the entire middle class the way some communist countries did.

The good news is that most public-sector workers in the US are not incompetent political appointees. The people I talk to in New York and Boston are sharp and informed and often difficult to keep up with because of how much they understand that I don’t, and for the most part I get the impression that they don’t think their colleagues are morons. The competence level on average decreases as one goes upward, partly because of negative selection of management, but it’s possible and desirable to internally promote people and raise wages to retain talent.

Fundamentally, the US needs to let go of the idea that the public is inferior to the private. But this isn’t just about what’s in Americans’ heads. They need to treat the public commons well, and I don’t just mean building monuments that look nice now and will rust in 10 years. I mean investing in public services, and paying the people who provide them competitively. Public squalor is a choice the US makes every day that it can stop making.

Urban Freeways and Rapid Transit

A ride-hailing trip today reminded me of something about freeway travel in cities – namely, it is untethered from the surface street network. Oddly enough, for a different reason this is equally true of rapid transit. The commonality to these two ways of travel is that they change the geography of the city, rather than just extending the range of walking along the usual paths as surface arterial streets and surface transit do.

Rapid transit compression

Rapid transit networks compress distances along the lines, and by the same token magnify distances in orthogonal directions. Manhattan is a good example of how this works: north of Midtown the subway only runs north-south, not east-west, so there are separate East Side and West Side cultures. Moreover, as middle-class gentrifiers are displaced by rising rents coming from even richer gentrifiers, they tend to move along subway lines, and thus people from the Upper West Side and Columbia end up in Washington Heights and Inwood.

The contrast here is with surface transit. Bus networks are far too dense to have the same effect. A citywide bus grid would offer 15 km/h transit in all directions in New York, and a tramway grid like what parts of Berlin have (and what big Eastern European cities like Prague and Budapest have) offers 15-20 km/h transit in all directions. It extends walking, in the sense that the most important throughfares probably get their own routes, or if they don’t they are closely parallel with roads with surface transit.

This is not how rapid transit works. A handful of very strong orthogonal routes can and should get rapid transit, hence the Ringbahn, M2/M6 in Paris, and the under-construction M15 – and by the same token, 125th Street in New York should get a subway extension off of Second Avenue. But that still leaves the city with a wealth of major routes that have no reason to get rapid transit, ever. Most of these are crosstown routes, for example the east-west streets of Manhattan, but in less gridded cities they can just be major streets that don’t quite fit into a regionwide radial metro network.

Rapid transit spikiness

I get a lot of pushback when I talk about this, but rapid transit encourages spiky density. This does not mean that every transit city is spiky and every spiky city is a transit city. Density in Paris within the city is fairly uniform, aided by zoning rules that prohibit high-rises even though many could succeed commercially on top of Métro transfer points or RER stations. In the other direction, some American auto-oriented cities have spiky density near transit, like San Diego’s Mission Valley or Atlanta’s Buckhead, but it’s not big enough a development to permit people to comfortably walk and take transit to all destinations.

Nonetheless, for the most part, rapid transit tends to be associated with spiky development forms, especially if it’s been built more recently and if the interstation is long (as in Vancouver, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Stockholm). This isn’t really how a pedestrian city works: pedestrians have no need for spikiness because they don’t have particular distinguished stations – at most, the corner nodes are distinguished, but that includes all corners, which are placed at far shorter intervals than subway stops.

Freeways as street bypasses

Surface transit promotes urban forms that look like an extended pedestrian city. This is equally true of surface roads designed around car access. The car was originally not supposed to take over the entire city, but merely provide convenient intra-urban transportation at a faster speed than walking. It was originally just a faster, more private, more segregated streetcar. The effect on urbanism was to reduce overall density (as did the streetcars and rapid transit in New York, which used to have inhuman overcrowding levels on the Lower East Side), but not to change the urban form beyond that.

Freeways, like rapid transit, are completely different. This does not mean that they change the city in the same way as rapid transit, just that both operate independently of the usual street grid. Freeways, like rapid transit, compress travel distances along the freeway, and simultaneously lengthen them in all other directions because of the effect of traffic congestion.

Moreover, freeways are different from rapid transit in typical alignments. They are far more land-intensive, which is why they tend to be placed in formerly marginal parts of the city. This can include the waterfront if it is originally industrial and low-value, as it was in midcentury America, rather than a place of high-end residential consumption because of the views.

Interface with the street

How does a surface street transit network interface with either rapid transit or freeways?

With rapid transit, the answer is that surface transit is slow, so it should feed rapid transit using transfers, which may be timed if the trains are not so frequent (say, 15 minutes or worse, as is common on suburban rail branches). Rapid transit should then be constructed to connect with surface transit this way, that is the stations should be at intersections with arterial corridors for bus connections.

With freeways, the answer is that often interface is impossible. San Diego provides a convenient example: there is an arterial road that’s great for buses running northward from city center toward the beachfront neighborhood of Pacific Beach. But there’s also a parallel freeway inland, so drivers mostly use the freeway, and commerce on the north-south arterial is neglected. In contrast, the main east-west arterials feeding the freeway are bustling, and one of them has of the city’s strongest buses. Buses can make stops on these arterials and then express to city center on the freeway, but on the freeway itself the buses are not very efficient since there’s minimal turnover, and chaining a few neighborhoods together on one frequent route is usually not possible.

Fare Evasion

There’s a moralistic discourse in the United States about fare evasion on public transport that makes it about every issue other than public transport or fares. It’s a proxy for lawlessness, for police racism, for public safety, for poverty. In lieu of treating it as a big intra-urban culture war, I am going to talk about best practices from the perspective of limiting revenue loss to a minimum.

This is an issue where my main methodology for making recommendations for Americans – looking at peer developed countries – is especially useful. The reason is that Americans practically never look at other countries on hot-button culture war issues, even less than (say) the lip service the center-left pays to foreign universal health care systems. Americans who support immigration liberalization practically never listen when I try bringing up the liberal work visa, asylum, and naturalization policies of Germany or Sweden. Knowing stuff about the rest of the world is a type of competence, and competence is not a factor in a culture war. The upshot is that successful policies regarding fare collection in (for example) Germany are obscure in the United States even more than policies regarding wonkier transportation issues like train frequency.

The current situation in New York

In the summer, Governor Cuomo announced a new initiative to hire 500 cops to patrol the subway. The justification for this scheme has varied depending on who was asking, but the primary goal appears to be to defeat fare evasion. Per Cuomo’s office, fare evasion costs $240 million a year on the subway and buses, about 5% of total revenue. The MTA has also mentioned a higher figure, $300 million; I do not know if the higher figure includes just urban transit or also commuter rail, where conductors routinely miss inspections, giving people free rides.

But New York fare evasion is mostly a bus problem: the rate on buses is 22%. On the subway the rate is only 4%, and there is somewhat more revenue loss on buses than on subways. This, in turn, is because bus fares are enforced by drivers, who for years have complained that fare disputes lead to assaults on them and proposed off-board fare collection as an alternative. On many buses, drivers just let it go and let passengers board without paying, especially if nearly all passengers are connecting from the subway and therefore have already paid, as on the B1 between the Brighton Beach subway station and Kingsborough Community College or on the buses to LaGuardia.

So realistically the subway fare evasion level is closer to $110 million a year. The total cost of the new patrol program is $56 million in the first year, escalating by 8% annually thanks to a pre-agreed pay hike scale. Whereas today the program is a net revenue generator if it halves subway fare evasion, a level that already seems strained, within ten years, assuming normal fare escalation, it will need to cut fare evasion by about 90%, which is a complete fantasy. A sizable proportion of riders who do not pay would just stop riding altogether, for one. The governor is proposing to spend more on fare enforcement than the MTA can ever hope to extract.

