I’m at InnoTrans this week, which means I get to both see a lot of new trainsets and talk to vendors for things I am interested in. Those are interesting conversations and much of the content will make it to our upcoming report on high-speed rail in the Northeast and to some ETA reports. But then, in broad stroke, the presentations about the trains here have deeply bothered me, because of how they interact with the issue of on-rail competition. The EU has an open access mandate, so that state-owned and private railways can compete by running trains on tracks throughout the Union, with separation of operations and infrastructure (awkwardly, state railways do both but there are EU regulations prohibiting favoritism, with uneven enforcement). As a result, I’m seeing a lot of pitches geared specifically for potential open access operators, all of which remind me why I’m so negative about the whole concept: it treats infrastructure as a fixed thing and denigrates the idea that it could ever be improved, while enthroning airline-style business analysis.
Proponents of the model cite higher ridership and lower fares due to the introduction of competition in Italy and Spain, but even then, it’s never really invented anything new, and only gotten some city pairs in those two countries to the service quality that integrated state-provided services have always had in France and Germany. In effect, the EU is mandating a dead-end system of managing trains and making a collective decision not to invest in what worked – namely, building and running high-speed lines.
For people unfamiliar with the argument, I wrote a year ago about TGV ridership and traffic modeling. The TGV overperforms a model trained on Shinkansen ridership, which can be explained based on lower fares, leisure travel to the Riviera, and underdeveloped air competition in small metro areas whose residents mostly drive to larger ones to fly. Relative to the same model, Italian and Spanish ridership underperformed the TGV before competition, and rose to roughly match the TGV or be slightly deficient after competition. So competition did lead to growth in ridership, as the competitors added service and lowered fares – but it only created what the French state did by itself. The German state seems to have French-like results: the trains here are much slower than in France, but relative to that, ridership seems to be in line with a TGV-trained model on the handful of city pairs for which I have any data.
This is causing quite a lot of the buzz in the intercity rail industry in Europe to center cross-border competition and new entrants. But this is, judging by the examples the proponents of competition look up to, not creating anything new. It’s not moving rail forward. It’s just filling in gaps that some state-owned railways – but not the largest two – have in their operations.
And worse, it’s making the long-term issues of intercity rail in Europe worse. There’s practically no cross-border high-speed rail construction in Europe, nor any serious push for making it happen. After a great deal of activism by Jon Worth (and others), the European Commission is announcing regulatory measures in its agenda, starting with passenger rights in case of delays. Physical construction is nowhere on the horizon, nor is there any serious advocacy for (say) a Paris-Frankfurt high-speed line or a Bordeaux-Basque Country one. This is a recent development: in the 2000s there was more optimism about high-speed rail, leading to plans like Perpignan-Figueres. But since then, the TEN-T corridor plans turned into low-speed lines and vaporware, and there’s no real interest in fixing that.
Instead, the interest is in letting the private sector lead. State-built high-speed railways – more or less the only high-speed railways – are not in fashion. The private sector is not going to step in and build its own (despite the sad Hyperloop capsule on display at InnoTrans), but instead look for underserved city pairs to come into, competing with state railways. It’s a story of business analysts using techniques brought in from the airline industry rather than one of infrastructure builders.
And it’s exactly those airline-imitating business analysts who are why RENFE, FS, and Eurostar underprovided service to begin with. The airline world lives off of segmenting the market; there are periodic attempts at all-business class airlines, and low-cost carriers entering and exiting the market frequently. It does not build its own infrastructure, not think in terms of things that could work if the infrastructure were a little bit better. A railway that thinks in the same terms might still build, but will not build in coordination with what it runs. It will do the exact opposite of what Switzerland has done with its tight integration of infrastructure and operations planning; therefore, it will get results inferior to those of Switzerland or even France and Germany.
The trains on display at InnoTrans announce proudly that they are homologated for cross-border travel, listing the countries they can operate in. The main high-speed rail vendors here – Siemens, Hitachi, Talgo, Alstom – all talk about this, explicitly; Alstom had a presentation about the Avelia Horizon, awkwardly given in an American accent while talking about how the double-decker cars with 905 mm seat pitch (Shinkansen: 1 meter) minimize track access charges per seat.
In contrast, I have not seen anything about building new lines. I have not seen booths by firms talking about their work building LGVs or NBSes. I have not seen anything by ADIF selling its expertise in low-cost construction; there are some private engineering consultants with booths, but I haven’t seen ADIF, and the French state section of the conference didn’t at all center French construction techniques. The states that have figured out how to build high-speed rail efficiently seem uninterested in doing more with it than just completing their capital-to-provinces networks; even Germany is barely building. Naturally, they’re also uninterested in pitching their construction, even though they do do some public-sector consulting (SNCF does it routinely for smaller French cities). It’s as if the construction market is so small they’re not even going to bother.
Every other booth at the conference talks about innovation with so many synonyms that they swamp what the firm actually does. But beneath the buzzwords, what I’m seeing, at least as far as physical infrastructure goes, is the exact opposite of innovation. I’m seeing filling in small gaps caused by last generation’s bad airline imitation with a different kind of airline imitation, and nothing that moves intercity rail forward.
There’s a report by Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood, called Foundations, about flagging British growth, blaming among other things high construction costs for infrastructure and low housing production. The reaction on Bluesky seems uniformly negative, for reasons that I don’t think are fair (much of it boils to distaste for YIMBYism). I don’t want to address the construction cost parts of it for now, since it’s always more complicated and we do want to write a full case on London for the Transit Costs Project soon, but I do want to say something about the point about YIMBYism: dominant capitals and other rich cities (such as Munich or New York) have notable wage premiums over the rest of the country, but this seems to be the case in NIMBY environments more than in YIMBY ones. In fact, in South Korea and Japan, the premium seems rather low: the dominant capital attracts more domestic migration and becomes larger, but is not much richer than the rest of the country.
The data
In South Korea and Japan, what I have is Wikipedia’s lists of GDP per capita by province or prefecture. The capital city’s entire metro area is used throughout, comprising Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi in Korea, and Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama in Japan. In South Korea, the capital region includes 52.5% of GDP and 50.3% of population, for a GDP per capita premium of 4.4% over the country writ large, and (since half the country is metro Seoul) 9.2% over the rest of the country. In Japan, on OECD numbers, the capital region, labeled as Southern Kanto, has a 14.5% premium over the entire country, rising to around 19% over the rest of the country.
In contrast, in France, Ile-de-France’s premium from the same OECD data is 63% over France, rising to about 90% over provincial France. In the UK, London’s premium is 71% over the entire country and 92% over the entire country excluding itself; if we throw in South East England into the mix, the combined region has a premium of 38% over the entire country, and 62% over the entire country excluding itself.
Now, GDP is not the best measure for this. It’s sensitive to commute volumes and the locations of corporate headquarters, for one. That said, British, French, Korean and Japanese firms all seem to prefer locating firms in their capitals: Tokyo and Seoul are in the top five in Fortune 500 headquarters (together with New York, Shanghai, and Beijing), and London and Paris are tied for sixth, with one company short of #5. Moreover, the metro area definitions are fairly loose – there’s still some long-range commuting from Ibaraki to Tokyo or from Oise to Paris, but the latter is too small a volume to materially change the conclusion regarding the GDP per capita premium. Per capita income would be better, but I can only find it for Europe and the United States (look for per capita net earnings for the comparable statistic to Eurostat’s primary balance), not East Asia; with per capita income, the Ile-de-France premium shrinks to 45%, while that of Upper Bavaria over Germany is 39%, not much lower, certainly nothing like the East Asian cases.
Inequality
Among the five countries discussed above – Japan, Korea, the UK, Germany, France – the level of place-independent inequality does not follow the same picture at all. The LIS has numbers for disposable income, and Japan and Korea both turn out slightly more unequal than the other three. Of course, the statistics in the above section are not about disposable income, so it’s better to look at market income inequality; there, Korea is indeed far more equal than the others, having faced so much capital destruction in the wars that it lacks the entrenched capital income of the others – but Japan has almost the same market income inequality as the three European examples (which, in turn, are nearly even with the US – the difference with the US is almost entirely redistribution).
So it does not follow, at least not at first pass, that YIMBYism reduces overall inequality. It can be argued that it does and Japan and South Korea have other mechanisms that increase market income inequality, such as weaker sectoral collective bargaining than in France and Germany; then again, the Japanese salaryman system keeps managers’ wages lower than in the US and UK and so should if anything produce lower market income inequality (which it does, but only by about three Gini points). But fundamentally, this should be viewed as an inequality-neutral policy.
Discussion
What aggressive construction of housing in and around the capital does appear to do is permit poor people to move to or stay in the capital. European (and American) NIMBYism creates spatial stratification: the middle class in the capital, the working class far away unless it is necessary for it to serve the middle class locally. Japanese and Korean YIMBYism eliminate this stratification: the working class keeps moving to (poor parts of) the capital region.
What it does, at macro level, is increase efficiency. It’s not obvious to see this, since neither Japan nor Korea is a particularly high-productivity economy; then again, the salaryman system, reminiscent of the US before the 1980s, has long been recognized as a drag on innovation, so YIMBYism in effect countermands to some extent the problems produced by a dead-end corporate culture. It also reduces interregional inequality, but this needs to be seen less as more opportunity for Northern England as a region and more as the working class of Northern England as people moving to become the working class of London and getting some higher wages while also producing higher value for the middle class so that inequality doesn’t change.
The 2025-29 capital plan is out, and it is not good. There’s an outline of an ETA report to be released soon going over issues like accessibility, rolling stock costs, and the new faregates. But for now, I’d like to just focus on a high-level issue and how it relates to the subway’s history: State of Good Repair. The capital plan has a summary history of past capital plans on PDF-page 8, and it calls the 1990s and 2000s an era of underinvestment and deferred maintenance, the exact opposite of reality. It treats 2017 as a keystone year for system renewal, which it was not; it was, however, the year current MTA chair Janno Lieber was hired as the head of MTA Construction and Development (formerly Capital Construction). In effect, the plan falsifies the history of the system in order to treat the current leadership as saviors, in service of a plan to spend more money than in 2020-24 while having less to show for it, washing it all with the nebulous promise of State of Good Repair.
The history of State of Good Repair
Traditionally, capital investment is conceived as going to expansion. In New York in the first two thirds of the 20th century, this meant new subway and elevated lines, new connections between subway lines, station upgrades to lengthen the platforms, and new transfers between stations that had previously belonged to different operators. Maintenance was treated as an ongoing expense.
