2024-08-05

Why New York-New Haven Trains Crawl

Between New York and New Haven, a distance of 120 km (from Penn Station) or 116 km (from Grand Central), the two fastest intercity trains of the day take 1:35 to travel, an average of 75 km/h. Most do the trip in about 1:40, averaging about 72 km/h. Commuter trains to Grand Central do it in about 1:40 three times a day, averaging 70 km/h, but the vast majority of even the rush express trains are slower, a few doing it in 1:52 and most in about two hours, averaging 58 km/h. This is not normal for a primary intercity corridor; the Acela averages about 120 km/h between New York and Washington and between New Haven and Boston, which is typical for non-high-speed intercity lines in Europe, while high-speed ones usually average 200 km/h or more. I’ve been asked by some big names in online transit content creation why this is so, and hope to explain why the trains are slow, and what it would take to reduce 40 minutes from the one-way trip time.

The contrast should be with the high-speed rail proposal that I’m working on at Marron, which cuts the intercity trip time between New York and New Haven to about 52 minutes, on the existing right-of-way, and the express commuter rail trip time to Grand Central to about 1:16. The result is not high-speed rail, but is a fast upgraded intercity rail line, on a par with the faster British and Swedish lines. Changes in right-of-way geometry, including buyouts of houses in expensive suburbs in Connecticut, could reasonably cut the intercity trip time to about 45 minutes; these are mapped here, the 52-minute trip corresponding to the alternatives that stay on the existing right-of-way and the 45-minute one to the alternatives that use the bypasses where they exist.

The primary culprit for the slow trip times today is poor scheduling practices. Those practices, in turn, come from mutual abuse between Amtrak and the commuter rail operators, in this case Metro-North and the Connecticut Department of Transportation, both of which display terminal incompetence on all matters related to rail. The state of the tracks contributes to the slowness, and thus the second most important issue is poor maintenance practices leading to unreliable infrastructure, which then feeds into poor scheduling. Metro-North and CTDOT are again especially bad even by American standards. Physical infrastructure problems add minutes here and there, but the most important interventions are cheap and for the most part can only work with better timetabling rather than on their own.

Of note, it is common to blame the low speeds on curves. However, the curves are not especially onerous – few restrict trains to slower speeds than about 150 km/h given good operating practices. In fact, the Northeast Corridor gets if anything curvier east of New Haven until after it crosses into Rhode Island, but the speed there is higher, as there is less dense commuter traffic complicating the schedule, and Amtrak’s level of incompetence is bad but less bad than that of CTDOT.

Timetable padding

Every rail timetable has to include contingency or buffer time. This takes into account primarily the need for trains to recover from delays, and secondarily suboptimal driver behavior, such as starting to brake a little too early. Switzerland pads its timetables 7%; the TGV network can only do about 10-13%, and the ICE network about 25%. What I and others have seen on Amtrak and Metro-North trains as well as what train drivers have told me suggests that the buffer time between New York and New Haven is 25% or even maybe 30%.

More complex networks require more padding, since delays on one train cascade to others. The ICE network mixes intercity trains together with much slower regional ones on the same tracks, all over Germany, and delays can cascade across the entire country, to the point that some people have begun to advocate that Germany build a separate high-speed rail network, not for speed (which activists here don’t care much about), but for the reliability of having a fast network and a slow network rather than one mixed network. The more segregated TGV network thus does better; the almost entirely dedicated-track Shinkansen system does even better, and JR East suggested 4% padding in its review of California High-Speed Rail. Switzerland is like Germany in having a single mixed-speed network, but it has more systematic processes for avoiding delays, such as strategic investment in bypasses around known bottlenecks.

The Northeast Corridor is not an especially complex network. It is a single line with branches, rather than a two-dimensional mesh like the German rail network. There is little freight traffic, which makes it possible to control freight through regular slots, with the number of potential slots greatly exceeding actual traffic so that if a train misses its slot, it can wait 10 or 15 minutes for the next one. Passenger traffic is high on all lines serving the corridor, and thus there is no need to cut corners on reliability (such as signals, or platforms) on any of the branches. It is a mixed-speed line, but nearly all of it has four tracks, and where commuter trains share tracks with intercity trains, they run express and the speed difference is not large. In the timetables we developed at Marron with Devin Wilkins, express commuter trains do Stamford-Grand Central in 28 minutes if they run as today, stopping only at Harlem-125th, and in 29 if they also stop at New Rochelle; intercity trains do Stamford-Penn Station in 25 minutes, on a marginally longer route into New York. Slotting intercity and express commuter trains on the same tracks between Stamford and New Rochelle is annoying, but is not an objectively hard scheduling problem.

