Public Transit Unions

In this post, I would like to explain an observation: public transit workers are unionized even in countries where few workers belong to a union, such as the US and the UK. Attempts by management to win concessions from the unions have often led to prolonged strikes, for example the 108-day strike by SEPTA workers in 1983. This is not just the public sector: the private railroads in the US are unionized, and in 1964 the Florida East Coast Railway had a year-long strike. Nor is this because the public operators and private railroads have a unionized legacy: many private bus shuttles used by Bay Area tech firms to get workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley offices have unionized drivers, including Facebook and Google, even though the tech industry as a whole is predominantly non-union. Public transportation workers, especially on-board crew, are in a position of strength, and I would like to explain why.

First, let us recount how unions work. At their heart is collective bargaining: the union negotiates wages and benefits for the entire membership. An individual worker who is paid too little can quit, which is unlikely to cause the employer much concern; a union can launch a strike, thereby getting higher wages and better work conditions than each individual worker could obtain alone.

In order to be able to collectively bargain, there needs to be a collective in the first place, which means two separate things:

  1. Politically, there needs to be a sense of solidarity among the workers. The workers need to see each other as comrades, or as colleagues, and not as competitors. They need to feel like the union represents their interest. This is unlikely to happen in industries where there is substantial competition for promotions to managerial roles, but easier in industries with clear separation between line workers and managers. It is also unlikely to happen in industries with rapid turnover of employees.
  2. Economically, there needs to be a reasonable way to set a uniform wage scale. This means that the work done by the various employees in each category must be interchangeable, or close enough to it that wages can be made equal. In turn, this requires that the job not have a strong sense of merit, in which some workers are persistently much more productive than others. Productivity differences should be related to seniority, or easily worked into wage agreements (for examples, sales agents can collectively bargain for a uniform commission structure). It’s fine if there is differentiation into several job categories, but then it’s best if this differentiation is rigid, so that workers in each group do not often have to do the job of workers in other groups.

Conversely, if the union goes on strike, management has tools to fight back, including the lockout, or more commonly hiring strikebreakers. To deter management from doing so, the union can exercise peer pressure on people not to scab (condition 1 above), but it also union needs to also fulfill a third condition:

  1. The job must be skilled enough that it is hard for the employer to hire and train strikebreakers quickly. On a nationwide basis this makes unionization easier in a tight labor market, hence socialist support for monetary policy that prioritizes full employment over price stability. But on a per-industry basis, this condition requires some difficult pipeline that workers must go through: a degree, long training, apprenticeship, or bespoke familiarity with the project at hand.

Conditions 2 and 3 are in tension, since skilled jobs are more likely to involve workers with different levels of productivity. For example, retail workers fulfill condition 2, but are easy to replace if they go on strike and the labor market is not tight. In contrast, programmers easily fulfill condition 3, in the sense that if the entire development team on a project quits, it will be difficult for the company to find a new one and get it up to speed, but because there is a wide range of productivity levels, it makes little sense for programmers to all be paid the same. Silicon Valley’s business culture, in which developing a product fast is more important than establishing a business culture, and turnover is encouraged, also makes it hard to establish meaningful solidarity among software developers.

In the intersection between these three conditions lie a set of job descriptions in which there is a strong sense of professionalism, to meet condition 3, but a weak sense of merit, to meet condition 2. These jobs are typically static in the sense of not changing too much over the years, which makes it ideal for a person to do the same thing for their entire life, learning to adopt new technologies gradually as they are introduced but not having to change their entire skillset. Often, the industries these jobs are in are static as well, whence they are more easily done by the public sector, or by large conglomerates that have been around for generations, such as the private US railroads.

Commercial drivers – of buses, trucks, trains, planes – are a major example of people who satisfy all three conditions. One racecar driver can be better than the next by being faster, but in the commercial sector, speeds are determined by the equipment, the schedule, and the safety standards. A train driver can be better than another on the margins, by responding more quickly to an obstacle on the tracks, or paying attention to the posted schedule better, but both of these aspects depend more on external factors, such as the signal system, than on driver skill. Train schedule padding, accounting for suboptimal driver behavior such as beginning to brake too early but also for propagating delays and passengers who take too long to board or alight, consists of a few percent of total travel time: in its peer review of California High-Speed Rail, JR East proposes 3-5% (PDF-p. 10); and a Swedish study for high-speed rail mentions a 0.9-2.3% discrepancy in energy consumption based on driver behavior (PDF-p. 12) and a total schedule pad equal to about 7% of travel time (PDF-p. 24). The productivity difference, or in other words individual merit, is too small to challenge the logic of a uniform wage scale.

Instead of individual merit, commercial drivers have professionalism. A train driver is expected to fulfill certain criteria to ensure safety first and punctuality second, which requires considerable study of the route of the train, the signal systems, the dispatching codes, the correct way to respond to various unforeseen circumstances. Unlike individual car drivers, commercial drivers are not permitted to take small risks in other to go faster, and learning how to pilot a vehicle safely takes some time; all of this is true manifold if the vehicle in question is a plane, leading to arduous certification requirements. In this setting, even in an environment of absolute control by management, there’s little reason to have different payscales – at most, management can penalize workers who make mistakes.

For the same reasons that train drivers have standards of professionalism, it is easy for them to form a cultural group with internal solidarity. They have their own knowledge set and jargon, as anyone who has tried reading threads on railfan forums knows. The transportation industry changes slowly enough, in terms of both travel demand and technological progress, that most train drivers can expect to work for the same company for decades. Even bus drivers, in an industry that’s less dependent on physical plant, can expect to move between bus operators.

The other major category of public transportation workers, maintenance workers, is not as clear-cut. There is certainly a difference in merit – some people just fix things faster than others. But at the same time, the importance of safety is such that giving financial incentive to working faster can lead to shoddy work. Instead, there are extensive regulations, developed by national safety authorities as well as internally by rail operators, specifying which tasks need to be performed and at what intervals.

Unlike train drivers, maintenance workers aren’t interchangeable – they have more specific job titles. But these job titles often lend themselves to easy categorization, such as electricians and welders. Those have their own standards, and the potential for major accidents encourages uniformity of credentials and of wages, while the complexity of the machinery these workers operate ensures that they must be skilled. This leads to the same presence of professionalism without differential individual merit seen in the case of train drivers, and ensures all three conditions facilitating unionization are present.

In a healthy company, technology progresses as fast as it can given the requirements of the industry, and the union rules are reasonable. Wages and benefits are higher with collective bargaining than without almost by definition, but they cannot be massively higher – those are skilled workers, who are not easily replaceable. In environments where the rules are unreasonable – perhaps the certification requirements are more onerous than necessary, perhaps labor-saving technologies are not used, perhaps the work rules are not suitable for a modern operation – management cannot easily force the union’s hand. Even when three people do the job of one, as in the case of US commuter rail operations with conductors and assistant conductors, labor is in a position of power, and reform-minded managers cannot easily hire strikebreakers.

Greenbelts Help Cars

A number of major cities, most notably London, have designated areas around their built-up areas as green belts, in which development is restricted, in an attempt to curb urban sprawl. The towns within the green belt are not permitted to grow as much as they would in an unrestricted setting, where the built-up areas would merge into a large contiguous urban area. Seeking access to jobs in the urban core, many commuters instead live beyond the greenbelt and commute over long distances. There has been some this policy’s effect on housing prices, for example in Ottawa and in London by YIMBY. In the US, this policy is less common than in Britain and Canada, but exists in Oregon in the form of the urban growth boundaries (UGBs), especially around Portland. The effect has been the same, replacing a continuous sprawling of the urban area with discontinuous suburbanization into many towns; the discontinuous form is also common in Israel and the Netherlands. In this post, I would like to explain how, independently of issues regarding sprawl, such policies are friendlier to drivers than to rail users.

Let us start by considering what affects the average speed of cars and what affects that of public transit. On a well-maintained freeway without traffic, a car can easily maintain 130 km/h, and good cars can do 160 or more on some stretches. In urban areas, these speeds are rarely achievable during the day; even moderate traffic makes it hard to go much beyond 110 or 120. Peak-direction commutes are invariably slower. Moreover, when the car gets off the freeway and onto at-grade arterial roads, the speed drops further, to perhaps 50 or less, depending on density and congestion.