The American moral panic about fare evasion regrettably goes far beyond New York. Two years ago, BART announced that it would supplement its fare barriers with proof-of-payment inspections, done by armed cops, and lied to the public about the prevalence of such a belts-and-suspenders system. More recently, it trialed a new turnstile design that would hit passengers in the face, but thankfully scrapped it after public outcry. Boston, too, has its moral panic about fare evasion, in the form of campaigns like the Keolis Ring of Steel on commuter rail or Fare is Fair.

There is another way

In talking to Americans about fare evasion, I have found that they are generally receptive to the idea of minimizing revenue loss net of collection costs. However, what I’ve encountered more resistance about is the idea that people should just be able to walk onto a bus or train.

In the urban German-speaking world, everyone with a valid fare can walk onto a bus, tram, or train without crossing fare barriers or having to pay a driver. This system has been copied to American light rail networks, but implementation on buses and subways lags (except on San Francisco buses). In New York, the SBS system uses proof of payment (POP), but passengers still have to validate fares at bus stops, even if they already have paid, for example if they have a valid monthly pass.

In the vast majority of cities, no excuse exists to have any kind of overt fare control. Tear down these faregates. They are hostile to passengers with disabilities, they cost money to maintain, they constrain passenger flow at busy times, and they don’t really save money – evidently, New York’s subway fare evasion rate is within the range of Berlin, Munich, and Zurich. Fare enforcement should be done with POP alone, by unarmed civilian inspectors, as in Berlin. Some people will learn to dodge the inspectors, as is the case in Berlin, and that’s fine; the point is not to get fare evasion to 0%, but to the minimum level net of enforcement costs.

New York itself may have an excuse to keep the faregates: its trains are very crowded, so peak-hour inspections may not be feasible. The question boils down to how New York crowding levels compare with those on the busiest urban POP line, the Munich S-Bahn trunk. But no other American city has that excuse. Tear down these faregates.

What’s more, the fare inspection should be a low-key affair. The fine in Berlin is €60. In Paris on the RER I can’t tell – I believe it’s three figures of which the first is a 1. Inspectors who can’t make a citation without using physical violence should not work as inspectors.

Make it easy to follow the law

The most important maxim when addressing a low-level crime is to make it easy to follow the law. Mistakes happen; I’ve accidentally fare-dodged in Berlin twice, only realizing the error at the end of the trip. This is much more like parking violations or routine mistakes in tax filing.

The turnstile acts as a reminder to everyone to pay their fare, since it’s not possible to fare-dodge without actively jumping it. (I did turnstile-jump in Paris once, with a valid transfer ticket that the turnstile rejected, I think because Paris’s turnstile and magnetic ticket technology is antediluvian.) However, turnstiles are not necessary for this. A better method is to ensure most passengers have prepaid already, by offering generous monthly discounts. My fare dodges in Berlin happened once before I got monthlies and once on my way to the airport on my current trip, in a month when I didn’t get a monthly since I was only in Berlin 6 days.

New York does poorly on the metric of encouraging monthlies. Passengers need to swipe 46 times in a 30-day period to justify getting a monthly pass rather than a pay-per-ride. This is bad practice, especially for passengers who prefer to refill at a ticketing machine rather than at home or on their phone with an app, since it means passengers visit the ticketing machines more often, requiring the agency to buy more to avoid long lines. In Berlin, the breakeven point is 36 trips. In Zurich, it’s 20 trips; ZVV does whatever it can to discourage people from buying single tickets. In both cities, there are further discounts for annual tickets.

Unfortunately, the problem of indifference to monthlies on urban rail is common around the Anglosphere. Singapore has no season passes at all. In Vancouver, Cubic lobbying and a New Right campaign about fare evasion forced TransLink to install faregates on SkyTrain, and when the faregate project had predictable cost overruns, the campaigners took that as evidence the agency shouldn’t get further funding. London’s fare capping system is weekly rather than monthly – there are no monthly passes, and all fares are set at very high levels. Britain generally overuses faregates, for example on the commuter trains in London. London generally gives off an impression of treating everyone who is not a Daily Mail manager as a criminal. Paris is better, but not by much. The German-speaking world, as irrational as Britain and France about urban crime rates that are far lower than they were a generation ago, still treats the train and bus rider as a law-abiding customer unless proven otherwise.

Social fares

American transit agencies and activists resist calls for large monthly discounts, on a variety of excuses. The most common excuse is revenue loss, which is weird since realistically New York would transition to a large discount through holding the monthly fare constant and hiking the single-ride fare. It’s the second most common excuse that I wish to deal with here: social fares, namely the fact that many low-income riders don’t have the savings to prepay for an entire month.

On social fares, as on many other socioeconomic issues, it is useful for Americans to see how things work in countries with high income compression and low inequality under the aegis of center-left governments. In Paris, various classes of low-income riders, such as the unemployed, benefit from a solidarity fare discount of 50-75%. In both Paris and Stockholm, the monthly pass is flat regionwide, an intentional program of subsidizing regular riders in the suburbs, which are on average poorer than the city.

The flat fare is not really applicable to American cities, except possibly the Bay Area on BART. However, the large fare reductions to qualifying low-income riders are: a number of cities have used the same definition, namely Medicaid eligibility, and give steep discounts for bikeshare systems. On the same principle, cities and states can discount fares on buses and trains.

The right way to view fares

Fares are an important component of public transport revenue; the taxes required to eliminate fares are significant enough that there are probably better uses for the money. By the same token, the issue of fare evasion should be viewed from the lens of revenue loss, rather than that of crime and disorder. The transit agency is not an individual who is broken by being mugged of $100; it should think in terms of its own finances, not in terms of deterrence.

Nor is making it easier to follow the law going to encourage more crime – to the contrary. Transit agencies should aim at a fare system, including enforcement, that allows passengers to get on and off trains quickly, with minimum friction. Turnstiles do not belong in any city smaller than about 10 million people. The fare structure should then encourage long-term season passes, including annual passes, so that nearly all residents who take public transport have already paid. Random inspections with moderate fines are the layer of enforcement, but the point is to make enforcement largely unneeded.

And tear down the faregates.

Mauerfall

The Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago.

I feel weird about where I’m writing this post from. I was expecting to be writing this from Berlin, after visiting the commemorations. But I’m visiting Boston (and New York) right now and the connotation of talking about November 9th as a day of celebration is different from that of Germany, and within Germany the connotation is different in Berlin and elsewhere. The official unification day in Germany is German Unity Day, celebrated on October 3rd; November 9th is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht, which is why many (like Elie Wiesel) pushed Germany to pick a date other than Mauerfall.

But in Berlin, where the wall was, Mauerfall celebrations are unavoidable. The Wall itself is unavoidable. One sees it in satellite photos of the northern margins of Mitte. Walking along Bernauerstrasse, one sees the remains of the wall, a park along the Death Strip, the trace of the Tunnel 57 escape route, memorial plaques to the people killed trying to cross. There are historical exhibits farther east of early escape attempts, including one involving a small child whose mother wanted returned but could not get an exit visa to West Berlin lest she defect, leading to a diplomatic spat over who would hand over the child.

As I’m writing this, there’s an exhibit in another escape tunnel, opened to the public for the 30-year anniversary. The mayor of Berlin, a Social Democrat governing in coalition with the Greens and the communist-descended Left, is quoted as saying “One can authentically experience the courage of the women and men who tried to take people to freedom and resisted the East German regime.” This is not a peculiarity of the current mayor or the neoliberal turn of the center-left: then-mayor of West Berlin, future West German Chancellor Willy Brandt dubbed it the Wall of Shame as soon as it came up.

There’s something about the reality of East German communism that turns pacifist social democrats into America Cold Warriors. And that reality is gone now. The immigration debate in the developed world is about entry visas, not exit visas. The communists used to have the world’s second largest political and economic power for inspiration, and today they have a depopulating middle-income country of 30 million.