The finances of the subway after WW1 were shaky, and from the Depression onward, it never made money again. Of the two private operators, one, the IRT, was in bankruptcy protection during the Depression, while the public operator, the IND, was debt-ridden due to exceptionally high construction costs for that era and overbuilding. This made it attractive to defer maintenance, on the subway as on mainline rail everywhere in the United States. In 1951, bond money was designated for Second Avenue Subway, but then the money was raided for other priorities, including smaller extensions but also capital renewal, such as replacing the almost 50-year-old IRT rolling stock fleet.
In the 1970s, the city’s poor finances meant it couldn’t subsidize operations and maintenance as much as before, and the maintenance deferral led to a systemwide collapse. NYCSubway.org goes over the various elements of it: chunks of equipment and material were falling onto the street from the elevated lines, and onto the tracks from the retaining walls of open cuts; trains had flat wheels and no lubrication, leading to such squeal that the noise was worse than that of Concorde; train doors and lights malfunctioned; derailments and fires were common. By 1981, the mean distance between failures (MDBF) dropped to its lowest ever, 6,640 miles (10,690 km). One third of the system was under emergency 10 mph speed restrictions, and a quarter of the rolling stock had to be kept in reserve to substitute for equipment failures and could not be run in maximum revenue service. The new trains bought for the system, the R44 and R46, used new technology, for example higher top speed for the use on long express sections, but were defective to the point that the lawsuits against the vendors, St. Louis and Pullman respectively, bankrupted them. The origin of the conservatism of rolling stock orders and the pattern that all American rolling stock manufacture is done at transplant factories owned by European, Japanese, or formerly Canadian firms, are both the result of this history.
The State of Good Repair program as we know it dates to the 1980s, when the MTA, starting with the leadership of Richard Ravitch, began to prioritize maintenance and renewal over expansion. This meant five-year capital programs, to reduce the incentives to defer maintenance in a single year, and a lot of openly crying poverty, where leaders both before and after Ravitch would prefer to extoll the system and downplay its shortcomings. There was large spending on capital as a result, but no Second Avenue Subway. Instead, money went to renewal. Rolling stock was more conservative; the R62 was also imported from Japan, since Reagan cut federal aid to mass transit and so the MTA was free from Buy America’s strictures (in contrast, today states prefer to preemptively obey even when they’re not sure they will get federal funding, and even demand in-state plants). Its mean distance between failures was far higher than that of all other rolling stock, and this greater reliability continued into the R62A, R68, and R68A orders; the systemwide mean distance between failures kept climbing throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, to a peak of around 180,000 miles, or around 280,000 km, in 2005 and again in 2010-11. The slow restrictions that characterized the system in the 1970s were lifted, and rolling stock availability for maximum service rose.
The construction of Second Avenue Subway beginning in 2007 was not viewed as a rebuke to the SOGR program, but rather as the legacy of its success. Leaders like Lee Sander spoke of growth and new lines, setting the stage for what is now known as IBX and was known in then as Triboro RX. The political discourse in the United States at the time was one of transit revival, due to the then-new decoupling of car driving and oil use from economic growth, and the high fuel prices; this was also around the time American discourse discovered European and Japanese high-speed rail, setting the stage for Proposition 1A approving the construction of California High-Speed Rail in 2008.
The present of State of Good Repair
I’ve repeatedly criticized SOGR as a scheme allowing agency heads to demand money with nothing to show for it. The behavior of current MTA leadership is one such example; it is not the only one – Amtrak did the same under Joe Boardman in the 2000s. But it needs to be made clear that the SOGR program of the 1980s and 90s was an unmitigated success. There was visible improvement in the system due to better maintenance of fixed plant and more prudent capital investments, such as the trainsets bought in the era from the R62 to the R160. The present problems of the SOGR concept come essentially because its success in the 1980s and 90s led agencies to talk about it as the next hot thing, even while going in a rather different direction.
In the 2010s, the subway started facing new problems – but these were not problems of undermaintenance. The MDBF crept down to a little less than 120,000 miles at the bottom, in 2017, and was 125,000 miles in 2023. The oldest trains are the worst, but much of the problem comes from other issues than slow replacement of fixed plant. For example, the ongoing slowdowns on the subway – even in the 2000s it was slower than before the 1970s collapse, and speeds are noticeably lower when I visit than when I lived in the city in 2006-11 – come not from insufficient maintenance, but from tighter flagging rules, which are designed to protect workers on adjacent track, but in fact have coincided with more worker injuries than in 1999, with a particular deterioration in worker safety in the 2010s. Andy Byford’s Save Safe Seconds campaign was the right response to the slowdowns, and helped stop the bleeding.
And yet, the idea of SOGR persists, even though the problem it purported to solve has been solved. The worst offender is Amtrak: in the Obama stimulus, it asked for $10 billion for SOGR on the Northeast Corridor, promising trivial reductions in travel times; Amtrak’s chair at the time, Joe Boardman, was the very one who deferred maintenance in order to make Amtrak look more profitable on paper in the service of the Bush administration’s goal of eventual privatization, replacing David Gunn, who was fired because he refused to do so.
In effect, SOGR is now a byword for “investments that aren’t sexy.” Some of those investments are still solid, like those done in the 1990s. Others are wastes of money; their lack of sexiness makes them ideal for managers who rate themselves by the input of how much money their agencies get rather than by outputs like ridership or service quality, since the lack of visible output disempowers civil society and good government watchdogs.
MTA Construction and Development head Jamie Torres-Springer essentially uses this definition in his defense of the capital plan, saying “We looked very closely at a couple of asset types that haven’t been focused on in the past. And to some people, they’re not the most exciting assets. They’re the ones that ensure that we can provide service. It’s structures and power and station components.”
The MTA’s capital plan is likewise denigrating the agency’s own past, saying, of the era in which MDBF rose by a factor of about nine in the span of 15 years, “Investment lagged again in the 1990s and early 2000s” and “After years of progress in the 1980s, investment fell off, culminating in a ‘Summer of Hell’ in 2017. That year, New York’s subway had one of the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit systems in the world, with only 65% of weekday trains reaching their destinations on-time.”
The problems of train delays are not about investment or about maintenance. Rather, the train delays were about overly ambitious schedules, compounding with the problems of excessive interlining. Of course, interlining had always been present in the system, but the combination of new trains with better braking and signal timers installed based on the performance of older trains meant that the schedules could not be met without slowdowns; managers, in turn, changed how they measured punctuality from on-time performance to wait assessment, the latter more appropriate for subway lines with high frequency (like New York) and little complexity (unlike New York). MTA President Ronnie Hakim, coming from a legal rather than technical background, also denigrated the idea of speed, viewing it not as an essential feature of public transit but as a source of legal liability.
Non-sexy investment can target this; Byford alleviated some of the slowdowns with Save Safe Seconds. In the future, deinterlining the system, starting from DeKalb Avenue’s scrambling of the B, D, N, and Q, where trains lose two minutes due to schedule padding entirely to protect from cascading delays, is necessary. But this is not SOGR – in fact zero dollars are required in capital spending to deinterline DeKalb. Nor is it invisible – this is a visible change on the subway map, which passengers and good government watchdogs can judge for themselves, trading off fewer one-seat rides for higher speed and reliability.
But neither Lieber nor Torres-Springer seems interested in inexpensive fixes. No: both rate themselves by how much money they get rather than by whether it does any good, hence the denigration of the era in which SOGR was a success. As political appointees, they also have no loyalty to the system and its permanent staff, or even to well-regarded leaders (Byford, again) who do not come from the same political milieu. They fail because they exist to allow incompetent governors like Cuomo and Hochul to control a system they have no business running.
An argument about public transportation fares on Bluesky two weeks ago led to the issue of gig workers, and how public transportation can serve their needs. Those are, for the purposes of this post, workers who do service jobs on demand, without fixed hours or a fixed place of work; these include delivery and cleaning workers. App-hailed drivers fall into this category too, but own cars and are by definition driving. When using public transit – and such workers rarely get paid enough to afford a car – they face long, unreliable travel times, usually by bus; their work travel is completely different from that of workers with consistent places of work, which requires special attention that I have not, so far, seen from transit agencies, even ones that do aim at service-sector shift workers.
The primary issue is one of work centralization. Public transit is the most successful when destinations are centralized; it scales up very efficiently because of the importance of frequency, whereas cars are the opposite, scaling up poorly and scaling down well because of the problems with traffic congestion. I went over this previously talking about Los Angeles, and then other American cities plus Paris. High concentration of jobs, more so than residential density (which Los Angeles has in droves), predicts transit usage, at metro area scale.
Job concentration is also fairly classed. In New York, as of 2015, the share of $40,000+/year workers who worked in the Manhattan core was 57%; for under-$40,000/year workers, it was 37%. It is not an enormous difference, but it makes enough of a difference that it makes it more convenient for the middle class to take transit, since it gets to where they want to go. In metro New York, the average income of transit commuters is the same as that of solo drivers; in secondary American transit cities like Chicago, transit commuters actually make more, since transit is so specialized to city center commutes.
Worse, those 37% of under-$40,000/year workers who work in the Manhattan core are ones with regular low-paying jobs in city center, rather than ones doing gig work. The difference is that gig workers work where the middle class lives, rather than where the middle class works (for example, food service workers at office buildings) or where it consumes (for example, mall retail workers). They still generally take transit or bike where that’s available (for example, in Berlin), because they don’t earn enough to afford cars, but their commutes are the ones that public transit is the worst at. They can’t even control where they work and move accordingly, because they by definition do gigs. In theory, it’s possible for apps to match workers to jobs within the right region or along the right line; in practice, the situation today is that the apps can send a worker from Bytom to Gliwice today and a worker from Gliwice to Bytom tomorrow, based on vagaries of regional supply and demand, and the Polish immigrant who complained to me about this with the names of those two specific cities wishes there were a way to match it better, but at least currently, there isn’t.
The upshot is that gig worker travel is, more or less, a subcase of isotropic, everywhere-to-everywhere systems, with no distinguished nodes. This has all of the following implications:
Travel by rail alone is infeasible – last-mile bus connections are unavoidable, as are uncommon transfers, with three- and at times four-legged trips.
The bus network has to have the usual features of a modernized, redesigned network, with high all-day frequency and regular transfers – suburb-to-city-center buses alone don’t cut it when the work is rarely in city center, and a focus on rush hour service is useless for workers who mostly travel outside peak hours. This also includes reforms that improve buses in general, regardless of the route taken: proof of payment, bus lanes, stop consolidation, bus shelter, signal priority at intersections.