Trains are less affected by congestion. On a well-maintained, straight line, a regional train can go at 160 km/h, or even 200 km/h for some rolling stock, even if headways are short. The busiest lines are typically much slower, but for different reasons: high regional and local traffic usually comes from high population density, which encourages short stop spacing, such that there may not be much opportunity for the train to go quickly. If the route is curvy, then high density also makes it more difficult to straighten the line by acquiring land on the inside of the curves. But by and large, slowdowns on trains come from the need to make station stops, rather than from additional traffic.

Let us now look at greenbelts of two kinds. In the first kind, there is legacy development within the greenbelt, as is common around London. See this example:

greenbelt1

 

The greenbelt is naturally in green, the cities are the light blue circles with the large central one representing the big city, and the major transportation arteries (rail + freeway) are in black. The towns within the greenbelt are all small, because they formed along rail stops before mass motorization; the freeways were built along the preexisting transportation corridors. With mass motorization and suburbanization, more development formed right outside the greenbelt, this time consisting of towns of a variety of sizes, typically clustering near the freeways and railways for best access to the center.

The freeways in this example metro area are unlikely to be very congested. Their congestion comes from commuters into the city, and those are clustered outside the greenbelt, where development is less restricted. Freeways are widened based on the need to maintain a certain level of congestion, and in this case, this means relatively unimpeded traffic from the outside of the green belt right up until the road enters the big city. Under free development, there would be more suburbs closer to the city, and the freeway would be more congested there; travel times from outside the greenbelt would be longer, but more people would live closer to the center, so it would be a wash.

In contrast, the trains are still going to be slowed down by the intermediate stops. The small grandfathered suburbs have no chance of generating the rail traffic of larger suburbs or of in-city stops, but they still typically generate enough that shutting them down to speed traffic is unjustified, to say nothing of politically impossible. (House prices in the greenbelt are likely to be very high because of the tight restrictions, so the commuters there are rich people with clout.) What’s more, frequency is unlikely to be high, since demand from within the greenbelt is so weak. Under free development, there might still be more stops, but not very many – the additional traffic generated by more development in those suburbs would just lead to more ridership per stop, supporting higher frequency and thus making the service better rather than worse.

Let us now look at another greenbelt, without grandfathered suburbs, which is more common in Canada. This is the same map as before, with the in-greenbelt suburbs removed:

greenbelt2

In theory, this suburban paradigm lets both trains and cars cruise through the unbuilt area. Overall commutes are longer because of the considerable extra distance traveled, but this distance is traversed at high speed by any mode; 120 km/h is eminently achievable.

In practice, why would there be a modern commuter line on any of these arteries? Commuter rail modernization is historically a piecemeal program, proceeding line by line, prioritizing the highest-trafficked corridors. In Paris, the first commuter line to be turned over to the Metro for operation compatible with city transit, the Ligne de Sceaux, has continuous urban development for nearly its entire length; a lightly-trafficked outer edge was abandoned shortly after the rest of the line was electrified in 1938. If the greenbelt was set up before there was significant suburbanization in the restricted area, it is unlikely that there would have been any reason to invest in a regional rail line; at most there may be a strong intercity line, but then retrofitting it to include slower regional traffic is expensive. Nor is there any case for extending a high-performing urban transit line to or beyond a greenbelt. Parts of Grand Paris Express, namely Lines 14 and 11, are extended from city center outward. In contrast, in London, where the greenbelt reduces density in the suburbs, high investment into regional rail focuses on constructing city-center tunnels in Crossrail and Crossrail 2 and connecting legacy lines to them. In cities that do not even have the amount of suburban development of the counties surrounding London, there is even less justification for constructing new transit.

Now, you may ask, if there’s no demand for new urban transit lines, why is there demand for new highways? After all, if there was not much regional travel into these suburbs historically, why would there be enough car traffic to justify high investment into roads? The answer is that at low levels of traffic, it’s much cheaper to build a road than to build and operate a railway. This example city has no traffic generators in the greenbelt, except perhaps parks, so roads are cheap to build and have few to no grade crossings to begin with, making it easier to turn them into full freeways. The now-dead blog Keep Houston Houston made this point regarding a freeway in Portland, which was originally built as an arterial road in a narrow valley and had few at-grade intersections to be removed. At high levels of demand, the ability to move the same number of people on two tracks as on fourteen lanes of freeway makes transit much more efficient, but at low demand levels, rail still needs two tracks or at least one with passing sidings, and high-speed roads need four lanes and in some cases only two.

The overall picture in which transit has an advantage over cars at high levels of density is why high levels of low-density sprawl are correlated with low transit usage. But I stress that even independently of sprawl, greenbelts are good for cars and bad for transit. A greenbelt with legacy railway suburbs is going to feature trains going at the normal speed of a major metro area, and cars going at the speed of a more spread out and less populated region. Even a greenbelt without development is good urban geography for cars and bad one for transit.

As a single exception, consider what happens when a greenbelt is reserved between two major nodes. In that specific case, an intercity line can more easily be repurposed for commuting purposes. The Providence Line is a good example: while there’s no formal greenbelt, tight zoning restrictions in New England even in the suburbs lead to very low density between Boston and Providence, which is nonetheless served by good infrastructure thanks to the strength of intercity rail travel. The MBTA does not make good use of this infrastructure, but that’s beside the point: there’s already a high-speed electrified commuter line between the two cities, with widely spaced intermediate stops allowing for high average speeds even on stopping trains and overtakes that are not too onerous; see posts of mine here and here. What’s more, intercity trains can be and are used for commutes from Providence to Boston. For an analogous example with a true greenbelt, Milton Keynes plays a role similar to Providence to London’s Boston.

However, this exception is uncommon. There aren’t enough Milton Keyneses on the main intercity lines to London, or Providences on the MBTA, to make it possible for enough transit users to suburbanize. In cities with contiguous urban development, such as Paris, it’s easier. The result of a greenbelt is that people who do not live in the constrained urban core are compelled to drive and have poor public transportation options. Once they drive, they have an incentive to use the car for more trips, creating more sprawl. This way, the greenbelt, a policy that is intended to curb sprawl and protect the environment, produces the exact opposite results: more driving, more long-distance commuting, a larger urban footprint far from the core.

A Theory of Zoning and Local Decisionmaking

This weekend there’s a conference in the US, YIMBY 2016, by a national network of activists calling for more housing. I am not there, but I see various points raised there via social media. One is a presentation slide that says “NIMBYism is a collective action problem: no single neighborhood can lower prices by upzoning; might still be in everyone’s interest to upzone at city/state level.” I think this analysis is incorrect, and in explaining why, I’d like to talk about a theory of how homeowners use zoning to create a housing shortage to boost their own property values, and more generally how long-time residents of a city use zoning to keep out people who are not like them. In this view,zoning is the combination of a housing cartel, and a barrier to internal migration.

For years, I’ve had trouble with the housing cartel theory, because of a pair of observations. The first is that, contra the presentation at YIMBY, zoning is driven by homeowners rather than by renters; for an overview, see the work of William Fischel. The second is that restrictive zoning typically correlates with local decisionmaking, such as in a neighborhood or small city, while lax zoning typically correlates with higher-level decisionmaking, such as in a city with expansive municipal boundaries or in an entire province or country; see below for more on this correlation. These two observations together clash with the housing cartel theory, for the inverse of the reason in the above quote from the YIMBY presentation: it’s more effective to create a housing shortage in a large area than in a small one.

To a good approximation, land value equals (housing price – housing construction cost)*allowed density. If a small municipality upzones, then as in the quote, housing price doesn’t change much, but allowed density grows, raising the price a homeowner can get by selling their house to developers who’d build an apartment building. In contrast, if a large municipality upzones then housing prices will fall quite a bit as supply grows, and depending on the price elasticity, land value might well go down. If x = housing price/housing construction cost and e = price elasticity for housing, i.e. price is proportional to density^(-1/e), then maximum land value occurs when x = e/(e-1), provided e > 1; if e < 1 then maximum value occurs when x is arbitrarily large. Price elasticity is much higher in a small municipality, since even a large increase in local housing supply has a small effect on regional supply, limiting its ability to reduce prices. This implies that, to maximize homeowner value, small municipalities have an incentive to set density limits at a higher level than large municipalities, which will be seen in faster housing growth relative to population growth.