The Wall fell for East Germany

Branko Milanovic asked five years ago, for whom did the Wall fall?. He was writing from a pan-Eastern European context, one in which a handful of countries prospered, such as Poland and Estonia, while many only tread water, including Russia, and some are poorer than they were in the 1980s, like Ukraine and Serbia.

East Germany must be classified together with Poland in this scheme. Even articles that talk about resentment of the EU and growing racism in East Germany admit that East German economic growth since the end of the Cold War has been impressive. To the extent I can find claims that East Germany has not really been economically integrated, they come from far outside Europe: Paul Krugman argues that former East Germany got massive aid from the West in the 1990s but still depopulated, and a translated Chinese article that I can no longer find, by a cynic opposed to both democracy and the CCP, mocks East Germany for not having gone the Chinese route and not getting Chinese growth rates.

But in reality, there are parts of Berlin, such as the east and southeast sectors coming out of Mitte, where one no longer even notices the Wall. Some Eastern suburbs have high poverty and crime rates; so do many suburbs of entirely Western cities, like Paris. The pattern is that the media likes to focus on high crime rates if those suburbs are populated by ethnic minorities (as in Seine-Saint-Denis) and on the failure of the state to deliver on promised convergence if they’re populated by white people (as in Marzahn).

What of East Germany outside Berlin? The incomes there, according to Eurostat, are better than in most of provincial England and France Spain and in Southern Italy. Brandenburg, which exists as a negative space of suburbs and exurbs around Berlin, is almost as rich as provincial France’s richest regions, Rhône-Alpes and Alsace, and almost as rich as Tuscany, Lazio, and Liguria, all of which are solidly in the rich half of Italy whenever one divides Italy into a rich North and poor South. The poorest former East German state, Saxony-Anhalt, is still richer than Southern Italy and the most deprived parts of Britain, like South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, and comparable to parts of the Midlands and North that are not so often used as metonyms for regional poverty.

The depopulation is real, but should if anything have the opposite effect on incomes: ambitious workers move to the West for the higher wages of Munich and Frankfurt and Hamburg and Stuttgart, retirees and people who cannot work (perhaps because of disabilities) stay in the East and drag the market income down. And yet, with the depopulation, East Germany’s incomes are steadily converging.

Even the racism is not such a big change from before. Under communism, Vietnamese guest workers were deported if they had children. Milanovic himself talks about how beneath the rhetoric of international brotherhood, communism taught people to fear the stranger as a spy or saboteur. Today, the extreme right is getting a lot of votes in most of the East, but is far from a majority, and meanwhile the rest of the political spectrum treats them as illegitimate Nazis; Die Linke governed Thuringia as pro-immigration and froze deportations, and CDU’s record on immigration under Merkel is well-known in and outside Europe.

Cities and integration

A person nearing retirement after a life of low-productivity industrial work building Trabis is not going to have the exact same living standards as a successful engineer. A social state can redistribute incomes through high taxes and transfers; it can compress market incomes through unionization; it can improve income mobility through investment in worker training, free education, and institutions giving people second chances even if they didn’t score well on tests at age 17. Germany has done okay if not amazing well on all three measures.

There’s a rather individualistic way of looking at mobility and integration, focusing on the success of a working-class individual who through hard work, luck, or both managed to make it near the top. But we cannot all be in the top quintile of the income distribution. A better way of looking at integration is to consider the collective range of outcomes of people who grew up in the disfavored group: ethnic minorities, the bottom quintile, East Germany. Integration in this scheme means a combination of income compression and well-mixed percentile ranks within the entire population.

In this scheme, Mauerfall should be considered an unqualified success, and perhaps a model for other cases of integration. This includes interregional inequality in such countries as the UK, Italy, France, and the US, and potentially intraregional inequality in high-inequality areas such as every part of the United States.

What is the Anglosphere, Anyway?

As I’m putting more and more urban rail lines and their construction costs into one table, I have to notice trends. One that I’ve talked about for many years is that construction costs in the Anglosphere are higher than in the rest of the developed world, not just in world leader New York but also in other American cities as well as in Britain, Canada, Singapore, and so on. For years I identified this with common law, which I no longer do. Instead, I want to expand on this by asking what exactly the Anglosphere even means.

The features of the Anglosphere

Within the developed world, a subset of countries consists of the Anglosphere. The core is Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but Ireland has to be on the list too, as should Singapore and to varying extents Israel and Hong Kong. Which features separate them from the remainder of the first world:

  • For the most part, they use English as their usual language – but Israel, Hong Kong, and Quebec do not, and Singapore only does as a public language while maintaining Chinese, Malay, and Tamil as home languages.
  • They use English common law – but Quebec uses a French-derived code for civil law.
  • They have extensive right to trial by jury – but Israel and Singapore have no juries.
  • They use single-member districts in elections – but Singapore and Hong Kong are undemocratic, Israel and New Zealand use proportional representation, Ireland uses single transferable vote, and Australia’s single-member districts use instant runoff (cf. France’s single-member districts with runoffs).
  • They have higher economic inequality than other developed countries, lower taxes and government spending, and weaker unions – but there are some exceptions (e.g. Canada and Australia are less unequal than Italy, and South Korea and Japan have lower taxes than most of the Anglosphere), and moreover the ranges within both the Anglosphere and the rest of the developed world are quite wide.
  • They make extensive use of privatization and public-private partnerships for infrastructure and services – but Stockholm contracts out its urban rail whereas no major American city does, and France built one of its recent high-speed lines, the one to Bordeaux, as a PPP.
  • The smaller countries see the US, the UK, or both as inspirations for what modern prosperity looks like – but Israel compares itself with both the US and Western Europe (especially Germany), Singapore’s cultural cringe extends toward both the US/UK and bigger East Asian countries, and Hong Kong is torn between Western and Chinese models.

Every distinguishing feature of the Anglosphere can be made to correlate with high construction costs, but that tells us little, because it could be that this is just a spurious relationship, the real cause being something else about the Anglosphere. When making a claim about what makes the US, UK, and Canada so expensive to build in, it’s useful to test it against special cases – that is, countries that are part of the Anglosphere in general but fail that specific criterion.

The legal system

With respect to common law, Quebec is the ideal testing ground. Montreal and Toronto share more social and economic features than do other pairs of major cities with their respective languages. A large Toronto premium over Montreal would suggest that remaining differences, such as the legal code or maybe the peculiarities of Quebec politics, matter to construction costs.

But what we see is the opposite. In the 2000s, Toronto and Montreal both built subway extensions at pretty reasonable costs. Since then, costs have risen in both cities in tandem, placing the planned Blue Line extension in Montreal and the planned Ontario Line and Scarborough replacement in Toronto among the most expensive non-New York subways. So it’s likely that common vs. civil law makes no great difference to costs.

Electoral politics

By the same token as with the use of common versus civil law, we can look at the electoral system. Israel and New Zealand use fully proportional elections, and Israel has national lists, without any local empowerment. Both countries have cheap recent electrification projects, but when it comes to tunneling, both Tel Aviv and Auckland are on the expensive side.

Conversely, France has single-member districts with runoffs; the lack of a spoiler effect weakens political parties, but they’re still stronger than in the US, and in practice independent candidates mostly run explicitly as left or right. Any reasonable mechanism for why single-member districts should raise construction costs should apply regardless of whether these districts are elected by plurality or with runoffs (and besides which, Melbourne has extreme costs and Sydney fairly high ones). And yet, French costs are decidedly average: Grand Paris Express is the median world subway by construction costs, and other Metro extensions in Paris and other French cities are somewhat cheaper.