For the most part, the buses that take gig workers to work are the same that could take residents of those neighborhoods to work, in the opposite direction. However, in areas with weaker transit than Berlin or New York, much of the middle class drives, making buses within usually lower-density middle-class areas infeasible. In contrast, those buses are still likely to be used by gig workers doing service work in the homes of those drivers.
The last point, in particular, means that one of the more brutal features of bus redesigns – cutting coverage service in order to focus on the more useful routes – can be counterproductive. This is, again, not relevant to large enough cities that their middle classes mostly don’t live in coverage route territory (even Queens doesn’t need this tradeoff, let alone Brooklyn). But in New Haven, for example, Sandy Johnston long pointed out that some of the bus routes just don’t really work, no matter what, because the areas they serve are too low-density, so the only way forward is to prune them.
This more brutal treatment can still be understandable at times. If the route is being straightened rather than eliminated, as we discussed for Sioux City years later, then it provides all workers with faster service – the meanders if anything are to big job centers that are a few hundred meters off the arterial, and gig workers are less likely to be using those meanders than regular service workers. Moreover, if the part being pruned is genuinely low-density, then it may well also have low density of destinations for gig workers. However, if the part being pruned has moderate density, and is just considered low density because the residents are rich enough they never take the bus, then it’s likely to be useful for gig workers, and should when possible be retained, likely with no extra peak service, only base service.
Evidently, routes like that are sometimes understood to have this class of rider, though perhaps not in this language. This is most visible in suburban NIMBYism against buses: a number of middle-class American suburbs oppose the introduction of bus service that may be useful for regular riders, for fear that poor people might use it to get to their areas; in Massachusetts, those suburbs are fine with buses making one stop in the periphery of their town, triggering a paratransit mandate under the state’s interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (in most states it’s within 0.75 miles, but in Massachusetts it’s town-wide), but oppose any further penetration by regular transit.
To be clear, most of the things that would disproportionately benefit gig workers also benefit the network writ large: faster buses with off-board fare collection and (in denser urban areas) bus lanes would make a great difference, and so would shifting service away from the peak. But the network design principles at granular enough a level to discuss pruning marginal routes really do differ, and it’s important to get this right and, at the very least, avoid empowering aggrieved rich people who hire maids and then do local activism to make it harder for their maids to get to their houses.
To be clear on another point, none of these reforms would make traveling to clean a randomly-selected apartment in a residential neighborhood pleasant. But they could, through smoother bus travel time and transfers, replace a 1.5-hour commute with a 1-1.25-hour one, which would make a significant, if not life-altering, improvement in the comfort levels as well as productivity (and thus pay) of gig workers. It mirrors many other egalitarian social interventions, in producing a moderate level of income and quality of life compression, rather than a change in the rank ordering by income.
One of the dirty secrets of my (and ETA’s) New York commuter rail through-running proposal is that it barely connects Long Island to New Jersey. The later lines with the longer greenfield tunnels do, but the base proposal only through-runs the Port Washington Branch to New Jersey, and with some work it can also through-run some branches to the Hudson Line via Penn Station.
Credit: Kara Fischer, ETA; Flushing is not depicted on the map and is on the Port Washington Branch
It’s long been a criticism of the plan in comments and on social media that it doesn’t do anything to connect Newark with Jamaica. I’d like to address this briefly, since changes in work geography over the last decade have made the Port Washington connection more valuable relative to the Jamaica connection.
Job counts
For the main secondary centers that are or could be on this system, here are the job counts within 1 km of the station, in the business cycle peak years of 2007 and 2019:
Jamaica and Flushing both grew rapidly in the 2007-19 business cycle, but Flushing both started bigger and grew faster, to the point of approaching the job count near Newark Penn Station.
Long Island City has seen booming development, as the only near-center neighborhood in New York with significant construction rates; the number of residents has grown even faster, from 4,502 to 12,183 employed residents over the same period, but with a jobs-to-employed-residents ratio higher than 5, it is a business district first. Plans for an infill station at Queens Boulevard are on the MTA’s wishlist in the 20 Year Needs Assessment, at typically extreme MTA costs; this is separate from Sunnyside Junction, somewhat to the east, which has less development but could be a cross-platform transfer with East Side Access-bound trains.
Non-work trips
Flushing is a booming ethnic center for Chinese-New Yorkers. Jobs there serve the community wherever its members live, and so do non-work destinations, including cultural centers and well-regarded Chinese restaurants. This generates not only work trips, but also consumption trips. Without fast transit to Flushing, it’s a special occasion to go there for food, especially if one does not live on the subway; with fast transit, Flushing restaurants are capable of outcompeting more local alternatives for people arriving from inner New Jersey, and people from suburbs farther out may choose to take a more frequent LIRR than to drive.
Jamaica is not a regional center of much. There is one big trip generator there, other than the growing job center: JFK, via the AirTrain. Airport connections are valuable, but also overrated. The unlinked (likely total) ridership on the AirTrain in the first three months of 2024 was 1.924 million, or 21,143/day (not weekday), slightly higher than in 2019. This is not a high modal split, but airport arrivals are disproportionately going to Manhattan already, and the frequency between Penn Station and Jamaica is high enough that through-running and other modernization elements would only mildly increase this figure.
I can’t quite compare the two figures, since leisure trips, especially routine ones like going out to restaurants, are hard to measure. But Jamaica’s airport trips coming from better commuter rail are just not going to be significant in volume by the standards of the work trips of Long Island City or Flushing.
Through-running schemas
The reason I’ve advocated for through-running from New Jersey to the Port Washington Branch and no other LIRR line is operational. There is only enough capacity for at most 12 trains per hour, because the trains have to share tracks with Penn Station Access local trains to Stamford and with intercity trains. Connecting to an LIRR branch serving Jamaica would create complex branching, with the same line in Queens reverse-branching to different destinations, reducing reliability. It was hard enough to timetable the reverse-branched New Haven Line in our Northeast Corridor project. The Port Washington Branch, running completely separately from the rest of the system, sharing tracks only on the approach to and within Penn Station, is an ideal candidate.
It is a happy coincidence that the through-running schema for the LIRR that is easiest to implement also happens to serve the larger Queens business center between the two traditional ones. It would also be a great opportunity to build infill in Long Island City, which has emerged in the last few decades to be a much larger center. Another happy coincidence is that, while New Haven Line timetabling has been difficult, there is room in the schedule for two infill stations in Queens without upsetting the delicate track sharing between Penn Station Access local commuter trains and intercity trains within the East River Tunnels to Penn Station. Anything involving mainline rail through legacy cities is necessarily going to have to rely on tricks, waivers, and happy coincidences like this to cobble together a good system out of a region that had no reason to be built in 1900-30 around the commuter rail technology of the 1970s-2020s.
As our high-speed rail project draws to a close, we need to not just write down what is needed for running the trains but also how much it costs. This post should be viewed as a work in progress, and it will not surprise me if I’m missing things that will make it to the report later this year.
The rule for this post is that costs only matter going forward, not backward. If it’s already committed, it’s not part of the budget; in particular, the $6 billion Frederick Douglass Tunnel, already fully funded and in the design and engineering phase, is not part of the budget. In addition, only infrastructure is costed, not rolling stock (new rolling stock may well have negative cost relative to current plans, through buying standard EMUs and not esoteric trainsets like Massachusetts’ battery train idea or nonstandard LIRR/Metro-North-style EMUs).
Bypasses
All bypasses can be seen on this map, but not all bypasses are part of the plan – in particular, nothing between Stamford and New Haven seems worth it for now.
The main bypass we’re proposing, between New Haven and Kingston, is 120 km in relatively easy terrain, including two constrained river bridges (Quinnipiac and Thames; the Connecticut is easier), but no tunnels. The cost should be in line with non-tunneled high-speed lines in Europe, which in 2024 dollars would be around $5 billion.
The secondary bypass, around Port Chester and Greenwich, is 7 km of complex els crossing I-95 multiple times, and should be costed at the upper end of els, which is high hundreds of millions. Call it $1 billion together with a new bridge across the Mianus. The current projected cost for the Cos Cob Bridge replacement is higher, but it should be easier to rebuild the bridge a bit upstream to straighten the approach curves than to do it in situ; with a short section of 4% grades on each side, it should be possible to clear I-95 west of the river and keep the Riverside station east of the river while also having around 23 meters of clearance below the bridge. (4% grades are routine for EMUs; freight trains are so long that they can ascend these grades just fine, since what matters is the grade averaged over the length of the train.)
Frankford Junction is about 2 km of complex urban el, including a rail-on-rail grade separation; the per km cost is likely high, in the very low three-figure millions, but it’s 2 km and so $300 million should cover it.
The other bypasses are very short and in easy environments, for example easing the curve at Kingston (also discussed here), with costs dominated by the track connections rather than the physical construction of 1-2 km of at-grade track outside urban areas. Call this entire portion $6.5 billion total.
Grade separations
The starting point is that NJ Transit thinks that Hunter Flyover should be $300 million in 2022 prices (source, PDF-p. 151). This is as close as can be to a nonnegotiable element of the program.
At the other end of the New York metro area, there’s Shell Interlocking/CP 216, which must be grade-separated as well, and is even more nonnegotiable. I have not seen recent cost figures; it should be comparable to Hunter or somewhat more expensive given the right-of-way constraints. A $500 million placeholder is probably right.
Further north, the junction with the New Canaan Branch is flat and needs to be grade-separated, at a cost likely similar to Hunter, in a similarly built-up area. The Danbury and Waterbury Branches have flat junctions too, but traffic is low enough that they may be kept so (especially Waterbury), but if not, Danbury seems comparable in difficulty to Hunter and New Canaan.
In Philadelphia, the Chestnut Hill West Line (former R8) has a flat junction with the Northeast Corridor, and there are a variety of proposals for what to do with it; for decades, an advocate wish was the Swampoodle Connection, to have it transition to a closely parallel line letting it enter the city via the Reading side rather than the former Pennsylvania Railroad side that it’s on. It’s largely dropped off the wishlist, and instead a grade separation could be done for a cost comparable to that of Hunter, or maybe less (potentially much less) if it’s possible to abuse the line’s low ridership and close proximity to the Chestnut Hill East Line to have shutdowns to speed up the work.
On the other side of Philadelphia, the junction between the intercity and commuter rail approaches to 30th Street is flat as well, which also incorporates the branch to Media/Elwyn (former R3); this should be grade-separated as well.