What we see is the exact opposite. Consider the following cases, none a perfect natural experiment, but all suggestive:

1. In the Bay Area, we can contrast San Francisco (a medium-size urban municipality), San Jose and generally Santa Clara County (San Jose is medium-size for a central city and very large for a suburb), and San Mateo County (comprising small and medium-size suburbs). San Mateo County is by far the stingiest of the three about permitting housing: over the last three years it’s averaged 1,000 new housing units per year (see here); in 2013, the corresponding figures elsewhere in the Bay Area were 2,277 new housing units in San Francisco and 5,245 in Santa Clara County. Per thousand people (not per housing unit), this is 2.63 in San Francisco, 2.73 in Santa Clara, and 1.31 in San Mateo. In Alameda County, comprising medium-size cities and suburbs, with a less hot housing market because of the distance from Silicon Valley jobs, growth was 2,474 units, 1.51 per 1,000 people. In small rich Silicon Valley municipalities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park, NIMBYs have effectively blocked apartment construction; in much larger and still rich San Jose, the city has a more pro-growth outlook.

2. Among the most important global cities – New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo – Tokyo has by far the fastest housing stock growth, nearly 2% a year; see article by Stephen Smith. In Japan, key land use decisions are made by the national government, whereas in Paris, London, and New York, decision is at a lower level. London builds more than New York and Paris; its municipal limit is much looser than Paris’s, with 8.5 million people to Paris’s 2.2 million even though their metro areas have similar populations. New York has a fairly loose limit as well, but the development process empowers lower-level community boards, even though the city has final authority.

3. Canada has a relatively permissive upzoning process, and in Ontario, the planning decisions are made at the provincial level, resulting in about 1.3% annual housing growth in Toronto in the previous decade; in the same period, San Jose’s annual housing growth was about 1% and San Francisco’s was 0.9%.

4. France has recently made a national-level effort to produce more housing in the Paris region, especially social housing, due to very high housing prices there. Last decade, housing production in Ile-de-France was down to about 30,000-35,000 per year, averaging to 2.6 per 1,000 people, similar to San Francisco; see PDF-pp. 4-5 here and the discussion here. With the new national and regional effort at producing more social housing, plans appear to be on track to produce 30,000 annual units of social housing alone in the next few years; see PDF-p. 6 here. With 7,000 annual units within city limits, Paris expects to build somewhat more per capita than the rest of the region.

In France, the combination of a national focus on reducing housing burden and the observation that higher-level decisionmaking produces more housing makes sense. But elsewhere, we need to ask how come homeowners aren’t able to more effectively block construction.

My theory is that the answer involves internal migration. Consider the situation of Palo Alto: with Stanford and many tech jobs, it is prime location, and many people want to move there. The homeowners are choosing the zoning rule that maximizes their ability to extract rents from those people, in both the conventional sense of the word rent and the economic sense. Now consider decisionmaking at the level of the entire state of California. California can raise housing prices even more effectively than Palo Alto can by restricting development, but unlike Palo Alto, California consists not just of residents of rich cities, but also of residents of other cities, who would like to move to Palo Alto. In the poorer parts of the state, there’s not much point in restrictive zoning, because there isn’t that much demand for new housing, except perhaps from people who cannot afford San Francisco or Los Angeles and are willing to endure long commutes. On the contrary, thanks to the strength of internal migration, a large fraction of prospective residents of Palo Alto live elsewhere in California. Nor do people in poor areas, where houses aren’t worth much as investments, gain much from raising house prices for themselves; the ability to move to where the good jobs are is worth more than raising housing prices by a few tens of thousands of dollars. This means that the general interest in California is to make Palo Alto cheaper rather than more expensive. The same is true of Japan and Tokyo, or France and Paris, or Ontario and Toronto.

While superficially similar to the point made in the presentation quoted at the beginning of this post, my theory asserts the opposite. The issue is not that individual municipalities see no benefit in upzoning since it wouldn’t reduce rents by much. It’s that they see net harm from upzoning precisely because it would reduce rents. It is not a collective action problem: it is a problem of disenfranchisement, in which the people who benefit from more development do not live in the neighborhoods where the development would be taking place. High-level decisionmaking means that people who would like to move to a rich area get as much of a vote in its development policy as people who already live there and have access to its amenities, chief of which is access to work. It disempowers the people who already have the privilege of living in these areas, and empowers the people who don’t but would like to.

Individual rich people can be virtuous. Rich communities never are. They are greedy, and write rules that keep others out and ruthlessly eliminate any local effort to give up their political power. They will erect borders and fences, exclude outsiders, and demagogue against revenue sharing, school integration, and upzoning. They will engage in limited charity – propping up their local poor (as San Francisco protects low-income lifelong San Franciscans via rent control), and engaging in symbolic, high-prestige giving, but avoid any challenge to their political power. Upzoning is not a collective action problem; it is a struggle for equal rights and equal access to jobs regardless of which neighborhood, city, or region one grew up in.

The RPA Continues to Push for the Flawed Crossboro Plan

As the Regional Plan Association continues to work on its Fourth Regional Plan, expected to be published next year, it’s releasing various components of the upcoming agenda. One, an update from the Third Regional Plan from 1996, is a line variously called Triboro or Crossboro. In the third plan, Triboro RX was meant to be a circumferential subway line, taking over existing abandoned and low-traffic freight rail rights-of-way in Brooklyn, Queens, and the South Bronx, terminating at Yankee Stadium via a short tunnel. It was never seriously proposed by any political actor, but was briefly mentioned positively by then-MTA chair Lee Sander in 2008, and negatively mentioned by Christine Quinn, who called for a bus line along a parallel alignment in her mayoral campaign in 2013. In 2014, Penn Design proposed a variant it calls Crossboro, which differs from the original Triboro proposal in two ways: first, the stop spacing is much wider, and second, instead of the short tunnel to Yankee Stadium, it continues northeast along the Northeast Corridor, making four stops in the Bronx as in the proposed Metro-North Penn Station Access plan. Crossboro is an inferior proposal, and unfortunately, the fourth plan’s Triboro proposal downgrades it from the original alignment to Crossboro.

As I explained a year and a half ago, specifically in the context of Crossboro, it is poor planning to run train service that begins as a radial and then becomes as a circumferential instead of continuing into the center. The route of Crossboro, and now also the Triboro plan, involves going from the North Bronx to the south in the direction of Manhattan, but then turning southeast toward Queens and Brooklyn, rather than continuing to Manhattan. Briefly, in a system with radial and circumferential routes (as opposed to a grid), circumferential service is the most effective when it connects to secondary centers, and has easy transfers to every radial. If a line runs as a radial and then switches to circumferential, its ability to connect to other radials is compromised, making it a weaker circumferential; nor could it ever be even a half-decent radial without service to the CBD. Lines with such service pattern, such as Line 3 in Shanghai and the G train in New York until 2001, tend to underperform.

However, the stop spacing deserves to be treated separately. Under both Crossboro and the RPA’s new version of Triboro, there are too few stops for the line to be useful as an urban rail service. I’m going to ignore the connection between Queens and the Bronx, which as a major water crossing can be expected to have a long nonstop segment, and talk first about the Bronx, and then about Queens and Brooklyn.

In the Bronx, there are four stops in 10 km, starting counting from where the bridge toward Queens begins to rise. This may be reasonable for a commuter rail service with local service extending well past city limits (to New Rochelle or even Stamford), but when it terminates within the city, it’s too far for people to be able to walk to it. The proposed stops also miss the Bronx’s most important bus route, the Bx12 on Fordham Road, which in 2015 became the city’s busiest single bus route. A stop on the Pelham Parkway, the continuation of Fordham in the East Bronx, would be a massive travel time improvement over trying to reroute the Bx12 to meet a train station near Coop City, the proposed northern terminus of both Crossboro and the new Triboro. Conversely, it would delay few other passengers, by very little, since there would only be one further stop north. The result of the proposed stopping pattern is then that most people living near the line would not be able to either walk to it or take a frequent bus.