Unions and inequality

The political factor – the Anglosphere’s socioeconomic policy is generally to the right of that of Continental European countries – has its own special cases too. The American left and center-left has in particular seized upon the importance of health care to construction costs, since the US has high health care costs and employers, especially in the public sector, are expected to pay most of the costs of workers’ health insurance. But the UK and Canada both have largely public systems that the American left uses as inspiration for its single-payer health care plans, and the UK also has very good cost control; and yet both countries have very high infrastructure construction costs. Singapore, whose health care system is private and unequal but also low-cost, has very expensive subway construction as well.

We can similarly look at inequality in general, or at union power. The correlation between inequality and national construction costs should be fairly high, if only because the Anglosphere has high inequality as well as high construction costs. However, per Branko Milanovic’s data for after-tax-and-transfers inequality, Canada, Britain, and Australia all have slightly lower inequality than Spain, and are comparable to Greece and Italy.

Unions can affect construction costs in either direction. The American center-right and right complain that the power of public-sector unions warps public incentives and forces high construction and operating costs, citing union hostility to productivity improvements that include layoffs, or such regulations as prevailing wage laws. However, the most unionized countries in the developed world are in Scandinavia, where costs are low. The OECD has union density figures by country, and the big cleave is Scandinavia versus the rest. The Anglosphere is on the weaker side.

Perhaps the correlation must then go the other way? That is, weak unions increase costs, for example by creating a siege mentality among those workers who do have stable union jobs (including rail workers, as the industry’s economic and political situation is friendly to unionization)? But the data does not support that, either. Spain’s union density is barely higher than the US’s and much lower than Britain’s, and Greece’s is comparable to Britain’s. The available data strongly suggests that union power has no effect on construction costs, positive or negative.

Could it be privatization?

Privatization and the reliance on PPPs is the least clean of the Anglosphere’s special features – that is, it is not always used throughout the countries I identify with the Anglosphere, and conversely it may be used elsewhere, even in countries with generally left-wing economic policy like Sweden. Nonetheless, among the political, legal, social, and economic factors, it is the only one I cannot rule out.

The issue is not precisely contracting out something, as Stockholm is doing with urban rail. Rather, it is more specifically privatizing the planning aspects of the state, such as engineering. Spain relies heavily on in-house engineering and design, while the US and UK, and by imitation the rest of the Anglosphere, prefer private consultants. To the extent I have cost comparisons within the same city or country with different levels of privatization, they’re suggestive that it matters: the publicly-funded LGV Est Phase 2 cost €19 million per kilometer (with a tunnel covering 4% of the route), the PPP LGV Sud-Europe-Atlantique cost €23 million per kilometer (with no tunnels), the two lines opening within a year of each other. This is not an enormous cost difference, but accounting for the tunnel makes the cost noticeable, perhaps a factor of 1.5.

Conclusion

Overrelying on a single case is not particularly robust. In light of the similarities between costs of different lines in the same city, and even those of different cities in the same country, the N for a quantitative comparison is not large – my data table currently has 38 unique countries, and even accounting for a few misses for which I haven’t included data yet, like Israel, the number is not much larger than 40. It is not responsible to use multivariable regressions or other advanced statistical techniques in such a situation.

In that case, looking at one or two cases provides a powerful sanity check. As far as I can tell, the Anglosphere’s tendency toward privatization and using consultants, often reinforced by different English-speaking countries learning one another’s practices, could be a serious cost raiser. However, the other special features of the Anglosphere – common law, winner-take-all elections leading to two-party systems, and weak unions and welfare states – are unlikely to have a significant effect.

Construction Costs are National

I’m about to send a thinktank a draft of a table of subway construction costs, and I’d like to preview one of the most important findings from the data. This is based on 125 distinct items, totaling 2,297 kilometers – some complete, some under construction, a handful proposed. I’ve alluded to this here before, for example when writing about national traditions (US, Soviet, UK) or about Russian and Nordic costs. But the basic observation is that construction costs are not really a feature of an individual metro line, but of a city, and usually an entire country.

What this means is that if one line in Madrid is cheap, then we can expect other lines in Madrid to be cheap, as well as in the rest of Spain; if one line in London is expensive, then we can expect other lines in London to be expensive, as well as in the rest of the UK. In fact, in both countries the construction costs of metro systems in the capitals also accord with the construction costs of intercity high-speed rail: cheap in Spain, expensive in Britain, with Germany somewhere between Spain and Britain and France somewhere between Spain and Germany.

Some examples

The examples in this section are somewhat cherrypicked to be the ones with narrower ranges, but there are very few examples with truly large ranges over a similar period of time (i.e. not secular increases as in Canada). I am specifically excluding regional rail, as it tends to be more expensive per kilometer than subways.

Panama: Line 1 cost around PPP$260 million per kilometer for 53% underground construction, and Line 2 is cheaper, around $150 million, but is entirely above-ground. This is consistent with a factor-of-2.5 underground premium over elevated lines, well in line with the literature.

Greece: Athens Line 4 is €104 million per km, with construction having started recently. Thessaloniki has two lines in the database, the main line due to open next year and an extension to Kalamata due to open in 2021, and Athens is also about to wrap up an extension of Line 3 to Piraeus. All cost figures may be found here on PDF-p. 9. The two Thessaloniki projects are respectively €135 million/km and €118 million/km, the former at least including rolling stock and I believe the latter too; the Athens Line 3 extension, without rolling stock and with somewhat wider stop spacing, is much cheaper, €61 million/km, but this rises to €82 million/km with rolling stock.

Sweden: the Stockholm Metro extensions under construction all cost pretty much the same per kilometer. Three extensions are under construction at once, in three different directions; per this source, the costs per kilometer (in kronor) are 1 billion, 1.25 billion, and 1.15 billion, with the most expensive of the three involving brief underwater tunneling.

Russia: I asserted in an old post that Russian construction is expensive, with only a handful of projects. Since then I’ve found a source asserting that the entire 2011-20 program is 1.3 trillion rubles, for what appears to be 150 km, 57% underground. This is in PPP terms $364 million per km. Other costs are vaguely in that range – Railway Gazette claims the cost of boring in Moscow is (again in PPP terms) $400-600 million/km, Line 11 is around $310 million/km for underground suburban construction, one line mentioned on Railway Gazette in St. Petersburg is $310 million/km underground, another St. Petersburg line is maybe $360 million/km.

What does this mean?

That there’s correlation between different cities’ construction costs within the same country suggests the differences in costs are predominantly institutional or socio-political, rather than geological. This is further reinforced by looking at countries with very similar socio-political regimes, namely the Nordic countries: all of them are cheap, and even though Stockholm and Helsinki both have similar gneiss geology, the Oslo line I use for comparison does not (and neither does somewhat more expensive Copenhagen).

To further reinforce the institutional point, the costs of high-speed rail in different countries seem to follow the same order as the costs of metros. Spain is cheap: Ferropedia quotes construction costs below €20 million per kilometer. The UK, in contrast, just announced a cost overrun on HS2, a 540 kilometer network, to £88 billion, and even allowing for future inflation, this is maybe 7 or 8 times as expensive as in Spain. France and Germany are in between, in the same order as their metro costs. China, as far as I can tell comparable to France in its metro construction costs, has a high-speed rail construction cost range somewhat higher than France’s, mostly explainable by using more (generally avoidable) viaducts.

When Reliability Matters Above All Else

This post is about situations in which the most important thing for transportation is reliability, more so than average speed or convenience. It’s inspired by two observations, separated by a number of years: one is my own about flying into or out of Boston, the other is from a New York Times article from yesterday describing a working-class subway rider’s experience.

My observation is that over the years, I’ve used Logan Airport a number of times, sometimes choosing to connect via public transportation, which always involves a bus as the airport is not on the rail network, and other times via taxi or pickup. My choice was always influenced by idiosyncratic factors – for example, which Boston subway line my destination is on, or whether I was visiting someone with a car and free time. However, over the last eight years, a consistent trend is that I am much more likely to use the bus arriving at the airport to the city than departing. I know my own reasoning for this: the bus between South Station and the airport is less reliable than a cab, so when in a crunch, I would take a train to South Station (often from Providence) and then hail a taxi to the airport.