In Boston, there are two flat junctions on the Providence Line. Canton Junction separates it from the Stoughton Line, and looks routine to either grade-separate (it’s a low-density area) or, potentially, even turned into a shuttle with timed connections to the Providence Line if absolutely necessary, given the demand mismatch between the two branches. The Franklin Line, farther north, has a similar flat junction around Readville, technically within Boston but in an area with plenty of space, but can be sent over to the Fairmount Line if there are difficulties, and may even preferentially go to Fairmount regardless (the main argument against it is service to Back Bay). The answer to “how much should this cost?” is “no more than around $150 million each or else it’s better not to do it at all.”
In total, these should be around $1.8 billion, with New Canaan and Canton but not Danbury or Readville.
Note that rail-on-rail grade separations for bypasses are already priced in, especially New Haven-Kingston, which is of comparable length to European high-speed lines that have been built, with grade-separated connections to legacy lines.
Portal Bridge
The Hudson Tunnel Project within the Gateway Program is funded, but some tie-ins are not. Most (such as PennExpansion) are useless, but one is essential: a second Portal Bridge, to ensure four tracks of capacity from New York to Newark. The current favored alternative is a lift bridge, budgeted at $800 million; it is a movable and not fixed bridge, but it is not a causeway and has some clearance below, and would only need to open when a sludge barge comes from upriver, which can be scheduled overnight.
High platforms
Everything that touches the Northeast Corridor needs high platforms at all stations. The definition of “touches the Northeast Corridor” is complicated; for example, in New Jersey, there are 68 low-platform stations on the lines that go through Newark Penn or Newark Broad Street, of which 26 are funded for high-platform conversions for around $23 million each ($683 million/30 stations; the other four are on the Erie lines), but of the 68, only 10 are on the lines that would be using the North River Tunnels after the Hudson Tunnel Project opens (see map in ETA’s report). Even taking all 42 as required, it’s around $1 billion at NJ Transit costs, with nearly all benefits accruing to commuter lines.
In Massachusetts, the definition is easier – everything on the Providence and Stoughton Lines needs to be raised; the TransitMatters report explains that there are eight stations, plus two potential infills, with the eight costing around $200 million in 2020 prices, which should be closer to $250 million in 2024 prices. If Franklin Line work is also desired then it should be another $200 million, split across more stations but with shorter platforms. Note that the second phase of South Coast Rail, if it is built, would extend the Stoughton Line, but as the stations are all new construction, they will already have high platforms.
In Pennsylvania, nearly total separation of intercity traffic from SEPTA is possible from the get-go – the only track sharing is peripheral, in and around Wilmington, at low frequency on SEPTA. If the entire Wilmington/Newark Line is to be upgraded, it’s a total of 12 stations, all in four-track territory; SEPTA’s construction costs for high platforms are lower than those of the MBTA and NJ Transit, but much of its construction has been single-platform stations with shorter trains, and my guess is that those 12 stations are around $200 million total. The seven inaccessible stations on the Trenton Line, which, to be clear, does not need to share tracks with intercity trains at all, should be another $100-150 million (it’s a busier line, so, longer trains, and North Philadelphia is more complex).
In total, all of this is around $1.8 billion, with the benefits going to commuters at such rate that state matches would be expected; in Massachusetts at least, there are talks about doing it as part of the Regional Rail program, but no firm commitment.
Unfortunately, precisely because it’s a longstanding Amtrak project, the project definitions have been written in a way that is not compatible with any cost-effective construction. For example, Amtrak is under the impression that the catenary poles have to be redone because higher speeds require denser pole spacing; in fact, catenary systems sold routinely by European vendors allow high speeds at spacing that exists already on the legacy Northeast Corridor system.
This makes costing this more difficult; Amtrak’s official figures are of little relevance to a project that has even cursory levels of interest in adopting European practices. With the poles and substations already usable, the wire tensioning should cost less than installing new wires; around half of the cost of new-build electrification is the substations and transformers and the other half is the wires, so take the cost of new-build systems outside the US and Canada, cut in half, and then double back to take into account that it’s a four-track corridor. This is around $3 million/km, so around $1 billion corridor-wide.
Commuter rail lines that touch the Northeast Corridor need to be wired as well, and then it’s a matter of which ones count as touching, as with the high platform item. This includes 25 km of the North Jersey Coast Line, 72 km of the Raritan Valley Line, 31 km of the Morristown Line, 30 km of the Montclair-Boonton Line, 38 km of the Danbury Branch, a few hundred meters of Providence Line siding tracks, 6 km of the Stoughton Line, 34 km of the Franklin Line, and 15 km of the Fairmount Line. Much of the unwired territory is single-track, so lower per-km costs can be expected, on the order of $600 million total.
Together, this is about $1.6 billion.
Total
The sum of all of the above lines is $12.5 billion. It’s possible to go lower than this: the high platform and electrification costs are partly modernizing commuter rail that may not quite use the Northeast Corridor, and the Greenwich bypass may be dropped at the cost of 80 seconds (more, if Cos Cob Bridge speed limits have to be lower than what right-of-way geometry allows). A numerological $10 billion limit can still be met this way.
The vast majority of traffic on the Northeast Corridor comprises captive trains, only running internally to the corridor. However, a noticeable minority of trains run south of Washington, swapping the electric locomotive for a diesel locomotive. Those trains have a certain logic to them today – through-service is valuable, and north of Washington they more or less substitute for Northeast Regional service. But drawbacks to reliability remain, and if the corridor modernizes its operations, they will need to be removed; several elements of modern operations are not compatible with keeping either the Virginia trains or the long-distance ones on the corridor. Instead, these trains should be cut to Washington, with transfers to much faster, more frequent Northeast Corridor trains. Potentially, some Virginia lines could be electrified and then through-service could be offered, if they can fill the same size of train that future Northeast Corridor service could.
Fortunately, this tradeoff still leaves the South with better service than it gets today. The forced transfer considerably speeds up the trip for New York-bound passengers, by more than the average transfer penalty even for passengers with heavy luggage. Nonetheless, a tradition of direct through-service from New York to diesel territory in the South will need to end.
Future Northeast Corridor service
Upgraded service, for example in our ongoing project at Marron for how to blend intercity and commuter rail on the corridor, should have all of the following features:
High speed: our current timetables have New York-Washington trains taking 1:53, at a top speed of 320 km/h; a blanket speed restriction to 217 km/h, the upper limit of the catenary today, would only slow down the trains to 2:04, the rest of the difference in speed from current trip times coming from reliability improvements, higher curve speed, higher acceleration, and minor curve fixes.
All-EMU configuration: nearly the entire world passenger rail market is electric multiple units rather than separated locomotives and coaches, EMUs outperforming locomotive-hauled cars in every aspect, and the exceptions are the less modern intercity and regional lines.
Single-class service: trains may have first- and second-class seats, but the trains should not be differentiated by speed – Spain has trains of different speeds on its high-speed line and charges more for the faster ones, and the resulting hit to frequency and interchangeability of tickets explains why Europe’s longest high-speed rail network has a fraction of the per capita ridership of France, Germany, or Japan, which (largely) lack this misfeature.
Affordable fares: the average fare should be in line with French and German norms, around $0.15 per p-km.
A train that does New York-Washington for a bit less than two hours and charges a bit more than $50 one-way on average – the current average is $106 on the Regional and $192 on the Acela – can comfortably expect ridership to quadruple, based on my two usual references on elasticity of high-speed rail ridership with respect to travel time and fares (Börjesson says -1.12 and -0.61 respectively, Cascetta-Coppola say -2 and -0.37 respectively). This forces running more frequency and longer trains. Frequency is a welcome addition provided there is capacity on the tracks for it; fortunately, there is capacity for an intercity train every 10 minutes in a post-Gateway timetable. The trains in question should be as long as possible, with platform lengthening where necessary to support 16-car trains, to maximize capacity.
The incompatibility of diesel trains
Very few diesel trains run on the Northeast Corridor today, and none run by Amtrak. The through-trains to the South run with engine changes: all Amtrak service today is run with locomotives, and at Washington, the trains change between diesel and electric locomotives. Nonetheless, even electric locomotive service as it is conceived today is incompatible with Northeast Corridor modernization, and future changes would still not make it compatible.
First, to the point on capacity: there is no way to run 16-car trains into the South. There isn’t enough demand for such trains. The Silver Star today runs nine coaches and the Silver Meteor runs 10, and on both trains, three coaches don’t sell seats but are used for baggage, lounge, and dining; the Palmetto runs six coaches, the Crescent seven, and the Cardinal five, each including two non-seat selling coaches. Speeding up the Northeast Corridor by an hour and a half can lead to ridership explosion internally to the corridor, but not on trains that take 30 hours today.
And second, there is no reasonable rolling stock for this, even if there were demand for a train with 16 cars or close to it. Locomotive-hauled trains would necessarily run slow, compromising not just top speed but also acceleration and, owing to the current equipment’s problems, reliability. The example train we’re using in our calculations, the Velaro Novo, has a power-to-weight ratio of 20 kW/t and an initial acceleration rate of 0.65 m/s^2. A pair of ACS-64 locomotives dragging 14 Airo coaches gets 14 kW/t but cannot accelerate faster than around 0.25 m/s^2 at any speed. The unpadded trip time for high-speed rail making one stop per state is 1:46; the unpadded trip time with the additional acceleration time of this example train and with a 217 km/h (135 mph) speed restriction is 2:09. If the timetable buffer time is still 7% then the trip time is 2:18, which means the train would be overtaken by about two faster trains, and this in turn would slow the trains further as more schedule contingency would be required for this more complex system. If the ACS-64’s problems or any interface with the freight-run Southern network forces more padding, then make it three overtakes.
The TGV used to couple a diesel locomotive in front of a high-speed trainset to reach Les Sables d’Olonne, before the branch to it was electrified. This option would eliminate the speed difference on the Northeast Corridor, but would also mean that expensive 16-car high-speed trainsets would be spending an entire day going to Florida at low speed and another going back, without being able to make back the cost through intensive operations measured in train-km per day.
Exceptions and the tail wagging the dog
The basic reason for prioritizing the Northeast Corridor’s internal traffic over through-traffic is the large mismatch in travel volumes. In fiscal 2023, the Northeast Corridor got 12,122,466 riders. The Virginia services got 1,300,776, the Carolinian 315,781, and the long-distance trains 1,308,211. A 4:1 ratio should tilt planners toward prioritizing the core over the long-distance trains.