In Queens and Brooklyn, starting from Astoria and going south, the route is 26 km long, and the new Triboro makes 17 stops. The average interstation, 1.5 km, is noticeably above the international subway average, and is especially high for New York, whose stop spacing is near the low end globally. The original version had 29 stops over the same distance, and one more stop between Astoria and the bridge. Unlike in the Bronx, in Brooklyn all streets hosting major radial routes get subway stops. However, long stretches of the route get no stops. The stop spacing is not uniform – from Northern Boulevard to Grand Avenue there’s a stretch with 4 stops in 2.8 km (counting both ends), but from Astoria-Ditmars to Northern Boulevard there’s a 2.5 km nonstop service, skipping Astoria Boulevard and Steinway, passing through a medium-density neighborhood south of the Grand Central Parkway with mediocre subway access. A stop at Astoria Boulevard and Steinway is obligatory, and probably also one between Astoria and Northern, around 49th Street. To the south of Grand Avenue, the proposal calls for a 2.1 km nonstop segment to the M terminus at Metropolitan Avenue, skipping Middle Village, which is cut off from Grand by the Long Island Expressway and from the M by cemeteries. An additional stop in the middle of this segment, at Eliot Avenue, is required.

In Brooklyn, the route runs express next to the L train, splitting the difference between serving Broadway Junction (with a connection to the A/C) and Atlantic Avenue (with a connection to the LIRR): the RPA’s diagram depicts a station at Atlantic Avenue but calls it Broadway Junction. Farther south, it makes a few stops on an arc going southwest toward southern Brooklyn; the stops are all defensible, and the stop spacing could potentially work, but there are still potential missing locations, and some nonstop segments in the 1.7 km area. For example, it goes nonstop between Utica and Nostrand Avenues, a distance of 1.7 km, with a good location for an interpolating station right in the middle, at Albany Avenue. From Nostrand west, it stops at a transfer to every subway line, except the R. In that segment, one more stop could be added, between the F and the D/N; the reason is that the gap between these two lines is 1.8 km, and moreover the right-of-way slices diagonally through the street grid, so that travel time from the middle to either stop is longer along the street network. However, overall, this is not why I dislike the route. Finally, at the western end, the route is especially egregious. The right-of-way is parallel to the N train, but then awkwardly misses 59th Street, where the N veers north and starts going toward Manhattan. The original proposal had a stop several blocks away from 59th, with a long transfer to the R (and N); this one drops it, so there is no R transfer in Brooklyn – trains express from the D/N transfer at New Utrecht to the terminus at Brooklyn Army Terminal, where there is very little development. There are practically no through-riders who would be inconvenienced by adding the extra two N stops in between. In contrast, due to the low frequency of the N (it comes every 10 minutes off-peak), making passengers originating in those stations who wish to ride Triboro transfer would add considerably to their travel time.

A route like Triboro has an inherent problem in deciding what stop spacing to use, because as a circumferential, it is intended to be used on a large variety of origin-destination pairs. For passengers who intend to connect between two outer radial legs more quickly than they could if they transferred in Manhattan, the wider stop spacing, emphasizing subway connections, is better. However, the mixed radial-circumferential nature of the new Triboro makes this a losing proposition: there’s no connection to any subway line in the Bronx except the 6. Moreover, in Brooklyn, there’s no connection in Brooklyn to the R, and if there’s a connection to the A/C, it involves walking several hundred meters from what on the L is a separate subway stop.

In contrast, for passengers whose origins are along the line, narrower stop spacing works better, because they’re unlikely to cluster around the connection points with the radial subway lines. (The line has no compelling destinations, except maybe Jackson Heights and Brooklyn College; in the Bronx, the two most important destinations, the Hub and Yankee Stadium, are respectively close to and on the old Triboro route, but far from the new one.) The aforementioned Astoria/Steinway, Eliot, and Albany, as well as the skipped stations along the L and N routes, all have reasonable numbers of people within walking distance, who have either poor subway access (the first three) or only radial access (the L and N stations).

What’s more, if trains make more stops, the increase in travel time for passengers connecting between two legs is not large compared with the reduced station access time for passengers originating at an intermediate station. The reason is that passengers who connect between two legs are not traveling all the way. The fastest way to get from the West Bronx to southern Brooklyn is to take the D train all the way, or take the 4 to the D; from the 6 train’s shed, the fastest way is to take the 6 and transfer to the N/Q at Canal or the B/D at Broadway/Lafayette. No circumferential service can change that. The benefit of circumferential service is for people who travel short segments: between the Bronx and Queens, or between the 7 or the Queens Boulevard trains and the lines in Brooklyn that aren’t the F. Given high circumferential bus ridership in Brooklyn – two circumferential routes, the B6 and B35, rank 2nd and 4th borough-wide and 4th and 7th citywide, despite averaging maybe 9 km/h – connections between two Brooklyn legs are also likely. For those passengers, making a few more local stops would add very little to travel time. The subway has a total stop penalty of about 45 seconds per station. Of the ten extra stops I list as required – Astoria/Steinway, Eliot, Albany, 59th, four along the L, and two along the N – three (the two on the N and 59th) are basically end stations, and few passengers have any reason to travel over more than five of the rest. In contrast, adding these ten stops would improve the quality of transfers to the R and A/C and provide crucial service to intermediate neighborhoods, especially Middle Village.

Finally, let me make a remark about comparative costs. The original Triboro plan required a short tunnel, between Melrose Metro-North station and Yankee Stadium; the new one does not. However, a single kilometer of new tunnel in the context of a 34 km line is not a major cost driver. The new proposal is actually likely to be more expensive. It is longer because of the segment in the Bronx along the Northeast Corridor, about 40 km in total, and 10 km would be alongside an active rail line. There are plans for increased mainline passenger rail service on the line: Penn Station Access, plus any improvements that may be made to intercity rail. Far from offering opportunities to share costs, such traffic means that any such plan would require four tracks on the entire line and flying junctions to separate trains going to Penn Station from trains going to Brooklyn. Fare collection would be awkward, too – most passengers would transfer to the subway, so subway faregates would be required, but commuter rail has no need for faregates, so sharing stations with Penn Station Access would require some kludge that wouldn’t work well for any mode. Tunneling is expensive in New York, but so is at-grade construction; a kilometer of tunnel in the Bronx is unlikely to cost more than configuring an active rail mainline for a combination of suburban and high-frequency urban service.

The RPA proposes the London Overground as a model, treating the new Triboro as a commuter line offering subway service levels. Everywhere else I’d support this idea. But here, it fails. First, as I explained in a previous post, the routing is an awkward mix of radial and circumferential. But second, the stop spacing only works in the context of a long suburban line feeding city center, and not an urban circumferential line. In the context of an urban line, more stops are needed, to let people walk from more neighborhoods to the train, or take a connecting bus. For the most part, the original Triboro plan, designed around interstations of about 900 meters not counting the water crossing, would work well. Crossboro, and its near-clone the new Triboro, is inferior to it in every respect, and the RPA should jettison it from the Fourth Regional Plan in favor of the old proposal.

Select Bus Service Problems

I recently visited New York. I stayed in Kew Gardens Hills, a neighborhood located between Jamaica and Flushing, just close enough to the subway that it’s plausible to walk but just far enough that this walk is uncomfortable and I preferred to take a bus. The bus route, Main Street, is one of Queens’ busiest (see data here and here). I’ve been calling for investment in it for years, going back to a fantasy spite map I drew so long ago I don’t remember what year it was, and continuing more recently in my post on where New York should and shouldn’t build light rail. Last year, the route did get Select Bus Service, and I took it a few times. The result is not good.