The New York Times article is about a work commute, leading with the following story:

Maribel Burgos barely has time to change into her uniform before she has to clock in at the McDonald’s in Lower Manhattan where she works, even though she gives herself 90 minutes to commute from her home in East Harlem.

It does not take 90 minutes to get between East Harlem and Lower Manhattan on the subway. The subway takes around half an hour between 125th Street and Bowling Green, and passengers getting on at one of the local stations farther south can expect only a few minutes longer to commute with a cross-platform change at Grand Central. Taking walking and waiting time into account, the worst case is around an hour – on average. But the subway is not particularly reliable, and people who work somewhere where being five minutes late is a firing offense have to take generous margins of error.

When is reliability the most important?

What examples can we think of in which being late even by a little bit is unacceptable? Let us list some, starting with the two motivating examples above:

  • Trips to the airport
  • Work trips for highly regimented shift work
  • Trips to school or to an external exam
  • Work trips for safety-critical work such as surgery
  • Trips to an intercity train station

In some of these cases, typically when the riders are of presumed higher social class, the system itself encourages flexibility by arranging matters so that a short delay is not catastrophic. At the airport, this involves recommendations for very early arrival, which seasoned travelers know how to ignore. At external exams, there are prior instructions of how to fill in test forms, de facto creating a margin of tolerance; schools generally do not do this and do mark down students who show up late. Doctors as far as I understand have shifts that do not begin immediately with a life-critical surgery.

But with that aside, we can come up with the following commonalities to these kinds of trips:

  • They are trips to a destination, not back home from it
  • They are trips to a fairly centralized and often relatively transit-oriented destination, such as a big workplace, with the exception of regimented shift work for retail (the original NY Times example), which pays so little nobody can afford to drive
  • They are disproportionately not peak trips, either because they are not work trips at all, or because they are work trips for work that is explicitly not 9-to-5 office work
  • They are disproportionately not CBD-bound trips

The first point means that it’s easy to miss this effect in mode choice, because people can definitely split choice between taxis and transit or between different transit modes, but usually not between cars and transit. The second means that driving is itself often unreliable, except for people who cannot afford to drive. The third means that these trips occur at a point in time in which frequency may not be very high, and the fourth means that these trips usually require transfers.

What does reliability mean?

Reliability overall means having low variance in door-to-door trip time. But for the purposes of this discussion, I want to stress again that trips to destinations that require unusual punctuality are likely to occur outside rush hour. Alas, “outside rush hour” does not mean low traffic, because midday and evening traffic in big cities is still quite bad – to take one New York example with shared lanes, the B35 steadily slows down in the first half of the day even after the morning peak is over and only speeds up to the 6 am timetable past 7 pm. Thus, there are twin problems: frequency, and traffic.

Traffic means the vagaries of surface traffic. Buses are generally inappropriate for travel that requires any measure of reliability, or else passengers have to use a large cushion. Everything about the mixed traffic bus is unreliable, from surface traffic to wait times, and bunching is endemic. Dedicated lanes improve things, but not by enough, and unreliable frequency remains a problem even on mostly segregated buses like the Silver Line to the airport in Boston.

Frequency is the harsher problem. The worker commuting from Harlem to Lower Manhattan is if anything lucky to have a straight-short one-seat ride on the 4 and 5 trains; most people who need to be on time or else are not traveling to city center and thus have to transfer. The value of an untimed transfer increases with frequency, and if every leg of the trip has routine 10-minute waits due to bunching or just low off-peak frequency guidelines, the trip gets intolerable, fast.

What’s the solution?

Bus redesigns are a big topic in the US right now, often pushed by Jarrett Walker; the latest news from Indianapolis is a resounding success, boasting 30% increase in ridership as a result of a redesign as well as other changes, including a rapid bus line. However, they only affect the issue of reliability on the margins, because they are not about reliability, but about making base frequency slightly better. New York is replete with buses and trains that run every 10-15 minutes all day, but with transfers, this is not enough. Remember that people who absolutely cannot be late need to assume they will just miss every vehicle on the trip, and maybe even wait a few minutes longer than the maximum advertised headway because of bunching.

Thus, improving reliability means a wider toolkit, including all of the following features:

  • No shared lanes in busy areas, ever – keep the mixed traffic to low-traffic extremities of the city, like Manhattan Beach.
  • Traffic signals should be designed to minimize bus travel time variance through conditional signal priority, focusing on speeding up buses that are running slow; in combination with the above point, the idea of giving a late bus with 40 passengers the same priority at an intersection as a single-occupant car should go the way of the dodo and divine rights of kings.
  • Off-peak frequency on buses and trains needs to be in the 5-8 minute range at worst.
  • Cross-platform transfers on the subway need to be timed at key transfer points, as Berlin manages routinely at Mehringdamm when it’s late and trains run every 10 minutes (not so much when they run every 5); in New York it should be a priority to deinterline and schedule a 4-way timed pulse at 53rd/7th.
  • Branch scheduling should be designed around regular gaps, rather than crowding guidelines – variation between 100% and 130% of seats occupied is less important to the worker who will be fired if late than variation between waiting 4 and waiting 8 minutes for a train.
  • Suburban transit should run on regular clockface schedules every 30, 20, or 15 minutes, with all transfers timed, including with fare-integrated commuter trains.

New York City Zoning and Subway Capacity

I got a bunch of accolades and a bunch of flaming replies over a tweetstorm imagining a bigger, better New York. Some people complained about my claim that subway trains in Brooklyn are underfull; I urge everyone to read my analysis of data from 2016 – it’s still relevant today, as the only big change is that Second Avenue Subway has reduced Upper East Side crowding. The point of this post is to demonstrate where zoning should definitely focus on adding more apartments, to fill trains that are not yet full.

The map

Instead of using the current subway map, let us start with a deinterlined map:

The reason for using this map is that it’s cleaner than the real map, since there is no track-sharing between routes of different colors, and not much route-sharing (one color local, one express). Getting from here to this map is cheap but not free, as it requires certain junction rebuilds, especially on the 2/3. I ask that my commenters resist the temptation to argue over the details of this map, since the point about zoned capacity does not really depend on questions like whether the E runs local in Queens and the F runs express or the reverse.

Where there is capacity

In 2016, three directions on the subway were truly at capacity, surpassing 4 standees per square meter: the 2/3 and 4/5 coming into Midtown from Uptown, and the L. The analysis looks at crowding on trains entering the Manhattan core, so it lumps lines from Queens based on which tunnel they enter from, which underestimates crowding on the E, since it shares tracks with the under-capacity M. Counted properly, the express Queens Boulevard trains should be viewed as near or at capacity as well, the F having 3.33 standees per square meter and the E having somewhat more.

Additional lines with capacity crunches, with about 3 standees per square meter or more, include the A/D coming in from Uptown, the 6, and the Astoria Line (then the N/Q, now the N/W). The 1 and 7 trains have capacity crunches as well in outlying areas: the 7 is overcrowded until it hits the transfer points to the E/F and N/W but has plenty of space in Long Island City, and the 1 is fairly crowded north of the junction with the express trains and then unloads passengers onto the overcrowded 2/3. These areas should not be deemed to have much spare capacity until such time as operations on the subway improve, permitting higher frequency and eventually more lines.