Note that I have not, up until now, talked about Keystone service and trains to Springfield. This is because Keystone trains can run through to the corridor just fine. None of the reasons why the long-distance trains cannot do so applies: the Keystone corridor is electrified all the way to Harrisburg, and New York-Philadelphia is a significant enough portion of it that boosting speeds in the core (and acceleration everywhere) would lead to sufficient ridership increases to justify 16-car trains. Springfield service is currently unelectrified, and Amtrak generally runs shuttles with timed connections because of the mismatch in demand; it should be electrified, and through-service instituted.
On Keystone and the New Haven-Springfield line, the mismatch in capacity actually works in favor of through-service. The New York-Philadelphia section has the most demand, so having one third of the trains branch off to Harrisburg rather than continuing to Washington is a good way of assigning capacity. New Haven is not Philadelphia, but has so much commuter demand to New York that giving New York-New Haven an intercity train every 10 minutes is not so stupid; in contrast, unless a lot more is built, I suspect that 16-car trains running every 10 minutes between New York and Boston would end up emptier than most planners would prefer. Years ago, before I started looking at the track charts and the possible schedules systematically, I even used the greater demand of New York-Philadelphia to argue in favor of diverting some trains not just at New Haven to Springfield, but at Penn Station, to Jamaica and Long Island; as it is, my primary argument against sending intercity trains to the LIRR is timetabling complexity.
With Keystone and Springfield added back in, the traffic on the Northeast Corridor rises from 12,122,466 to 13,680,273. The ridership of the trains to the South that are to be cut from the corridor is 2,924,768, or 21% of the internal ridership; the tail should not wag the dog.
Is this even bad for the trains to be cut?
No. As mentioned above, the trip times would get a lot faster, it’s just that turning a 30-hour trip into a 28-hour one does not lead to a large ridership boom.
The extra transfer is annoying, but should be compared with the time cost of both running a slower train to New York and changing the engine at Washington Union Station. As explained above, the slower train would take a minimum of 2:09 between New York and Washington, stopping once per state. The scheduled time would be at least 2:18, and likely more, maybe 2:28 with 15% buffer time. The engine change takes about 20 minutes judging by southbound schedules on Virginia service trains; the wait time at Union Station is much longer northbound, because the train has to have more schedule contingency on the less reliable freight-owned section to make its slot on the more precisely timetabled Northeast Corridor. The most charitable interpretation, ignoring the extra required schedule padding, is that making passengers change trains in Washington would save them 45 minutes minus the wait time for the next train (at most 15 minutes).
The transfer penalty is extensively studied in the modal choice literature. For example, studying intercity trips in the Netherlands, de Keizer-Kouwenhoven-Hofker find that the penalty is 23 minutes, which already incorporates an imputed additional waiting time of 15 minutes. This penalty rises by seven minutes if the transfer is not cross-platform; a cross-platform transfer at Union Station would require the through-tracks to be upgraded with high platforms, as they are currently low-platform. It rises by a further seven minutes for passengers with heavy luggage. Even with all of those penalties, 23+7+7 = 37 < 45. And 45 is in a way a best-case scenario; there is a lot of padding involved in making a long-distance or even Virginia train make a specific slot on the corridor, as opposed to guaranteeing passengers a seat on the next available train, and this adds on the order of half an hour, counting both Alexandria-Washington and on-corridor buffer times.
The upshot is that while trains cannot run through from Virginia to a modernized Northeast Corridor, little is lost in making passengers transfer at Union Station. The transfer penalty is real but limited, even with luggage, and the speed gain from letting such passengers transfer to a faster train is noticeable, if small compared with the total length of a night train trip. It would break tradition, but offer a modest improvement in the quality of rail service on the long-distance trains using the corridor and the Virginia trains, in conjunction with the much larger improvement in the quality of internal Northeast Corridor service.
This is the second part of my series about the Regional Plan Association event about expanding capacity at Penn Station. Much of the presentation, at least in its first half, betrays wanton ignorance, with which area power brokers derive their belief that it is necessary to dig up an entire block south of Penn Station to add more station tracks, at a cost of $16.7 billion; one railroad source called the people insisting on Penn Expansion “hostage takers.” The first part covered casual ignorance about the history of commuter rail through-running in Europe, including cities that appear in the presentation. This part goes over the core claim made in the presentation regarding how fast trains can enter and exit Penn Station. More broadly, it goes over a core claim made in the source the presentation uses to derive its conclusion, a yet-unreleased consultant report detailing just how much space each train needs at Penn Station, getting it wrong by a factor of 5-10.
The issue is about the minimum time a train needs to berth at a station, called the dwell time. Dwell times vary by train type, service type, and peak traffic. Subways and nearly all commuter trains can keep to a dwell time of 30 seconds, with very few exceptions. City center stations like Penn Station are these exceptions; the RER and the Zurich S-Bahn both struggle with city center dwell times. The Berlin S-Bahn does not, but this is an artifact of Berlin’s atypically platykurtic job density, which isn’t reproducible in any American city. That said, even with very high turnover of passengers at central train stations, the dwell time is still usually measured in tens of seconds, and not minutes. In the limiting case, an American commuter train should be able to dump its entire load of passengers at one station in around two minutes.
The common belief among New York-area railroads is that Penn Station requires very long dwell times. This is not made explicit in the presentation; Foster Nichols’ otherwise sober part of the presentation alludes to “varying dwell times” on pp. 23 and 26, but documents produced by the railroads about their own perceived needs go back years and state precise times; for through-running, it was agreed that the dwell times would be set at 12 minutes in the Tri-Venture Council comprising Amtrak, the LIRR, and New Jersey Transit. The consultant report I reference below even thinks it takes 16 minutes. In truth, the number is closer to 2-3 minutes, and investments that would precede Penn Expansion, like Penn Reconstruction, would be guaranteed to reduce it below 2 minutes.
Dwell times in practice
Before going into what dwell times should be, it is important to sanity-check everything by looking at dwell times as they are. It is fortunate that examples of short dwell times abound.
As mentioned in my previous post, I have just returned from a trip to Brussels and London. My train going out of Berlin was late, so at Hauptbahnhof, the dwell time was just three minutes. The train, which had departed Ostbahnhof almost empty, filled almost to seated capacity at Hauptbahnhof, where there is no level boarding. DB routinely turns trains in four minutes at terminal stations that are located mid-line, like Frankfurt and Leipzig, but this time I observed such dwells at a station with almost complete seat turnover. In Japan, where there is level boarding and two door pairs per car rather than one, the dwell times on the Nozomi are a minute, even at Shin-Osaka, where through-trains transition from JR Central to JR West operation.
On commuter rail, dwell times are shorter, even though the trains are much more crowded at rush hour. The reason is a combination of higher toleration for standees, and higher toleration of mistakes – if passengers get on the wrong train or miss their stop, they will get off at the next stop in a few minutes rather than ending up in the wrong city.
As mentioned in the introduction, Penn Station is a limiting case on commuter rail, since it’s the only station in Manhattan for any possible through-trains today; a future tunnel to Grand Central, studied over 20 years ago as Alternative G and recurrently proposed since in various forms (for example, in the ETA writeup, or in this post of mine from last year), would still leave trains that use the preexisting North River Tunnels running through the East River Tunnels and not making a second Manhattan stop. Thus, the best comparison cases need to be themselves limiting cases, as far as possible.
For this, we need to go to Paris, especially its busiest lines, the RER A and B. The RER B has two central stations: Gare du Nord, Les Halles; Gare du Nord isn’t really in the central business district, but is such a large travel hub that its RER and Métro traffic levels are the highest in both systems. The theoretical dwell time (“stationnement”) is 30 seconds on the RER. In practice, at rush hour, it’s higher – but it’s still measured in tens of seconds. In the 2000s, the RER B reached 70-80 second dwell times at Gare du Nord at peak, before new work reduced the average to 55 seconds. I timed dwell times while living in Paris and riding the RER B regularly to IHES, and at rush hour, the two central stations and Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame were usually 50-60 seconds. This is optimized through signaling as well as wide platforms and single-level trains with four door pairs per car, though the internal configuration of the corridor of the RER B rolling stock still leaves something to be desired, especially if there are passengers with luggage (which there often are, as the line serves CDG Airport).
The RER A has four central business district stations: Les Halles, Auber, Etoile, La Défense; a fifth station, Gare de Lyon, is like Gare du Nord a transport hub with very high originating ridership. A report from the early 2010s lamenting that the theoretical throughput of 30 trains per hour was not achieved in practice blames a host of factors, including high dwell times due to traffic, reaching 50 seconds in the central section. The RER A rolling stock is bilevel with three triple-wide door pairs per car, and for a bilevel its internal circulation is good, but it’s still a bilevel train, and getting through a crowded rush hour car to disembark takes a lot of shuffling.
Is Paris a good comparison case?
Yes.
Part 1 of this series goes over the history of the RER, and points out that in 2019, the RER A had 1.4 million weekday trips, and the RER B 983,000. This compares with a combined LIRR and New Jersey Transit ridership of about 600,000 per weekday. About 67% of LIRR ridership is at rush hour; on SNCF-operated Transilien and RER lines, at the suburban stations, the figure is 46%, and my suspicion is that the RER B is somewhat lower than Transilien.
The higher peakiness in New York evens things up somewhat. But even then, peak hourly traffic into Penn Station from New Jersey was 27,223 passengers in 2019, per the Hub Bound report (Appendix III, Section C), and peak hourly traffic from the four-track East River Tunnels was 33,530; in contrast, the RER A’s peak hourly traffic last decade was 50,000.
Now, Paris does have multiple central stations, whereas there is only one in Manhattan on the LIRR and NJ Transit. That said, this only evens things up. My table on this only includes the SNCF-operated portion, and only includes boardings at a resolution of four hours, not one hour; thus, all central RER A stations are missing. From the table, we get the following maximum boarding counts between 4 and 8 pm and between 6 and 10 am on a work day:
Station
Line
Trains/hour
Boardings (pm)
Boardings (am)
Penn Station
LIRR
37
73,430
4,920
Penn Station
NJ Transit
20
56,664
7,838
Gare du Nord
RER B (both directions)
20
48,989
54,137
Gare du Nord
RER D (both directions)
12
34,512
28,073
Châtelet-Les Halles
RER D (both directions)
12
28,586
6,877
Gare de Lyon
RER D (both directions)
12
49,392
17,158
Haussmann-Saint Lazare
RER E
16
45,383
10,719
The numbers represent single-line trips, so people transferring cross-platform between the RER B and D at Gare du Nord count as boardings. The reason for including both morning and afternoon peak traffic is that afternoon boardings are largely symmetric with morning alightings and vice versa, and so the sum represents total on and off traffic on the train at the peak.