Main Street maintains two bus corridors: the local Q20, and the Select Bus Service Q44. Almost every SBS route is an overlay of a local route and a rapid route; on the local route passengers must board from the front and pay within view of the driver, and on the rapid route passengers must validate a ticket at ticketing machines beforehand and can then board the bus from any stop, with the fare enforced via random checks for ticket receipts. This leads to the following problems, some preventable, some inherent to this setup:

  1. Passengers who can take either the local or the SBS route need to decide in advance whether to validate their tickets at the machines or not, based on whether the next bus is SBS. The resulting last-minute validation delays boarding. After the mayhem caused by the introduction of SBS to the M15, on First and Second Avenues, bus drivers on local routes began to accept the receipts spitted out by the SBS ticketing machines. However, this practice is either inconsistent or not widely-known among occasional bus riders, such as the people I was staying with, who own cars.
  2. The combination of local and limited buses on a medium-frequency route such as Main Street makes it impossible to maintain even headways. Even within each route (Q20 or Q44) I repeatedly saw bunching, but the different speeds of the Q20 and Q44 make bunching between a local and an express inevitable at some point on the route. Off-peak weekday frequency is 10 minutes on the Q20 and 8 on the Q44, which isn’t good enough to justify this split, especially given the bunching within each route; some stations will always be scheduled to have 8-minute service gaps, and in practice could see 15-minute gaps because of the bunching. See more on this problem of locals and rapids on infrequent routes on Human Transit.
  3. The expense of the ticketing machines ($75,000 per stop for a pair of modified MetroCard vending machines and a machine that takes coins) limits how widely they can be installed. Everywhere else where proof-of-payment is used, holders of valid transfers and season passes can just board the train or bus and show their pass to an inspector. This would be especially useful in New York, because the biggest crunch at SBS stops occurs when many passengers arrive at the stop at once, which in turn is the most common where passengers transfer from the subway. The slow process of validating a ticket leads to queues at busy times, and adding more machines is difficult because of their cost.
  4. Stop spacing is never what it should be. Most developed countries have converged on a standard of about 400-500 meters between successive bus stops. North America instead has converged on 200 meters, leading to slow buses that stop too often; see an old Human Transit post on the subject here. The stop spacing on the segment of the Q44 I was using was two stops in 1.7 km, leading to long walks between stops.
  5. On the schedule, the Q44 makes 15 stops in 9.2 km between its origin in Jamaica and Flushing, and takes 42 minutes in the midday off-peak. This is an average speed of 13.1 km/h. In contrast, Vancouver’s limited-stop buses, which average about a stop per kilometer on Broadway and 4th Avenue, average 20 km/h and 30 km/h respectively; the 4th Avenue buses do not have off-board fare collection, but there’s less traffic than on Broadway, and the stoplights give priority to through-traffic, both private and public, over crossing traffic.

The basic problem with New York’s approach to Select Bus Service is that all North American bus rapid transit ultimately descends from Jaime Lerner’s sales pitch of BRT as a cheap subway on tires, at grade. Lerner implemented BRT in Curitiba successfully, in the context of low wages: construction costs appear to only weakly depend on wealth (see e.g. my posts here, here, here, here, and here), but bus driver costs rise with average income, making replacing fifteen bus drivers with one subway driver a crucial money saver in rich cities and an unaffordable luxury in poor ones. North American BRT imitates Latin American BRT’s role as a cheap subway substitute, and ignores the superior usage of bus services in Europe, with which American transit planners do not dialog; there’s no systematic dialog with Latin American planners either, but Lerner has aggressively pitched his ideas to receptive audiences, whereas no comparable figure has pitched European-style reforms to the US.

In cities that think of BRT as a subway substitute, the BRT network will tend to be small, consisting of a few lines only serving the most important corridors, and bundle various features of improved transit together (off-board fare collection, larger vehicles, bus lanes, signal priority). After all, a line can’t be partly a subway and partly a bus. In Bogota, whose BRT system has eclipsed Curitiba and is the world’s largest, the BRT lines run different vehicles from the local lines: local buses have doors opening on the right to the curb, BRT buses have doors opening on the left to a street median bus station, some hybrids have buses with doors on both sides (see photos on Spanish Wikipedia). ITDP, which promotes Latin American-style BRT around the world, has a BRT scoring guideline that awards points to systems that brand their BRT lines separately from the rest of the bus network, as New York does with SBS.

In the European thinking, there’s already an improved quality urban transit service: the subway, or occasionally the tram. The bus is a bus. The biggest difference is that subway networks are smaller than bus networks. Paris and London, both with vast urban rail networks, have a number of subway lines measured in the teens, plus a handful of through-running commuter services; they have hundreds of bus routes. Instead of branding a few buses as special, they invest in the entire bus network, leading to systemwide proof-of-payment in many cities. Bus lanes and signal priority are installed based on demand on an individual segment basis. New York installs bus lanes without regard to local versus SBS status, but retains the special SBS brand, distinguished by off-board fare collection, and only installs it on a per-route basis rather than systemwide.

The other issue, unique to New York, is the ticket receipts. Everywhere else that I know of, bus stops do not have large ticket machines as New York does. Vancouver, which otherwise suffers from the same problem of having just a few special routes (called B-Lines), has no ticket machines at B-Line stops at all: people who have valid transfers or  monthly passes can board at their leisure from any door, while people who don’t pay at the front as on local buses. SBS in contrast does not give passengers the option of paying at the front. In New York, people justify the current system by complaining that the MetroCard is outdated and will be replaced by a smart card any decade now; in reality, systems based on paper tickets (including Vancouver, but also the entire German-speaking world) manage to have proof-of-payment inspections without smartcards. Small devices that can read the MetroCard magnetic stripe are ubiquitous at subway stops, where people can swipe to see how much money they have left.

The right path for New York is to announce that every bus route will have off-board fare collection, regardless of stop spacing. It should also engage in stop consolidation to reduce the interstation to about 400-500 meters, but this is a separate issue from fare collection. Similarly, the question of bus lanes should be entirely divorced from fare collection. There should be no ticketing machines at bus stops of the kind currently used. At most, stops should have validators, similar to the MetroCard readers at subway turnstiles but without the fare barrier. Validators are not expensive: smartcard readers in Singapore are consumer items, available to people for recharging their cards at home via their credit cards for about $40, a far cry from the $75,000 cost in New York today. People with valid transfers or unlimited cards should be able to board without any action, and people without should be able to pay on the bus.

Finally, the split between local and rapid routes should be restricted to the busiest routes, with the highest frequency in the off-peak. Conceivably it should be avoided entirely, in favor of stop consolidation, in order to increase effective frequency and reduce bunching. The city’s single busiest route, the M15, has 7-minute SBS and 8-minute local service in the midday off-peak, and given how slow the local is, it’s enough to tip the scales in favor of walking the entire way if I just miss the bus.

Quick Note: A Hypothesis About Airport Connectors

It is a truth universally acknowledged that cities spend far more per rider on airport connectors than on other kinds of public transit. On this blog, see many posts from previous years on the subject. My assumption, and that of such other transit advocates as Charles Komanoff, was always that it came from an elite versus people distinction: members of the global elite fly far more than anyone else, and when they visit other cities, they’re unlikely to take public transit, preferring taxis for most intermediate-length trips and walking for trips around the small downtown area around their hotels.

In this post, I would like to propose an alternative theory. Commuters who use public transit typically use their regular route on the order of 500 times a year. If they also take public transit for non-work trips around the city, the number goes even higher, perhaps 700. In contrast, people who fly only fly a handful of times per year. Frequent business travelers may fly a few tens of times per year, still an order of magnitude less than the number of trips a typical commuter takes on transit.

What this means is that 2 billion annual trips on the New York-area rail network may not involve that many more unique users than 100 million annual trips between the region’s three airports. Someone who flies a few times per year and is probably middle class but not rich might still think that transportation to the airport is too inconvenient, and demand better. In the US, nearly half the population flies in any given year, about 20% fly at least three roundtrips, and 10% fly at least five. Usually, discussions of elite versus regular people do not define the elite as the top half; even the top 10% is rare, in these times of rhetoric about the top 1% and 0.1%. When Larry Summers called for infrastructure investment into airport transit, he said it would improve social equity because what he considered the elite had private jets.

But what’s actually happening is not necessarily about the top 0.1% or 1% or even 5% directing government spending their way. It may be so; certainly politicians travel far more than the average person, and so do very rich donors. But broad segments of the middle class fly regularly. The average income of regular fliers is presumably considerably higher than that of people who do not fly, but not to the same extent as the picture drawn by political populists.

None of this makes airport transit a great idea. Of course some projects are good, but the basic picture is still one in which per rider spending on airport connectors is persistently higher than on other projects, by a large factor. In New York, the JFK AirTrain cost about $2 billion in today’s money and carries 6.4 million riders a year, which would correspond to 21,000 weekday riders if it had the same annual-to-weekday passenger ratio as regular transit, 300 (it has a much higher ratio, since air travel does not dip on weekends the way commuter travel does). This is around $100,000 per rider, which contrasts with $20,000 for Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 if ridership projections hold. Earlier this year, the de Blasio administration proposed a developed-oriented waterfront light rail, projected to cost $1.7 billion and get 16 million riders a year, which corresponds to about $32,000 per daily rider; a subsequent estimate pegs it at $2.5 billion, or $47,000 per rider, still half as high as how much the AirTrain cost.