In contrast, the remaining lines have space, often plenty of space. Everything in Brooklyn except the L and to some extent the J/M/Z is underfull: these trains have high frequency as determined by crowding guidelines at the Uptown or Queens end, but in Brooklyn there are fewer people today so the ridership is weaker. The local lines on the Upper West Side both have plenty of space on the trains as well as space on the tracks for more trains if need be. The 7 downstream of Queensboro Plaza has plenty of space, and the local Queens Boulevard trains downstream of Jackson Heights have nowhere for passengers to transfer to an overcrowded express service.

Since I’m relying on data from 2016, there’s no accounting for Second Avenue Subway. Even then, the 4/5 was only the third most overcrowded trunk line entering the Manhattan core, and it’s likely that there’s additional capacity coming from the new line. There’s certainly space on the tracks for more trains on Second Avenue, and one of the goals of deinterlining specifically is to make it feasible to run more service on this line, which currently only runs a train every 6-8 minutes at rush hour.

The map of where New York could add housing

The map excludes parts of Lower and Midtown Manhattan where the highest and best use is commercial rather than residential. But the boundaries there are deliberately crude: Downtown Brooklyn, NYU, and the Meatpacking District are drawn, to avoid excessive fragmentation of the drawn area, while Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen are excluded as too close to Midtown.

The map also does not look at considerations other than capacity. Some of the highlit areas on the Upper East and West Sides and Lower East Side are already built to very high density, at least on the avenues and major streets; these areas should be the template of how the rest of the city should look. At the other end, East New York has too weak demand for massive construction, especially if everything to its west is upzoned.

However, large swaths of desirable, close-in areas with relatively short buildings are highlit. Rich inner Brooklyn neighborhoods like Park Slope and South Brooklyn are currently built to missing middle density, with a floor area ratio of about 1.5 away from corner lots. A more appropriate floor area ratio in these neighborhoods is 12, corresponding to tapering buildings in the 20-30 story range, as on the avenues on the Upper East and West Sides. Park Slope is half an hour from Midtown by subway, and less than that from Lower Manhattan. The population of these neighborhoods is perhaps 150,000, and should be more than a million given their proximity to job centers.

Subway deserts and future additions

The map is designed to work with more or less the same service as today, maybe with slightly more frequency on lines that could handle it easily (that is, Second Avenue Subway). But what about future service? The L train is overcrowded, but only runs 19 trains per hour at the peak due to electrical limitations, and could go up to 26 with better electrical capacity, or for that matter lighter trains drawing less power during acceleration. Further extensions of Second Avenue Subway could more effectively relieve pressure off the 4/5, to the point of creating more capacity in the Bronx, which remains well below peak population. Commuter rail modernization opens up large swaths of Queens. Decades in the making extensions on Nostrand and Utica fill in the transit desert in southeast Brooklyn, currently served by buses that nominally come every 2 minutes and in practice comes in platoons of 4 every 8 minutes.

As with the map above, a hypothetical map of development sites assuming reasonable subway expansion includes areas that would be unlikely to actually see new development. Williamsburg and Greenpoint may turn into forests of towers given the opportunity, but in neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay and East Flatbush developers might well stick to the occasional 6-to-10-story mid-rise building that would not look out of place in Paris. In Eastern Queens, the desired density is probably spiky, with clusters of tall buildings around LIRR stations surrounded by single-family houses and missing middle, much like the structure of density in Toronto and Vancouver.

Numerology in Transportation

This post is a cautionary note for everyone who proposes, advocates for, or plans public transportation: please avoid numerology. What I mean by numerology is, it’s easy to target round numbers for trip time, ridership, capacity, or cost, but this may not be based on good design principles. Round numbers are memorable, which makes them attractive for marketing, but quite often the roundness percolates from public communications to system design, and then it tends to lead to bad results: excessive amounts of money spent on meeting a particular trip time, useful scope cut from a project to stay under a too tight budget, and general overpromising.

I’m tagging this incompetence because it is always bad, but even people who are generally good may unwittingly engage in numerology. I’m pretty confident I’ve done this in previous posts by accident. So I’m exhorting myself and good transit advocates and not just the usual politicians and power brokers.

10x and tech

The worst numerology that I’ve seen in technology is not specifically in transportation, but in the software industry of the American West Coast, which is obsessed with the concept of 10x, that is 10 times as good as normal. The most common variation of this is the 10x engineer, that is the programmer who gets 10 times the productivity of the average programmer, but (by implication) does not demand 10 times the average salary, or even 1.5 times the average salary.

Thanks to Elon Musk, the same concept of 10x has jumped into the transportation discourse – Musk promises a 10x reduction in construction costs for tunneling. It goes without saying he cannot deliver, but the telling thing here is the origin of the number. It does not come from some deep analysis finding that California’s tunneling costs are about 10 times as high as those of some target best practice, or even as high as those of a new method. (In fact, California is around 7 times as expensive to build in as Madrid or Seoul, the world’s cheapest cities to build in, so 10 is at the limit of plausibility.) Rather, the number came first: innovation in American tech is supposed to come in orders of magnitude, not continuous improvements, so the target was 10x, just as SpaceX’s target for space launch cost reduction is 10x even though so far the reality is maybe 1.5x or 2x.

The primary problem here is overpromising. Factor-of-10 improvements are almost nonexistent. The one example I am comfortable with in transportation is the tunneling costs in New York specifically, and even that is a problem that only emerged with the latest project, Second Avenue Subway Phase 2; Phase 1 and the 7 extension are off by a factor of 6 or 7 off the rest-of-world average (and about 15-20 off the very cheapest in the world), and East Side Access is a problem of overbuilding more than anything so I can’t even give it a specific factor. Many other things in New York are too expensive, but generally by a factor ranging from 1.5 to 3. Cutting operating costs in half, cutting rolling stock procurement costs by a third, and so on are both laudable goals, but 10x rhetoric skips them entirely. Thus comes the secondary problem with 10x-oriented numerology: just as it rounds up factor-of-7 improvements and overpromises a factor of 10, it completely ignores factor-of-2 improvements as they simply cannot plausibly be stretched to an order of magnitude.

Schedules

It is common in marketing to promise round numbers for schedules: 2-hour trip times, 3-hour trip times, etc. This sometimes percolates into the planning world behind the scenes, leading to planning around discrete trip times in integer numbers of hours.

In France it’s a commonplace that high-speed rail is only competitive with air travel if the trains take 3 hours or less. The reality is very different on two levels: first, mode share is a continuous function of trip time, so the difference between (say) 2:55 and 3:05 cannot be very big. And second, in 2009, rail had a 54% mode share of all Paris-Toulon trips, on which the TGV takes 4:08-4:20, compared with 12% for air; the TGV held its own as far east as Cannes (34%), 5:26 away, and Nice (30%), 5:57 away. The 3-hour rule is alluring and may be true in one specific social class, namely airline and railway managers, but the numerology here makes it easy to stick to it even if the breakeven point keeps creeping up to 3:30, 4:00, 4:30, 5:00.

A more benign example of numerology is the 30-30-30 plan in Connecticut. Governor Lamont has proposed far-reaching investments to speed up trains to take half an hour on each of three segments: New York-Stamford, Stamford-New Haven, New Haven-Hartford. This is more or less feasible: a reasonable level of investment would reduce New York-New Haven to about 1:03 on express trains, with Stamford near the exact midpoint. However, the target trip times remain numerological: there is no obvious reason why 1:00 is so much better than 1:10. So far 30-30-30 has run into resistance from incompetent traditional railroaders, but it’s easy to imagine a future in which the governor approves the plan over their objections, and then has to decide how much money to spend on the final few minutes’ worth of speedup to meet the stated goals.

In contrast with numerology based on round numbers, there is a much more solid planning paradigm based on trip times a few minutes short of a round number. In that case, the trip time is a round number including turnaround time, which makes it easy to run trains on a clockface schedule. Differences like 1:05 vs. 0:55 are not important enough to bother passengers about, but differences in frequency between hourly and every 1:10 are critical – passengers can remember 9:05, 10:05, 11:05, 12:05 much better than they can 9:05, 10:15, 11:25, 12:35. Therefore, the integrated timed transfer plan of Switzerland and the Netherlands aims at trip times that are not very memorable, but that together with connection or turnaround time enable memorable schedules.