Peak traffic per train in a single direction occurs at Saint-Lazare on the RER E, which only began through-running in May of this year; the counts are from the mid-2010s, when the station was a four-track underground terminal. At the through-stations, total ons and offs per rush hour train are slightly lower than at Penn Station on NJ Transit and slightly higher than on the LIRR. Even taking into account that at Penn Station, 40% of the peak four hour traffic is at the peak hour, and the proportion should be somewhat smaller in Paris, the difference cannot be large. If Gare du Nord can support 60 second dwell times, Penn Station can support dwell times that are not much higher, at least as far as the train-platform interface is concerned.
Gantt charts
A yet unreleased consultant report for the Penn Station Capacity Improvement Project (PCIP) details the tasks that need to be done for a through-running train at Penn Station. This is shown as a pair of Gantt charts, both for a future baseline, the second one assuming dropback crews and station scheduling guaranteeing that trains do not berth on two tracks facing the same platform at the same time. All of this is extravagant and unnecessary, and could not be done by people who are familiar with best practices in Europe or Japan.
This is said to be turn time in the chart and dwell time in the description. But the limiting factor is the passenger path and not the crew path, and for that, it doesn’t matter if a train from New Jersey then goes to Long Island or Stamford and a train from Long Island or Stamford goes to New Jersey or if it’s the other way around.
To be clear, 16 minutes is insanely long as an unpadded turn time, let alone a through-dwell time. The MBTA can do it in 10; I think so can Metro-North at the outer ends. ICE trains turn in four minutes at pinch points like Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, with extensive rail passenger turnover. So let’s go over how to get from 16 down to a more reasonable number.
Passenger alighting
Alighting does not take 6.5 minutes at Penn Station, even at rush hour, even on trains that are configured for maximum seats rather than fast egress. The limiting factor is not the train doors – the RER D runs bilevels with two door pairs per car and narrow passageways, and would not be too out of place on NJ Transit. Rather, it’s the narrow platforms, which have fewer egress points than they should and poor sight lines. This was studied for the Moynihan Station project, which opened in 2021. The project added new staircases and escalators, and now the minimum clearance time is at most 2.03 minutes, on platform 9, followed by 2.02 minutes on platforms 4 and 5. The expected clearance time, taking into account that passengers prefer to exit near the 7th Avenue end but the egress points are not weighted toward that end, peaks at 4.83 minutes on platform 4 – but passengers can walk along the platform while the train is moving, just as they do on the subway or on the RER.
What’s more, Penn Reconstruction, a project that may or may not happen, but that is sequentially prior to the Penn Expansion project that the slide deck is trying to sell, is required to install additional vertical circulation at all platforms, to reduce the egress times below 2 minutes even in emergency conditions (one escalator out). This is because NFPA 130 requires evacuation in 4 minutes assuming every track that can be occupied is, which given timetabling constraints means both tracks facing each platform other than the single-track platform 9. Responding to Christine Berthet’s questions about through-running, the agency even said that Penn Reconstruction is going to bring all platforms into compliance, but still said dwell times would need to be 8 minutes.
Passenger boarding
Alighting and boarding peak at different times of day. As the above table shows, reverse-peak traffic at Penn Station is only 12% of the combined peak and reverse-peak traffic on NJ Transit, and only 6% on the LIRR. In any circumstance in which the alighting time needs to be stretched to the maximum (again, only somewhat more than 2 minutes), the boarding time can be set at 30 seconds, and vice versa.
Moreover, because the access points to the platforms include escalators, not all running in the peak direction, and not just staircases, reverse-peak traffic consumes capacity that is otherwise wasted. Even the 30 seconds for additional boarding time in the morning rush are generous.
Conductor walk time for safety review
This is not done in Europe. Conductors’ safety review comprises checking whether passengers are stuck in the gap between the platform and the train, which is done after boarding, and takes seconds rather than minutes, using CCTV if the sight lines are obstructed.
Door opening and closing
These do not take 30 seconds each; the total amount of time is in the single digits.
Engineer operating position set-up, and engineer/conductor job briefing
Crews switch out in 1-2 minutes at boundaries between train operating companies in Paris and Shin-Osaka. The RER B is operated by SNCF north of Gare du Nord and by RATP south of it, and they used to switch crews there – and the operating position had to be changed, since the two companies’ engineers preferred different setups, one preferring to sit and the other to stand. It took until the early 2010s to run crews through, and even then it took a few years to unify the line’s dispatching. It does not take 3 minutes to brief the engineer on the job.
Total combined time
On a through-train, using alighting times in line with the current infrastructure at Penn Station, the minimum dwell time is 2-3 minutes, provided trains can be timetabled so that no two tracks facing the same platform have a train present at the same time. If there are four through-platforms, then commuter trains can run every 5 minutes to each platform, which is borderline from the perspective of egress capacity at 7th Avenue but does work.
Intercity trains make this easier to timetable: they have lower maximum capacity unless standing tickets are sold, which they currently are not, and even if Amtrak runs 16-car EMUs, they’ll still have fewer seats than there are seats plus standing spaces on a 10-car NJ Transit train, and not all of them turn over at Penn Station. Potentially, platform 6 can be dedicated to intercity trains in both directions, and then platforms 4 and 5 can run eastbound, alternating, and platforms 7 and 8 can run westbound. Using the timetable string diagram here, the local NJ Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor would have to share a platform, running every 5 minutes, while the express trains can get a dedicated platform running every 10; the local trains are likely to be less crowded and also have more through-passengers, first because usually through-service is more popular in inner suburbs than in outer ones, and second because the likely pairing in our Northeast Corridor plan connects those trains to Long Island City and Flushing while the express trains awkwardly turn into local Metro-North trains to Stamford.
Note that intercity trains can be scheduled to dwell for just 2-3 minutes too, and not just commuter trains. That’s actually longer than Shinkansen express dwell times (involving a crew change at Shin-Osaka), and in line with what I’ve seen with full turnover in Berlin. The Avelia Liberty has better circulation than the ICE 3, since it has level boarding, and any future trainset can be procured with two door pairs per car, like the Velaro Novo or Shinkansen, rather than just one, if dwell times are a concern.
The incuriosity of consultant-driven projects
I spoke to some of the people involved about my problems with the presentation, and got very good questions. One of them pointed out that I am talking about two- and three-minute dwell times in big European cities, and asked, how come experienced international consultants like Arup and LTK, which prepared the Gantt chart above, don’t know this? What’s missing here?
This is a question I’ve had to face with the construction cost comparisons before, and the answer is the same: consultants are familiar with projects that use consultants. Anglo consultants like Jacobs, AECOM, Arup, and WSP have extensive international experience, with the sort of projects that bring in international consulting firms to supervise the designs. The bigger Continental European and East Asian countries have enough in-house engineering expertise that they don’t really bring them in.
This can be readily seen in two ways. First, getting any detailed information about rail projects in France and Germany requires reading the local language. Practically nothing gets translated into English. I almost exclusively use French sources when writing about the RER, which can be readily seen in this post and in part 1. My German is a lot less fluent than my French, but here too I have to rely on reading technical German to be able to say anything about the Berlin or Munich S-Bahn or the ICE at greater depth than English Wikipedia (for one example, compare English and German on switches). A lot of the information isn’t even online and is in railfan books and magazines. This is not an especially globalized industry, and a consultancy that works in English will just not see things that are common knowledge to the experts in France or Germany, let alone Japan.
And second, the few Continental European projects that are more globalized turn into small reference pools for American agencies looking to compare themselves to others. Woody Allen portrays a Barcelona with the works of the only architect his American audience will have heard of. The MTA compares its per-rider costs to those of the not-fully-open Barcelona Metro L9/10, MassDOT uses L9/10 to benchmark the North-South Rail Link (again with the wrong denominator), and VTA uses L9/10 as a crutch with which to justify its decision to build a single-bore San Jose subway. L9/10 is an atypically large project, and atypically expensive for Spain; it also, uniquely, uses more privatization of planning than is the norm in Spain, including design-build project delivery, whence the line from the one of the consultants I’ve had to deal with in the US, “The standard approach to construction in most of Europe outside Russia is design-build” (design-build to a good approximation does not exist in Germany, Spain except L9/10, or Italy, and is uncommon in France and done with less privatization of expertise than in the US).
To take these two points together, then, the elements of foreign systems that are likeliest to be familiar to either American railroaders or English-primary consultants are the biggest and flashiest ones. This can even include elements that are not consultant-driven, if they’re so out there that they can’t be missed, like a high-speed rail network: rail consultants know the TGV exists, even if they’re not as familiar with how SNCF goes around planning and building lines, and can sometimes imitate design standards. Commuter rail infrastructure that’s similarly flashy gets noticed, so the presentation mentions the RER and Munich S-Bahn, even while getting their histories wrong and fixating on the new station caverns that even a tourist on a short trip can notice.
Commuter rail operations are not flashy. The map of RER or S-Bahn lines is neat, which is why rail activists talk about through-running so much – it’s right there posted at every station and on every railcar. But the speed at which people get on and off the train is not as obvious, and it requires looking into detailed reports to do an even rudimentary comparison, none of which in the case of Paris is available in English or easy to find on Google (the word “stationnement” usually means “parking,” in the same manner that the word “dwell” usually means “to live in a place”).
The upshot is that consultant reports written by serious people who absorb the knowledge of the railroaders of the Northeastern US with some British sanity checks can still say things that are so wrong to make the entire report useless. The same process that produces the whopper that the Munich S-Bahn, built 1965-72, took 46 years to build, can produce a Gantt chart that has a combined boarding and alighting time with conductor check that’s more than five times longer than what Penn Station in its current configuration is capable of and more than 10 times longer than what Gare du Nord achieves with similar peak ridership. Based on this false belief regarding dwell times, the agencies are then convinced that through-running is difficult and, separately, many additional tracks at Penn Station are required to fully use the capacity of the under-construction Gateway tunnel, building which would waste $16.7 billion.
I am writing this post riding trains between Brussels and Berlin. My connection in Cologne was canceled as the connecting train was moved to depart earlier than my first train’s arrival time, and somehow, it is faster to stay on the train until Frankfurt and connect there, the trains between Cologne and Berlin are so disturbed this summer. Cologne-Berlin, normally a direct hourly connection in 4-4.5 hours, is slowed to 5.5 hours every two hours this summer. It got me thinking about something Jon Worth said last month about the importance of public transport being there, including at night, because it reminded me of how there are always tradeoffs. Train service cannot literally run 24/7 without changes; maintenance windows are required. So it’s a question of tradeoffs – when service must run less reliably, or not at all. Deutsche Bahn has unfortunately chosen a grossly wrong side of the tradeoff, leading to summertime shutdowns and slowdowns that its French and Japanese peers simply do not have. Those shutdowns, in turn, are, these days, leading to catastrophic levels of popular mistrust in DB.