However, what I propose is that the high cost of airport connectors is not because the elite spends money on itself. Rather, it’s because many ordinary middle-class people fly a few times a year and wish for better airport transit, without thinking very hard about the costs and benefits. An airport connector appeals to a very wide section of the population, and may be very cheap if we divide the cost not by the number of daily users but by the number of unique annual users. Hence, it’s easier for politicians to support it, in a way they wouldn’t support an excessively costly subway line connecting a few residential neighborhoods to the city.

It’s a political failure, but not one that can be resolved by more democratic means. The conventional analysis that the root cause is excessive attention to elite concerns implies that if spending were decided in more democratic ways, it would be directed toward other causes. But if the hypothesis I’m putting forth is right, then democracy would not really resolve this, since the number of people who would benefit from an airport connector, if only shallowly, is large. A rigorous regime of cost-benefit analyses, including publicized estimates of cost per rider and the opportunity cost, would be required.

Several European Countries to Follow Norway’s Lead, Ban Fuel-Powered Cars

Following plans by the government of Norway to ban cars fueled by petrol or diesel by 2025, several other countries in Europe are formulating similar programs to phase out fuel-powered transportation. Moreover, sources close to the European Parliament say that once multiple member states pass such a ban as is expected later this year, the European Union will attempt to enforce these rules throughout its territory.

In Sweden, the office of Åsa Romson, minister for the environment and co-spokesperson for the Green Party, released a statement saying that a ban on the internal combustion engine is a necessary step to reduce pollution and carbon emissions. In Sweden, only about 3% of electricity production comes from fossil fuels, and plans made by the Persson cabinet in 2005, Making Sweden an Oil-Free Society, already call for a phaseout of the use of oil for heating. The Löfven cabinet has nowhere else to cut in its program to make Sweden a carbon-neutral society by 2050. The Social Democrats-Green minority government is expected to work with the more moderate parties in the opposition Alliance; the Centre Party has already endorsed the move, but the Liberals have yet to make a statement.

In France and Germany, the ban is expected to be far more contentious. Auto manufacturers in both countries have condemned the moves by their respective governments to ban the internal combustion engine, saying that it would make the economy less competitive. European automakers have lagged behind Japanese and American ones in both hybrid and all-electric car technology, as conventional European petrol and diesel cars already have high fuel economy. In response to so-called range anxiety, in which an electric car’s limited range may leave the driver stranded on the motorway, the Hollande administration is expected to pair the proposed phaseout with national investment into charging stations as well as additional investment into TGV lines, to make it easier to travel long distances in France without a car.

Demands by BMW and Volkswagen for Germany to commit to spending money on R&D for improved battery range and charging and battery swap stations on the highway network have run into budgetary problems. While Chancellor Angela Merkel is reported to be interested in implementing a phaseout, in order to attract Green support into a possible future grand coalition and reduce EU dependence on oil imports from Russia, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has openly rejected any package that would raise the budget deficit, and the allied Christian Social Union has rejected the proposed ban on principle. Opposition from far-right populist parties, including the Alliance for Germany (AfD) and France’s National Front (FN), is likely to be significant, and sources close to Hollande and Merkel say that both have ruled out tax increases to pay for the program.

In France the calls for a phaseout of the internal combustion engine are especially loud in the Paris region, where high levels of particulate pollution from diesel vehicles led to recent restrictions on car use. The mayor of Paris, the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, previously proposed to ban diesel vehicles from the city entirely, and has endorsed the state’s plans to phase out fuel-powered vehicles, adding that given Paris’s pollution crisis, a local ban on diesel vehicles should be implemented immediately. The president of the regional council, Valérie Pécresse of the Republicans (LR), is said to support the phaseout as well, and to push LR behind the scenes not to oppose it. Conversely, opposition from FN is especially acute. The party leader, Marine le Pen, quipped that France would not need any additional reductions in greenhouse gas emissions if it had not taken in non-European immigrants since the 1960s, and noted that the immigrants are especially likely to settle in Paris, where the problems are the most acute.

Elsewhere in Europe, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are said to be considering a phaseout by 2030. Within Belgium, Saudi support of mosques preaching radical interpretations of Islam is said to have influenced the country’s liberal parties, the Francophone Reformist Movement (MR) and the Flemish Liberals and Democrats (VLD), to support a phaseout. However, the Flemish nationalist parties remain opposed, and the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) issued a statement saying that this solution may work within Brussels but is inappropriate for Flanders. In contrast, the Netherlands is expected to pass the phaseout without any political problems. In Switzerland, a referendum is planned for next year, and early polling suggests that it is supported by 55-60% of the population.

Governments outside Europe are said to be watching the development closely, especially in France and Germany, which are perceived as more reliable bellwethers of European opinion than Sweden. In Japan, home to the world’s top-selling electric car, the Nissan Leaf, political support for a phaseout appears high. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called climate change a “defining issue of our time,” and is working on a national infrastructure plan. Sources close to Abe say it will pair subsidies for so-called city cars, short-range electric vehicles, with investments into the country’s rail network outside major metropolitan areas, to make it easier for people living outside the biggest cities to travel on public transport.

In the US, both the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign refused to comment, saying that it is an internal European affair. However, sources close to the administration say that it is already planning to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s executive power to restrict the sale of new fuel-powered cars to emergency needs. The sources speculate that an executive order is planned for shortly after the presidential election this November, provided Clinton wins, in order to avoid creating backlash among key swing constituencies, including the automakers and the exurban lower middle class. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign’s response is unprintable.

Train Operator Labor Efficiency

Last summer, I brought up a metric of railroad labor efficiency: annual revenue hours per train driver. Higher numbers mean that train drivers spend a larger proportion of their work schedule driving a revenue train rather than deadheading, driving a non-revenue train, or waiting for their next assignment. As an example, I am told on social media that the LIRR schedules generous crew turnaround times, because the trains aren’t reliably punctual, and by union rules, train drivers get overtime if because their train is late they miss the next shift. Of note, all countries in this post have roughly the same average working hours (and the US has by a small margin the highest), except for France, which means that significant differences in revenue hours per driver are about efficiency rather than overall working hours.

I want to clarify that even when union work rules reduce productivity, low productivity does not equal laziness. Low-frequency lines require longer turnaround times, unless they’re extremely punctual. Peakier lines require more use of split shifts, which require giving workers more time to commute in and out.

The database is smaller than in my posts about construction costs, because it is much harder to find information about how many train operators a subway system or commuter railroad employs than to find information about construction costs. It is often also nontrivial to find information about revenue hours, but those can be estimated from schedules given enough grunt work.

In Helsinki, there is a single subway trunk splitting into two branches, each running one train every 10 minutes all day, every day: see schedules here and here. This works out to 65,000 train-hours a year. There are 75 train drivers according to a 2010 factsheet. 65,000/75 = 867 hours per driver. This is the highest number on this list, and of note, this is on a system without any supplemental peak service, allowing relatively painless scheduling.

In Toronto, there were 80,846,000 revenue car-km on the subway in 2014 (an additional line, the Scarborough Rapid Transit, is driverless). Nearly all subway trains in Toronto have six cars; the Sheppard Line runs four-car trains, but is about 10% of the total route-length and runs lower frequency than the other lines. So this is around 13.5 million revenue train-km. According to both Toronto’s schedule of first and last trains per station and this chart of travel times, average train speed is around 32 km/h between the two main lines, and a bit higher on Sheppard, giving about 420,000 annual service hours. In 2009, there were 393,000 hours. Toronto runs two-person train operation, with an operator (driver) and a guard (conductor); this article from 2014 claims 612 operators and guards, this article from 2009 claims 500 operators alone. 420,000/500 = 840, and, using statistics from 2009, we get 393,000/500 = 786; if the article from 2014 misrepresents things and there are 612 drivers in total, then 420,000/612 = 686. If I had to pick a headline figure, I’d use 786 hours per driver, using the 2009 numbers. Update: the Scarborough RT is not driverless, even though the system could be run driverless; from the same data sources as for the subway, it had 23,000 operating hours in 2014, which adds a few percent to the operating hours per driver statistic.