Costs

In addition to the tech industry’s 10x concept, more traditional cost estimations can suffer from numerology as well. Here it is important to distinguish relative from absolute costs. Relative costs are relative to an already-decided budget; in that case, it is useful to force agencies to stay within their promised costs, to discourage lowballing costs in the future (“strategic misrepresentation” in Bent Flyvbjerg’s language). Absolute costs are about numbers that sound big or small, and in that case, there is no good reason to force costs to hew to a specific number.

In the case of absolute costs, politicians may fit the program to the cost in either direction. Reportedly, the size of the stimulus bill passed by the Obama administration at the beginning of 2019 was designed to be in the hundreds of billions and avoid the dreaded trillion number, even though some of the administration’s advisors argued for $1.2-1.8 trillion. In transportation, I do not know of specific examples, but there is so much political pressure among various people who think they’re fiscally conservative that there’s bound to be pressure to go underneath a round number, in other words a political equivalent of pricing a product at $99 instead of $100.

In the other direction, visionaries may think they’re being bold by making up a high number, usually a catch round  figure like $1 trillion for US-wide infrastructure. The numerology here operates on a different level from the relatively small band of just under a limit vs. just over a limit: here the main problem is that the cost figure is arbitrary, and then the list of projects to be funded is chosen to match it. If there aren’t enough good projects, agencies will either bloat the budgets of projects by lading them with semi-related spending, for example bundling a light rail line with  street reconstruction and tree planting, or go forward with weak proposals that would otherwise not be funded.

How Fast New York Regional Rail Could Be Part 3

In the third and last installment of my series posting sample commuter rail schedules for New York (part 1, part 2), let’s look at trains in New Jersey. This is going to be a longer post, covering six different lines, namely all New Jersey Transit lines that can go to Penn Station, including one that currently does not (Raritan Valley) but could using dual-mode locomotives.

As on Metro-North and the LIRR, very large improvements can be made over current schedules, generally reducing trip times by 30-43%, without straightening a single curve. However, electrification is required, as is entirely new rolling stock, as the electric locomotives used by NJ Transit are ill-fit for a fast schedule with many stops. Moreover, all low platforms must be raised to provide level boarding and some must be lengthened to avoid overuse of selective door opening, which may require a few new grade separations on the North Jersey Coast Line. As a first-order estimate, 50-something trainsets are required, each with 8-12 cars. This is not quite free, but the cost is low single-digit billions: about $1.5 billion for trains, maybe $400 million for 160 km of electrification, and around $700 million for what I believe is 70 low- or short-platform stations.

The timetables

Here is a spreadsheet detailing speed zones for all New Jersey Transit lines passing through Newark. In support of previous posts, here are other similar spreadsheets:

  • New Haven Line (express schedule, add stop penalties as appropriate for locals) – the spreadsheet is about a minute too fast, missing some slowdowns in the terminal, and the version in my post (part 1) corrects for that
  • Harlem Line
  • Hudson Line locals and expresses
  • LIRR Main Line (including Port Jefferson, not covered in my posts)

Line by line schedules

The New Jersey Transit timetables are less consistent than the east-of-Hudson ones; I attempted to look at local midday off-peak outbound trains whenever possible.

Northeast Corridor

Station Current time Future time
New York 0:00 0:00
Secaucus 0:09 0:06
Newark Penn 0:18 0:10
Newark South Street — 0:12
Newark Airport 0:24 0:15
North Elizabeth 0:27 0:17
Elizabeth 0:30 0:19
Linden 0:35 0:23
Rahway 0:39 0:25
Metropark 0:45 0:29
Metuchen 0:49 0:32
Edison 0:54 0:36
New Brunswick 0:59 0:39
Jersey Avenue 1:03 0:41
Monmouth Junction — 0:47
Princeton Junction 1:16 0:53
Hamilton 1:23 0:58
Trenton 1:35 1:01

This fastest rush hour express trains do the trip in 1:12-1:13, and Amtrak’s Regionals range between 0:55 and 1:04, with trains making all nominal Amtrak stops (including rarely-served New Brunswick and Princeton Junction) taking 1:15.

North Jersey Coast Line

 

Station Current time Future time
New York 0:00 0:00
Secaucus 0:09 0:06
Newark Penn 0:19 0:10
Newark South Street — 0:12
Newark Airport 0:24 0:15
North Elizabeth — 0:17
Elizabeth 0:29 0:19
Linden 0:35 0:23
Rahway 0:39 0:25
Avenel 0:45 0:29
Woodbridge 0:48 0:31
Perth Amboy 0:55 0:34
South Amboy 1:00 0:37
Aberdeen 1:08 0:42
Hazlet 1:12 0:45
Middletown 1:19 0:49
Red Bank 1:25 0:53
Little Silver 1:29 0:56
Monmouth Park — 0:59
Long Branch 1:39-1:42 1:01
Elberon 1:46 1:04
Allenhurst 1:50 1:07
Asbury Park 1:54 1:09
Bradley Beach 1:57 1:11
Belmar 2:01 1:14
Spring Lake 2:05 1:16
Manasquan 2:09 1:19
Point Pleasant Beach 2:15 1:22
Bay Head 2:24 1:23

 

In electric territory, that is up to Long Branch, my schedule cuts 38% from the trip time, but in diesel territory the impact of electrification nearly halves the trip time, cutting 48%.

Raritan Valley Line

Station Current time Future time
New York (0:00) 0:00
Secaucus (0:09) 0:06
Newark Penn (0:18) 0:10
Newark South Street — 0:12
Union 0:27 0:17
Roselle Park 0:30 0:19
Cranford 0:35 0:22
Garwood 0:38 0:24
Westfield 0:41 0:25
Fanwood 0:46 0:28
Netherfields 0:49 0:30
Plainfield 0:53 0:32
Dunellen 0:58 0:35
Bound Brook 1:03 0:39
Bridgewater 1:06 0:41
Somerville 1:12 0:44
Raritan 1:15 0:47
North Branch 1:21 0:50
Whitehouse 1:28 0:54
Lebanon 1:34 0:58
Annandale 1:39 1:01
High Bridge 1:52 1:04

 

The Raritan Valley Line does not run through to Manhattan but rather terminates at Newark Penn because of capacity constraints on the mainline, so the New York-Newark trip times are imputed from Northeast Corridor trains. So really the trip time difference is 1:34 versus 0:54, a reduction of 42% in the trip time thanks to electrification.

Morristown Line

Station Current time Future time
New York 0:00 0:00
Secaucus 0:10 0:06
Newark Broad Street 0:19 0:11
Newark 1st Street — 0:13
East Orange — 0:15
Brick Church 0:25 0:17
Orange 0:28 0:19
Highland Avenue — 0:21
Mountain — 0:23
South Orange 0:33 0:25
Maplewood 0:38 0:27
Millburn 0:42 0:29
Short Hills 0:45 0:31
Summit 0:49-0:50 0:34
Chatham 0:55 0:39
Madison 0:59 0:41
Convent 1:03 0:44
Morristown 1:07 0:47
Morris Plains 1:11 0:50
Mount Tabor 1:18 0:54
Denville 1:21 0:56
Dover 1:32 1:00
Mount Arlington 1:40 1:06
Lake Hopatcong 1:45 1:09
Netcong 1:53 1:12
Mount Olive 1:58 1:15
Hackettstown 2:14 1:22

 

This timetable is cobbled from two different train runs, as electric wires only run as far out as Dover, so trains from New York only go as far as Dover, and trains to Hackettstown serve Hoboken instead. Observe the 35% reduction in trip time in electric territory despite making a few more stops, and the 48% reduction in trip time in diesel territory.