The tradeoffs
I wrote six weeks ago about the problems of summer maintenance in Germany. But, more generally, there is a tradeoff between span of service on a railway and how consistently service can be delivered. A railway that runs overnight will not have regular maintenance windows, and therefore have to pick some low-traffic period for a special disturbance. On the New York City Subway, this is the weekend: New York City Transit exploits its four-track mainlines and high levels of redundancy in most of the city to shut down individual sections of track on weekends and tell passengers to use alternatives. In Europe, it’s more common for this to be the summer period, when local travel is lower as people go on vacation; unfortunately, in Germany, this extends to intercity rail, during the high season of travel.
Jon says that, “That 5am train with a dozen building workers on it, or the last train home in the evening matter for the trust and reliability of the system, even if those individual trains make heavy losses and are largely empty.” But the point is that knowing that I can book a train in July and have it run as expected without being rerouted onto the slow line is, like the 5 am train, a matter of trust and reliability too. It’s just a matter of which matter of reliability is easier to compromise on.
Then there is a tradeoff of all of this against maintenance efficiency. It is more efficient from the perspective of minimum total gross hours of shutdown to have a long continuous period of shutdown, such as the four-month period planned for the Riedbahn. Nighttime shutdowns require an hour of preparation and disassembly at each end, so that a five-hour nighttime shutdown only yields three hours of maintenance work. Some systems don’t make that work even with regular nighttime shutdowns, such as the London Underground or American systems that are not New York; notably, the Berlin U-Bahn manages to avoid this even with overnight service on weekends.
The situation in Germany
DB’s response to the tradeoffs outlined above is to attempt to run all day, including occasionally at night. There are night trains between Hamburg and southern Germany on the Frankfurt-Cologne high-speed line, so even this line, without any nighttime freight (the grades are far too steep), does not have the regular maintenance windows that LGVs and Shinkansen lines have. As a result, last month, the line was shut for maintenance, and trains were diverted to the old line, taking an hour longer. Right now, the same diversions apply to Cologne-Berlin trains, slowing them by about an hour.
These are not peripheral connections. Frankfurt-Cologne is not quite the busiest intercity line in Germany – that would be the Riedbahn – but it’s a fairly close second, with the same planned traffic level in the Deutschlandtakt of six trains per hour in each direction. It’s the primary connection between the Rhine-Ruhr and not just Frankfurt but also all of southern Germany. Then, Berlin-Cologne connects the two largest metro areas in Germany; the Rhine-Ruhr is close in population to Ile-de-France, while Berlin and Brandenburg have more people than Rhône-Alpes or PACA, which has implications for how much traffic this connection would have if it were fast and reliable, which it is neither (government officials fly between Berlin and Bonn instead of relying on DB).
Is this unavoidable?
No. France has none of these daytime shutdowns on its main lines. Neither does Japan.
German rail advocates sneer at France and ignore Japan, finding all manners of reasons to avoid learning from countries that, on this point, are Germany’s superiors. A common line from within Germany is that its secondary lines are in better shape than France’s, so there is nothing to learn from France. But then, the reason there are routine hour-long delays (or longer) in the summer on the main lines is not that DB runs better service to a city like Siegen or Münster or Jena than SNCF does to their French peers.
The path forward has to be, at the technical level, to institute regular nighttime maintenance windows, and stop trying to make night trains happen. At infrastructure level, it must be to avoid building dual-use infrastructure, and build passenger-dedicated high-speed lines; if freight capacity is needed that the old lines with just slow regional trains can’t provide, then build a separate freight line, based on the needs of freight, at costs that are going to be lower than the long tunnels required for dual-use lines.
But the most important change has to be at the level of governance and culture. Germany believes itself to be at the top of the world. To borrow a joke about Japanese technological stagnation, there is an element here that visiting a German infrastructure system in 2005 had a futuristic vibe like visiting the year 2015, and visiting it today is still like visiting the year 2015. There’s a slew of problems in Germany for which the solution really is “be less German and more French,” and this is one of them, no matter what people who think all French people are unemployed rioters think.
The Regional Plan Association ran an event 2.5 days ago about New York commuter rail improvements and Penn Station, defending the $16.7 billion Penn Station Expansion proposal as necessary for capacity. The presentation is available online, mirrored here, and I recommend people look at the slides to understand the depth of the ignorance and incuriosity of area decisionmakers about best practices displayed in the first half of the presentation; the second half, by Foster Nichols, is more debatable. I hope to make this a series of two or perhaps three posts, focusing on different aspects of why this is so bad. But for now, I’d like to just talk about what the presentation gets wrong about the history of commuter rail improvement in Europe, on pages 17-19. Suffice is to say, the extent of error that can be crammed into a single slide with little text astounded me. With such incuriosity about best practices, it’s not surprising that regional power brokers are trying to will the unnecessary Penn Expansion project into being, never mind that it has no transportation benefits despite its extravagant cost.
The rub is that the presentation on pp. 18-19 says that commuter rail through-running is really hard. Here is page 18:
Regional metro systems comprise a targeted portion of regional rail networks centers of population, employment, business or major attractions like airports that support frequent, fast service
Regional metro systems typically do not operate within original historic train sheds
They operate in new tunnels, shoulder stations adjacent to existing major stations, and separate, simpler interlockings that facilitate frequent service
Then, page 19 shows maps of the RER, Munich S-Bahn, Elizabeth line, and Thameslink, quoting the length it took to build them as, respectively, “30 years,” “46 years,” “2001-2022,” and “1970s-80s, 2009-2020.” The conclusion is “Systems take decades to implement, usually in stages.”
And all of this is a pack of lies.
In fact, commuter rail through-running systems routinely reuse legacy stations, even fairly major ones: both Berlin and Munich Ostbahnhof were incorporated into their respective S-Bahns, and several Parisian train stations were reused for the RER, for example Gare d’Invalides or Luxembourg, with varying levels of modification. New stations are built from scratch underneath surface stub-end terminals like Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon as depicted in the presentation, but if the station already has through-tracks then it can be used as-is, like Munich Ostbahnhof, and in some cases even stub-end stations are at such grade that their infrastructure can be used. If Boston chooses to build the North-South Rail Link, then, since North and South Stations are both large at-grade terminals, the link will have to include new underground platforms at both stations. But Penn Station is an existing through-station below grade; Amtrak already runs through, and so could commuter rail, without adding platforms.
And as for the lines about the systems having taken 30 and 46 years to build, this is so painfully wrong that it is perhaps best to go over their actual histories. The actual length of time it took depends on one’s definitions, especially for Paris, but the maximum one can support for Paris is 16 years; for Munich, it is seven years.
The history of the RER
The RER and Transilien are, together, the largest commuter rail network in Europe by ridership, with around 1.1 billion annual riders. Globally, only four systems surpass them: Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka, Mumbai; the first two are integrated metro-commuter rail networks to the point that it’s hard to distinguish which mode they are, Osaka is several competing companies none with the ridership of the combined Paris system, Mumbai runs with practically no metro accompanying it. The RER’s history, as I will shortly explain, also makes it a good prototype for modern commuter rail operations, of the same type that is called S-Bahn in Germany. New Yorkers would do especially well to understand this history, which has some parallels to the administrative situation in New York today.
The topline of this is that since the 1960s, Paris has connected its legacy commuter and intercity rail terminals with new through-tunnels, called the RER, or Réseau Express Régional. There are five lines, dubbed A through E. Métro operator RATP runs most of the RER A, and the RER B south of Gare du Nord; national railway SNCF runs the rest plus commuter train networks stub-ending at most of the historic terminals, called Transilien, signed with letters from H to R.
But the history of the RER goes back further – and none of it can be said to have taken 30 years. In short: the Métro was built, starting in the 1890s and opening in 1900, to be totally incompatible with mainline rail – for one, where mainline trains in France run on the left, the Métro runs on the right. This was on purpose: city residents in the Belle Epoque already looked down on the suburbs and worried that if the Métro were compatible with the mainlines, then it might be used to connect to the suburbs and bring suburbanites to their city. The stop spacing, separately, was very tight, even tighter than on New York local subway trains, let alone the London Underground. By the time the system reached the inner suburbs in the 1930s, it was clear that it could not by itself connect the growing suburbs to the city, it would be too slow.
Various proposals for investment in commuter rail go back to the 1920s, but little happened, with one exception: the Ligne de Sceaux, shown as the blue line on the first image entering the city from the south, was acquired by the forerunner of RATP, CMP, in 1938, as the rest of the French mainline network was nationalized. CMP was attracted to the line because of its atypically good penetration into the center of Paris – the other lines terminated farther from the historic center, for example at Gare du Nord or Gare de Lyon. The line was also not useful for SNCF as it was being formed, due to its isolation from the rest of the network. The line was electrified as it was acquired, and run as a regional line, still isolated from all others.
More serious plans for commuter rail through-running began in the 1950s, as postwar growth and suburbanization put more pressure on the system. Gare Saint-Lazare was especially under pressure, first because of growth in the western suburbs, and second because the Paris CBD had been creeping west, making its location more attractive for commuters. In 1956, Marc Langevin proposed an eight-line network; in 1959, RATP and SNCF began collaborating, planning east-west and north-south lines. As late as 1966, there were still plans for two separate north-south lines (for example, see here, p. 244), of which only one has been built and the other is no longer seriously proposed.
In the 1960s, the plans got more serious. Construction began in 1961, starting with the east-west axis, still with an uncertain alignment. Eventually, RATP would take over the Ligne de Vincennes (the eastern red line in the before map) in 1969 and the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (the southernmost of the western red lines) in 1972, and connect them with a new tunnel, opening in 1977. Over the 1960s, the plans still had to be refined: it was only in 1963 that it was confirmed that the Ligne de Vincennes’ Paris terminal, Bastille, was too small to be used for this system, and therefore the new tunnels would have to begin farther east, to Nation, which opened in 1969 and is thus already depicted on the before map.
The Ligne de Vincennes was simultaneously modernized, starting in 1966. The entire systems had to be redone, including new platforms and electrification. Nation had to be built underground, starting 1965, complete in 1967 and opening with the rest of the line in 1969.