In London, unlike in North America, the statistics are reported in train-km and not car-km. There are 76.2 million train-km a year, and average train speed is 33 km/h, according to a TfL factsheet; see also PDF-p. 7 of the 2013-4 annual report. In 2012, the last year for which there is actual rather than predicted data, there were 3,193 train drivers, and according to the annual report there were 76 million train-km. 76,000,000/33 = 2,300,000 revenue-hours; 2,300,000/3,193 = 721 hours per driver.

In Tokyo, there used to be publicly available information about the number of employees in each category, at least on Toei, the smaller and less efficient of the city’s two subway systems. As of about 2011, Toei had 700 hours per driver: from Hyperdia‘s schedules, I computed about 390,000 revenue train-hours per year, and as I recall there were 560 drivers, excluding conductors (half of Toei’s lines have conductors, half don’t).

In New York, we can get revenue car-hour statistics from the National Transit Database, which is current as of 2013; the subway is on PDF-p. 13, Metro-North is on PDF-p. 15, and the LIRR is on PDF-p. 18. We can also get payroll numbers from SeeThroughNY. The subway gets 19,000,000 revenue hours per year; most trains have ten cars, but a substantial minority have eight, and a smaller minority have eleven, so figure 2,000,000 train-hours. There were 3,221 train operators on revenue vehicles in 2013, and another 373 at yards. This is 556 hours per driver if the comparable international figure is all drivers, or 621 if it is just revenue vehicle drivers. The LIRR gets 2,100,000 annual revenue car-hours, and usually runs trains of 8 to 12 cars; figure around 210,000. There were 467 engineers on the LIRR in 2013; this is 450 hours per driver. Metro-North gets 1,950,000 annual revenue car-hours, and usually runs 8-car trains; figure about 240,000. It had 413 locomotive engineers in 2013; this is 591 hours per driver.

In Paris, the RER A has 523 train drivers (“conducteurs”). The linked article attacks the short working hours, on average just 2:50 per workday. The timetable is complex, but after adding the travel time for each train, I arrived at a figure of 230,000 train-hours a year. 230,000/523 = 440 hours per driver. There’s a fudge factor, in that the article is from 2009 whereas the timetable is current, but the RER A is at capacity, so it’s unlikely there have been large changes. Note also that in France, workers get six weeks of paid vacation a year, and a full-time workweek is 35 hours rather than 40; adjusting for national working hours makes this equivalent to 534 hours in the US, about the same as the New York subway.

De Blasio Versus Good Transit

In New York, the de Blasio administration has been spending considerable political capital pushing for a $2.5 billion light rail line connecting Astoria and the Brooklyn waterfront south to Sunset Park. There has been a lot of criticism from good transit advocates about implementation – namely, it’s unclear there will be free transfers to the subway and buses, in order to avoid having to share turf with the state-owned MTA – but also of the basic concept, which is not the biggest transit priority in the region, or for matter the twentieth. In comments and on social media, I’ve seen a few wrong arguments made in support of waterfront light rail and similar bad investments over and over, and I’d like to go in some detail into where cities should and should not build such lines.

The principles below are based on various oppositions: first world versus third world, fast versus slow growth, subway versus no subway. I think a good meta-principle is that if the presence of a certain factor is an argument in favor of a specific solution, then its absence should be an argument against that solution. For instance, if high wages are an argument in favor of rail and against bus rapid transit, then low wages should be an argument in favor of bus rapid transit; this principle makes me wonder what Addis Ababa was thinking when it built light rail instead of BRT, while at the same time thinking very little of American cities that make the decision that Addis Ababa should have made. The upshot of the meta-principle is that many of the guidelines that work in New York could work in very different cities, in reverse.

1. New York is a mature first-world city with low population growth; it should build transit exclusively or almost exclusively based on current population and transportation patterns, and not attempt to engage in development-oriented transit. The upzoning the city engages in is too small compared to current population, and cannot justify anything of the magnitude of Vancouver’s Expo Line, which was built simultaneously with Metrotown and the New Westminster offices around the train stations. And even Vancouver cannot reasonably expect the growth rates of various third-world cities with annual population growth rates in the vicinity of 5% and even higher per capita income growth rates.

2. Rail bias is approximately the same on all routes. Routes with many turns and narrow roads have unusually slow buses, but they’ll also have unusually slow surface rail. Rapid transit does have the ability to avoid the extra traffic jams coming from such alignments, and this is especially important in cities where the main street is not the same as the nearby wide boulevard, but this is not what’s under discussion in New York. Yes, de Blasio’s proposed light rail line would get more riders than the buses on segments of the route in question are getting now; the same would be true of any number of light rail routes paralleling the busiest buses in the city.

3. In a city with a subway, the best light rail routes are the ones that don’t make sense as subway extensions. Of the three busiest buses in New York, two make sense as subway lines, so there’s no point building light rail and only later a subway: the M15, on First and Second Avenues, and the B46, on Utica. In contrast, the third route, the Bx12 on Fordham, is crosstown, and cannot reasonably be an extension of any subway line, so it would be a strong light rail corridor. The same can be said of Main Street in Queens, between Flushing and Jamaica; and 14th and 86th Streets in Manhattan, where the M14 and M86 are the busiest surface routes in the US in terms of riders per kilometer, well ahead of the Boston Green Line (they both have about 8,000, and the Green Line 6,000). Of note, 14th Street already hosts the L, but a branch going on Avenue D is far from the subway, and the street is so well-trafficked that despite slower-than-walking bus speeds, that arguably light rail makes sense there even with the subway.

4. As soon as a project is judged as not a top priority, it’s best to think of how useful it is once the top priorities are built. In the case of New York, let us zoom in on Brooklyn’s top two circumferential buses, the B4 B6 and B35. Triboro RX is a higher priority than turning these routes into light rail, and once it’s in place, how much demand is there really going to be for them? It would be faster to take the subway and connect to Triboro, except at very short distances, where speeding up surface traffic is less useful.

In New York, excluding the somewhat special cases of 14th and 86th Streets, I’d say there are three light rail networks that make sense: one in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens. The Bronx network involves taking the borough’s most frequent buses and turning them into light rail routes: the Bx12 on Fordham as noted above, but also the Bx1/2 on Grand Concourse (like 14th Street, hosting both a subway and a very busy bus route), the Bx19 on Southern and 145th, the Bx15 on Third, and a route on Tremont combining the Bx36 and the Bx40/42. These routes roughly form a grid, each has at least 30,000 weekday riders, and none is SBS except the Bx12. In this case, light rail should really be thought of as the next step after publishing a frequent grid map based on these routes and equipping the entire city bus fleet with off-board fare collection.

In Queens, there’s less room for a grid – the borough has street grids, but it really is based on several old centers, with major roads connecting them. The strongest routes are the ones that cannot reasonably be subway extensions, because they’re too circumferential; in turn, the strongest subway extension, i.e. Northern, is not a major bus route, because it’s close enough to the Queens Boulevard subway that people instead take the subway, which is overcrowded. Of the strong surface transit routes, the corridor with the highest ridership takes in several bus routes between Flushing and Jamaica; Main Street is the most important route, but potentially there’s room both there and on the second route, Kissena-Parsons. Other potential light rail routes radiate from Flushing and Jamaica, in directions not well-served by the subway and the LIRR, or even west on Queens Boulevard to help serve the gap in subway coverage between the 7 and the Queens Boulevard Line and relieve the subway lines.

Brooklyn is the most interesting. The main missing pieces in subway coverage in Brooklyn are good subway extensions: Triboro, Utica, Nostrand. With those in place, the only real gaps are Flatbush, and some route serving Red Hook. Possibly service to the Navy Yard may be desirable, but the area is not very well-developed right now, and the buses serving it have low ridership. Those are two or three routes radiating out of the same center in Downtown Brooklyn, which makes it tempting to not only build light rail on them, but also send it over the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. This would be like the subway-surface lines in Boston and San Francisco, where one underground trunk splits into several at-grade branches, except that in this case the trunk would be elevated rather than underground. It’s not worth building by itself, but the possibility of leveraging Brooklyn Bridge lanes for several light rail lines may make the ridership per unit of cost pencil out.