Gladstone Branch

Station Current time Future time
New York (0:00) 0:00
Secaucus (0:10) 0:06
Newark Broad Street (0:19) 0:11
Newark 1st Street — 0:13
East Orange 0:24 0:15
Brick Church 0:26 0:17
Orange 0:29 0:19
Highland Avenue 0:31 0:21
Mountain 0:33 0:23
South Orange 0:36 0:25
Maplewood 0:39 0:27
Millburn 0:42 0:29
Short Hills 0:45 0:31
Summit 0:50 0:34
New Providence 0:55 0:37
Murray Hill 0:58 0:40
Berkeley Heights 1:02 0:43
Gillette 1:05 0:46
Stirling 1:08 0:48
Millington 1:11 0:50
Lyons 1:14 0:53
Basking Ridge 1:17 0:56
Bernardsville 1:20 0:57
Far Hills 1:26 1:02
Peapack 1:30 1:06
Gladstone 1:37 1:08

 

As the line is entirely electrified, the time saving is only 30%. Note that Gladstone Branch trains do not run through to Penn Station except at rush hour, so I’m imputing New York-Newark Broad trip times using the Morristown Line.

Montclair-Boonton Line

Station Current time Future time
New York (0:00) 0:00
Secaucus (0:09) 0:06
Newark Broad Street (0:20) 0:11
Newark 1st Street — 0:13
Newark Park Street — 0:15
Watsessing Avenue 0:26 0:18
Bloomfield 0:28 0:19
Glen Ridge 0:31 0:21
Bay Street 0:34 0:23
Walnut Street 0:37 0:24
Watchung Avenue 0:40 0:26
Upper Montclair 0:43 0:28
Mountain Avenue 0:45 0:30
Montclair Heights 0:47 0:31
Montclair State U 0:50 0:33
Little Falls 0:56 0:37
Wayne-Route 23 1:00 0:40
Mountain View-Wayne 1:02 0:43
Lincoln Park 1:07 0:46
Towaco 1:11 0:49
Boonton 1:18 0:53
Mountain Lakes 1:22 0:56
Denville 1:27 0:59
Dover 1:34 1:04

 

Beyond Dover, a handful of evening trains continue to Hackettstown. Interestingly, the saving from electrification is only 32% – and the train I drew the current schedule from is a Hoboken diesel train. Electric trains run from New York to Montclair State University, but are for some reason actually slightly slower today than the Hoboken diesels on the shared Newark-MSU segment. I suspect that like the LIRR, NJ Transit does not timetable electric trains to be any faster than diesels on shared segments even though their performance is better.

Discussion

There are specific patterns to where my schedule outperforms the existing one by the largest margin and where it does so by the smallest margin.

Terminal zone

Between New York and Newark, I am proposing that trains take 10-11 minutes, down from 18-20 today, cutting 45% from the trip time. This comes from several factors. The first is avoiding unnecessary slowdowns in terminal zones: Penn Station should be good for about 50 km/h, ideally even more if there are consistent enough platform assignments that the turnouts can be upgraded to be faster; Newark should not impose any speed limit whatsoever beyond that of right-of-way geometry.

The second is increasing superelevation and cant deficiency. The worst curve is the turn from Harrison to Newark; its radius is just shy of 500 meters, good for around 110 km/h at normal cant and cant deficiency (150 mm each), or even 120 km/h if the cant is raised to 200 mm in support of higher-speed intercity service. But the current speed limit is a blanket 45 mph, even on Amtrak, whose cant deficiency is fine. The Newark approach is then even slower, 35 mph, for no reason. It’s telling that on my schedule, the Secaucus-Newark speedup is even greater than the New York-Secaucus speedup, despite the Penn Station interlocking morass.

The third is reducing schedule padding. The schedules appear extremely padded for what NJ Transit thinks is a capacity problem but is not really a problem in the midday off-peak period. Between 9 am and noon, 18 trains depart Penn Station going west, 10 on the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast and 8 on the Morris and Essex Lines and the Montclair Line.

Unelectrified lines

On lines without electrification, the time savings from electrification are considerable, with the exception of the Boonton Line. This is especially notable on the tails of the North Jersey Coast and Morristown Lines, both of which allow for 48% reductions in trip time, nearly doubling the average speed.

This is related to the issue of low platforms. These tails have low platforms, whereas the inner segment of the Raritan Valley Line (up to Westfield), which already has mostly high platforms, does not exhibit the same potential speed doubling. Outer segments may also not be well-maintained, leading to non-geometric speed limits. Between Long Branch and Bay Head the tracks are fairly straight, but the existing speed limits are very low, at most 60 mph with most segments limited to 40 or even 25 or less.

Upgraded lines

In contrast with the enormous slowdowns between New York and Newark and on unelectrified tails, the workhorse inner segments (including the entire Northeast Corridor Line) radiating out of Newark are only about 1.5 times as slow as they can be, rather than twice as slow. The Gladstone Branch, which runs EMUs rather than electric locomotive-hauled trains, manages to be only about 1.37 times as slow, in large part courtesy of low platforms.

Of course, 1.5 times as slow is still pretty bad. This is because no line on NJ Transit is truly modern, that is running all EMUs serving high platforms. But the electric lines manage to be less bad than the diesel lines, and the suburbs less bad than the New York-Newark segment with its excessive timetable padding and terminal zone slowdowns.

How to get there from here

NJ Transit has a problem: perhaps unaware of the new FRA regulations, it just ordered bilevel EMUs compliant with the old rather than new regulations. If it can cancel the order, it should do so, and instead procure standard European EMUs stretched to the larger clearances of the American (or Nordic) railway network.

Simultaneously, it should complete electrification of the entire Penn Station-feeding system, including the Raritan Valley Line even though right now it does not run through to New York. This includes some outer branches with low traffic, not enough to justify electrification on their own; that is fine, since the 31 km of wire between Dover and Hackettstown, 25 km between Long Branch and Bay Head, 27 between Raritan (where semi-frequent service ends) and High Bridge, and 30 between MSU and Denville permit a uniform or mostly uniform fleet with no diesel under catenary. EMUs are far more reliable than anything that runs on diesel, and if NJ Transit retires diesels and only runs EMUs on the most congested segment of the network, it will be able to get away with far less schedule padding.

In Boston, at Transit Matters we’ve likewise recommended full systemwide electrification, but with priority to lines that connect to already-electric infrastructure, that is the Stoughton branch of the Providence Line, the Fairmount Line (which is short enough to use Northeast Corridor substations), and subsequently the entire South Station-feeding system. By the same token, it is more important to electrify the outer edges of the Morristown and North Jersey Coast Lines and the entire Raritan Valley Line than to electrify the Erie lines not analyzed in this post, since the Erie lines’ infrastructure points exclusively toward Hoboken and not New York.

In addition to electrification, NJ Transit must replace all low platforms with high platforms. This should generally be doable with ramp access rather than elevators to save money, in which case a double-track station should be doable for about $10 million, if Boston and Philadelphia costs are any indication. In addition to speeding up general boarding, high platforms permit wheelchair users to board trains without the aid of an attendant or conductor.

All of this costs money – the infrastructure should cost somewhat more than $1 billion, and new rolling stock should cost about $1.5 billion at European costs, or somewhat more if there’s an American premium for canceling the in-progress contract for inferior equipment. But none of this costs a lot of money. New Jersey is ready to sink $2.75 billion of state money as part of an $11 billion Gateway tunnel that would do nothing for capacity (since it four-tracks the tunnel but not the surface segments to Newark); it should be ready to spend about the amount of money on a program that is certain to cut 25-50% off of people’s travel time and perhaps halve operating costs.