On the west, the cornerstone was laid in 1971, and construction began shortly later, starting with La Défense. Shuttle trains run by RATP opened between La Défense and Etoile in 1970, and extended to Auber in 1971. In 1972 the line was connected to the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
At the same time, deepening SNCF-RATP integration meant that the planned alignment within the city would need to change to connect to SNCF’s train stations better. Originally, the east-west axis was supposed to run as an express version of Métro Line 1, stopping at Etoile, Concorde, and Châtelet; this was modified to have it swerve north, replacing Concorde with Auber, which is connected to Saint-Lazare. East of Châtelet-Les Halles, the alignment swerves south to connect to Gare de Lyon instead of Bastille.
In 1977, the Nation-Auber section opened, finally offering through-service; the appellation RER A dates only from then. Simultaneously, the north-south axis that was actually built half-opened, connecting the Ligne de Sceaux onward to Les Halles, with cross-platform transfers from the south to the west. On the same date that the central section opened, RATP also inaugurated an entirely greenfield branch of the RER A to the east, initially to Noisy-le-Grand, eventually (by 1992) to the new Marne-la-Vallée development, where Eurodisney was built. Contemporary media reports called Les Halles the biggest metro station in the world, and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (center-right) spoke of public transport for everyone, not just the poor. The cost of this scheme was enormous: it cost 5 billion francs (update 8-9: see Alain Dumas’s comment below – it’s 5 billion FRF for the entire RER A, not just the Nation-Auber section), which would make it about $1 billion/km $350 million in 2023 prices, inflation since then more or less canceling out the franc:USD exchange rate. The RER B cost 400 million francs between Luxembourg and Les Halles, a distance of 2.3 km, and 1.6 billion to get to Gare du Nord and connect to the SNCF network to the north (opened 1981), a distance of 3.5 km.
The RER C then opened in 1979, as a second east-west line, on the Left Bank. Missing all of the main centers within Paris, it has always had far lower ridership than the RER A; it was also much easier and cheaper to build – all that was required was a short tunnel connecting Invalides on the west, previously a subsidiary commuter rail-only stop on the same lines to Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare, and Gare d’Orsay on the east, a commuter rail-only extension of the line to Austerlitz. This was built quickly – the decision was made in 1973, and the line opened within six years. This required a total rebuild of Gare d’Orsay with new underground platforms; Invalides required reconstruction as well, but could use the same station and track structures.
Subsequently, the system has added new lines and branches – the RER D opened from the north to new Gare de Nord platforms in 1982, was extended in 1987 along the same tracks used by the RER B to Les Halles but serving dedicated platforms at both stations, and was extended along a new tunnel to and beyond Gare de Lyon in 1995; the RER A acquired new western branches in 1988 to be operated by SNCF, requiring dual-voltage trains since those branches use 25 kV 50 Hz AC and not 1.5 kV DC like the RATP lines; the RER C acquired a new branch also in 1988 taking over part of the Petite Ceinture; the RER E was opened as a stub-end extension of lines from the Gare de l’Est network to a new underground station at Saint-Lazare in 1999, and was finally extended to the west with some through-service this year.
So in a sense, it’s taken 63 years to build the RER, starting 1961, and the work is not yet done. But the core through-running service opened in 1977, within 16 years, with some decisions made midway through the works. The total required work greatly exceeded anything New York needs to do – just what opened through 1977 includes 16 km of double-track central tunnel on the RER A, 3 km on the new branch to Noisy plus 6 km of new above-ground line, 2 km of tunnel on the RER B, and around one km of tunnel on the RER C, inaugurating eight new underground stations, all on the RER A. The RER A’s ridership reached 1.4 million per workday by 2019, and the RER B’s reached 983,000 – and a great majority of the work on both was done by 1981.
The history of the Munich S-Bahn
The Munich S-Bahn is not the oldest or busiest S-Bahn system in Germany; Berlin and Hamburg both have prewar systems, and Berlin’s ridership is considerably higher than Munich’s. Nonetheless, precisely because Berlin and Hamburg built so much of their infrastructure in the steam era, some lessons do not port well to cities today. In contrast, Munich’s entire system has been built after the war – in fact, the construction of the S-Bahn took place over just seven years, from the decision of 1965 to opening in 1972, timed with the Olympics.
As in Paris and many other cities, the history of proposals for rapid urban mainline rail in Munich stretches back decades before the decision was made. The first proposal was made in 1928, and there was more serious planning in Nazi Germany, as the Nazi Party had been founded in Munich and was interested in investing in the city due to that history; by 1941, there were plans for a three-line system, comprising a north-south, an east-west, and a circular tunnel. But little was built, and during the war, the resources of Germany toward rail were prioritized in a different direction.
After the war, Munich grew rapidly. It was not much of an industrial city in the early 20th century; early industrialization in Germany was mostly in the Ruhr and Saxony, while the professional services economy was centered on Berlin, whose metropolitan area in the 1930s was of comparable size to that of Paris. After the war, things changed, at least in the West: the Ruhr’s coal and steel economy stagnated, while southern Germany grew around new manufacturing of cars and chemicals; decentralization dispersed the professional services economy, and while most went to Frankfurt and Hamburg, a share went to Munich (for example, Siemens’ headquarters moved there from Berlin right after the war). The city’s wartime peak population was 835,000; it would surpass 1 million in 1957 and is 1.5 million today. The region, Oberbayern, comprising essentially the metro areas of Munich and Ingolstadt, would grow from 2 million at the beginning of the war to 2.8 million by 1960 and 4.8 million today, and is the richest region in the EU at this scale, with per capita income from work approaching that of New York.
This small size of Munich in 1900 means that it never had as extensive a rail network as Paris or Berlin. It had just two major urban stations: Hauptbahnhof, a terminal with a station throat leading to points west, and Ostbahnhof, a through-station with tracks leading east, south, and the west, the western tracks looping back south of city center to reach Hauptbahnhof. To this day, area railfans would like this loop to be incorporated into a regional S-Bahn system avoiding city center – but Munich is still a rather monocentric city. There was no U-Bahn, unlike in Berlin or Hamburg.
By 1961, the number of suburban commuters into Munich reached 114,000. The undersize rail network relative to the city’s current importance and the rapid growth in wealth meant that car ownership was high, leading to traffic congestion. The trams were slowed down by traffic, to the point of not running faster than walking in city center.
To resolve these problems, both an U-Bahn network and an S-Bahn network were planned. Early planning began in the 1950s, with the federal government taking over the wartime plans in 1956, but as in Paris, the extent of the system to be planned was up in the air: both an east-west axis and a north-south line were desired, and only in 1963 was the decision finalized that the north-south axis should be a municipal U-Bahn tunnel and not an S-Bahn. The study period began in 1961, with the plan approved in 1965 for the construction of a single east-west S-Bahn tunnel between Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof, and a separate U-Bahn system with three branched trunk lines.
Construction was done on a tight timeline, since Munich was awarded the 1972 Olympics in 1966, and delays were not considered acceptable; the first U-Bahn line, U3/U6 running north-south, opened 1971, and the S-Bahn opened 1972, in what is described as a “record time.”
During the seven years of construction, other projects had to be done in parallel. Commuter rail lines had to be extensively upgraded: the project included 143 km of electrification, and 115 stations outfitted with new high platforms at a level of 760 mm mostly 210 meters long. Simultaneously, most of what has become the standard for good timetabling was invented, out of necessity on a network that had to share tracks and systems with other trains on its outer margin, most importantly the clockface schedule – the system was designed around a 20-minute Takt on each branch from the outset, with outer tails running every 40 minutes.
The central tunnel itself, the Stammstrecke, comprises six stations from Hauptbahnhof to Ostbahnhof of which all except Ostbahnhof are underground, and three have Spanish platforms. Ostbahnhof itself is used as a pinch point for some trains, reversing direction depending on branch. The Stammstrecke in total was built for 900 million DM, or $2.8 billion in 2023 PPPs; the overall line included 4.1 km of tunnel and about 7.3 more km of above-ground connections. (Update 8-9: cost fixed – I originally stated it to be 900 DM.)
There has been further investment adding new branches and upgrading the system. The new signal system LZB was installed in the central section experimentally when it opened in 1972, but it was not used on all trains, and was taken out of service in 1983, only returning in 2004 when its capacity was needed, boosting throughput from 24 trains per hour to 30. However, as in Paris, the core of the system’s high ridership, now about 900,000 per workday, comes from infrastructure that was there from the start, and thus it’s most correct to say that the system took not 46 years to build but seven.
Some lessons for New York
By the standards of Paris and Munich, New York has practically everything it needs to run through-service. The electrification systems on its three commuter railroads are not compatible, but multivoltage trains not only are routine, but also already present in New York; the current configurations all have one problem or another, but fundamentally, ordering multivoltage trains is a solved problem. Only a handful of outer branches need to be electrified, and all can be deferred, running with forced transfers until they are wired as is current practice on the Raritan Valley Line and for the most part also the outer Port Jefferson Branch. The LIRR and Metro-North are entirely high-platform and New Jersey Transit’s Manhattan-facing lines only have 68 low-platform stations of which 26 are already funded for high platform conversions.
By far the biggest missing element for New York by cost is the Gateway Program and its Hudson Tunnel Project, which is budgeted at $16 billion and is funded and beginning construction, with the New Jersey land tunnel contract just awarded. Even before the new tunnel opens, it can run some through-service after Penn Station Access opens from the Hell Gate Line, pairing it with some New Jersey Northeast Corridor trains.
On top of that, some surface improvements are prudent, such as some grade separations of rail junctions, the most expensive costing on the order of hundreds of millions (Hunter is $300 million on the budget, maybe $400 million by now); much of that is already getting funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or likely to get them in the near future, since the infrastructure is also used by Northeast Corridor intercity trains.
But it does not need to do anything that area railroaders have convinced themselves they need, especially not new tracks at Penn Station. Nor are decades of prep work needed – rapid installation of high platforms is completely feasible, as was done not just in Munich in the 1960s and 70s but also in suburban New York in the same period and in the 1980s and 90s, converting the LIRR and Metro-North to full high-platform operations and doing the same on the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey.
All that is needed is a modicum of curiosity about the world, curiosity that is not seen in the presentation with its whoppers about the timelines of the RER and Munich S-Bahn, or its belief that new underground tracks are always required as if Penn Station is the same as the surface Gare du Nord. I find myself having to explain to journalists who interview me that all of this can be done, but the people in charge of the railroads around New York cannot do it.
Pedestrian Observations 