The common factor to all of these possibilities is that they are not meant for signature development areas that the city is targeting. Maybe there’s some new development there, but the focus is on improving public transit services to existing residents, who either are riding very slow buses or have given up on public transit because of the inconvenience. It can be marketed as an improvement in transit, but cannot really be sold as part of a plan to revitalize the Brooklyn waterfront. It’s about day-to-day governing, whereas the administration is interested in urban renewal schemes, which are rarely good transit.

Why Costs Matter

Stockholm is currently expanding its transit system, with about 19 kilometers of subway extension, and another 6 kilometers of a commuter rail tunnel taking regional traffic off the at-capacity mainline. The subway extension, excluding rolling stock acquisition, costs about $2.1 billion, and the commuter rail extension $1.8 billion.

The US is currently building five subways: Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 (2.8 km, $4.6 billion), East Side Access (2.2 km, $10 billion), the first phase of the Wilshire subway (6.3 km, $2.8 billion), the Regional Connector (3.1 km, $1.4 billion), U-Link (5 km, $1.8 billion). Two more projects are partially underground: the Crenshaw/LAX Line, a total of 13.7 km of which 4.7 are underground, at a total cost of $2.1 billion, and the Warm Springs BART extension, a total of 8.6 km of which 1.6 are underground, at a total cost of $900 million. (Update 2/1: the Central Subway is $1.6 billion for 2.8 km. Thanks to Joel for pointing out that I forgot about it.)

The first observation is that Sweden has just 700 meters 3.5 km of subway under construction less than the US under construction, despite a vast gap in not only population but also current transit usage. Stockholm may have twice the per capita rail ridership of New York, but it’s still a small city, the size of Indianapolis, Baltimore, Portland, or Charlotte; 450 million annual rail trips is impressive for a city of its size, but the US combined has more than 3 billion. This relates to differences in costs: the amount of money Sweden is putting into heavy rail infrastructure is $3.9 billion, vs. $23.6 billion $25.2 billion among the seven eight US projects, which approaches the ratio of national subway and commuter rail ridership levels.

The second observation is that the US spending is not really proportional to current rail ridership. Two thirds of the spending is in New York, as is two thirds of US rail ridership, but nearly everything else is in Los Angeles, which takes in a majority of current subway construction route-length. Los Angeles is a progressive city and wants better public transit, but the same is true in many of the six major US transit cities – New York, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. And yet, of those six, only New York and San Francisco are building urban subways (BART’s one mile of tunnel is in a suburb, under a park).

The difference is that Los Angeles builds subways at $400-450 million per km in the city core (less in future phases of the Wilshire subway), whereas in most of the US, lines are either more expensive or more peripheral. Boston, the Bay Area, and Washington are expanding their rapid transit networks, but largely above-ground or in a trench, and only outside the core. Boston’s Green Line Extension is in a trench, but has had major budget overruns and is currently on the high side for a full subway ($3 billion for 6.9 km), and the MBTA is even putting canceling the project on the table due to the cost. Washington’s Silver Line Phase 2 is 18.5 km and $2.7 billion, in a highway median through the Northern Virginia suburbs. BART’s Warm Springs extension is about $100 million per km, which is not outrageously high, but the next extension of the line south, to Berryessa, is $2.3 billion for 16 km, all above ground.

Let us now stay on the North American West Coast, but go north, to Vancouver. Vancouver’s construction costs are reasonable: the cost projections for the Broadway subway (C$2.7 billion ex-vehicles, PDF-p. 95) are acceptable relative to route-length (12.4 km, PDF-p. 62) and very good relative to projected ridership (320,000 per weekday, PDF-p. 168). Judging by the costs of the Evergreen and Canada Lines, and the ridership evolution of the Canada Line, these projections seem realistic. And yet, in a May 2015 referendum about funding half the line as well as many other transit projects, 62% of the region’s voters, including a bare majority in Vancouver proper, voted no.

The referendum’s result was not a shock. In the few months before the vote, the polls predicted a large, growing no vote. Already in February, the Tyee was already comparing Vancouver negatively with Stockholm, and noting that TransLink’s regional governance structure was unusual, saying the referendum was designed to fail. This is not 100% accurate: in 2014, polls were giving the yes side a majority. The deterioration began around the end of 2014 or beginning of 2015: from 52-39 in December to 46-42 in January, to 27-61 in March. The top reason cited by no voters was that they didn’t trust TransLink to spend the money well.

This cannot be divorced from Vancouver’s Compass Card debacle: plans to replace paper tickets and SkyTrain’s proof-of-payment system with a regionwide smartcard, called Compass, and faregates on SkyTrain, were delayed and run over budget. The faregates aren’t even saving money, since TransLink has to pay an operating fee to vendor Cubic that’s higher than the estimated savings from reduced fare evasion. The height of the scandal was in 2014, but it exploded in early 2015, when TransLink replaced its manager amidst growing criticism. The referendum would probably have been a success a year earlier; it was scheduled in what turned out to be a bad period for TransLink.

The importance of the Vancouver example is that construction costs are not everything. Transit agencies need to get a lot of things right, and in some cases, the effects are quite random. (Los Angeles, too, had a difficult rollout of a Cubic-run faregate system.) The three key principles here are, then:

1. Absolute costs matter. They may not directly affect people’s perceptions of whether construction is too expensive. But when legislators have to find money for a new public transit project, they have some intuitive idea of its benefits, give or take a factor of perhaps 2. Gateway is being funded, even though with the latest cost overrun (to $23.9 billion) the benefit-cost ratio in my estimation is about 1/3, but this involved extensive lobbying by Amtrak, lying both to Congress and to itself that it is a necessary component of high-speed rail. Ordinary subways do not have the luxury of benefiting from agency imperialism the way the Gateway project did; if they’re too expensive, they’re at risk of cancellation.

2. Averaged across cities and a number of years of construction, cities and countries with lower construction costs will build more public transit. We see this in the US vs. Sweden. Of course, there are periods of more construction, such as now, and periods of less, such as around 2000, but this affects both countries right now.

3. Variations from the average are often about other issues of competence – in Vancouver’s case, the failure of the faregates and the delayed Compass rollout. Political causes are less important: Vancouver’s business community opposed the transit referendum and organized against it, but it’s telling that it did so and succeeded, whereas business communities in cities with more popular transit authorities support additional construction.

In a post from 2011, Yonah Freemark argued that California HSR’s projected cost’s upper end was just 0.18% of the projected GDP of California over a 20-year construction period. The implication: the cost of high-speed rail (and public transit in general) is small relative to the ability of the economy to pay. This must be paired with the sobering observation that the benefits of public transit are similarly small, or at most of the same order of magnitude.

New York’s survived decades without Second Avenue Subway. It’s a good project to have, provided the costs are commensurate with the benefits, but without cost containment, phase 2 is probably too expensive, and phases 3 and 4 almost certainly. What’s more, the people funding such projects – the politicians, the voters, even the community organizations – consider them nice-to-haves. The US has no formal mechanism of estimating benefit-cost ratios, and a lot of local political dysfunction, and this can distort the funding, to the point that Gateway is being funded even though at this cost it shouldn’t. But, first, even a factor of 3 distortion is unusual, and second, on average, these distortions cancel out. Democrats and Republicans shouldn’t plan on controlling either Congress or the White House more than about half the time, in the long run, and transit activists shouldn’t plan on political dysfunction persistently working in their favor.

The only route forward is to improve the benefit-cost ratio. On the benefit side, this means aggressive upzoning around subway stations, probably the biggest lacuna in Los Angeles’s transit construction program. But in New York, and even in the next five transit cities in the US, this is not the main problem: population density on many corridors is sufficient by the standards of such European transit cities as Stockholm, Berlin, London, and Munich, none of which is extraordinarily dense like Paris.

No: the main problem in most big US cities is costs, and almost only costs. Operating costs, to some extent, but mainly capital construction costs. Congress and the affected states apparently have enough political will to build a 5-km tunnel for $20 billion going on $24 billion; if this system could be built for $15 billion, they’d jump at the opportunity to take credit. The US already has the will to spend reasonable amounts of money on public transit. The difference is that its $24 billion $25 billion of spending on subways buys 26 km 28.5 km of subway and 16 km of a mix of light rail and el, where it could be buying 120 km 125 km of subway. Work out where you’d build the extra 94 km 96.5 km and ask yourself if ignoring costs is such a good idea for transit activists.