This does not mean that Amtrak and Metro-North could just shave minutes off of the existing timetables, change nothing else, and run trains to the faster schedules. Other elements of the schedule would make the trains too unreliable. But it is possible to realign the schedules appropriately and cut the trip time by a factor of about 1.3/1.07 = 1.2.

Timetable complexity

The ideal schedule is one with as few variations as possible. This way, planners can write one schedule, ensure that it works, and, if there are problems with it, then develop an infrastructure program that builds around the bottlenecks. Switzerland, as usual, sets the standard, with its all-day repeating clockface timetable, or Takt. Swiss trains repeat regularly every hour, and on the busy lines every half hour; planners need to make sure one pattern works and then repeat it all day. It’s the planning equivalent of economies of scale in manufacturing.

New York planning, relative to the ideal, represents the list of what not to do, and it’s worse on busier lines such as the New Haven Line than on less busy lines. In effect, the New Haven Line schedule is the planning equivalent of rules for writing prose that illustrate each rule by breaking it – remember to not split infinitives, the passive voice should be avoided, eschew obfuscation, and so on – except that it is meant to be taken seriously. It has all of the following problems:

Where good planning begins with one peak hour and repeats it all day, the New Haven Line has few repeating patterns, and practically none at the peak.
Where good planning aims to have trains make consistent stops for legibility and for ease of planning around bottlenecks, the New Haven Line has bespoke stopping patterns – not counting branches, there are 16 trains entering Grand Central at the peak hour, which make 13 distinct stopping patterns.
Where good regional rail planning keeps the peak-to-base ratio low – Switzerland is almost 1:1, and even very large cities that need a huge volume of commuter trains at rush hour like Paris or Tokyo do not exceed 2:1 (and London is well below it) – the New Haven Line has, with branches, 20 trains entering Grand Central at the peak hour and 4 entering each off-peak hour.
Where good planning runs more or less the same service on weekends as in the off-peak on weekdays, the New Haven Line’s midday off-peak and weekend schedules are different even as they run the same number of trains (two express and two local per hour).
Where good planning aims to use the timetable for a prolonged period of time to reduce the need to redo the schedule, for example updating annually as in Switzerland, New York-area practice is to update several times a year, in what looks like a 3-6 month period.
Where good planning keeps the trains spaced far enough based on signal system constraints by default, Metro-North timetables somehow have trains on the shared trunk between Harlem and Grand Central sometimes arriving within less than the 2 minute minimum on the same track, requiring special speed restrictions, even with unimpressive traffic levels by urban commuter rail trunk standards.
Where good maintenance is done when trains are not running, that is, at night, in order to avoid disturbing weekday traffic, American planning assumes that daytime maintenance will always take some track out of service; the New Haven Line’s track renewal program has been so mismanaged that at no point since it began in the 1990s have all four tracks between New York and New Haven been operable along the entire line – some section is always shut down. Daytime maintenance is also a problem in Germany, and is a factor behind the poor schedule reliability here.

The constant tweaks to the timetable are also a feature of the New York City Subway, with its substantially simpler stopping patterns. There, the services are consistent, and change at a rate of a handful per decade (most recently, when Second Avenue Subway opened; the previous time was during the 2010 service cuts). However, frequency is micro-targeted based on crowding guidelines, so the planners never have time to optimize one schedule; moreover, with 24/7 service, daytime closures for maintenance are unavoidable. This way, where planners at healthy railroads write schedules, planners at American passenger railroads write service changes. The New York City Subway at least has the partial excuse of 24/7 service; Metro-North has no such excuse. The maxim that the Northeast Corridor is held together with duct tape, and is managed by people who are unfamiliar with any more advanced tools than duct tape, also applies to timetabling.

In contrast with today’s morass, the schedule we’ve been writing aims to simplify whenever possible. Branches are slotted into windows that could be used by local or express main line trains depending on the desired service pattern. From New Haven south, everything is on a repeating 10-minute Takt. The New Haven Line is reduced to four stopping patterns – local Stamford-Grand Central, local Stamford-Penn Station, express New Haven-Grand Central, intercity New Haven-Penn Station – each running every 10 minutes. It took weeks to find a pattern that worked with all the constraints of the right-of-way and allowed some future desired infrastructure changes, and even that required some track changes detailed below. Off-peak, the commuter train patterns could run every 20 minutes instead, using every other slot; the timetable should not be tweaked further.

It is particularly important to avoid timetable complexity beyond local and express trains east of Stamford. The line has four tracks, and could be run with commuter trains on the local tracks, making all stops before transitioning to the express tracks at Stamford, and intercity trains on the express tracks, running nonstop between Stamford and New Haven. In theory, this means this section could be run with less than 7% schedule padding, for example the Shinkansen’s 4%, but in practice, I suspect it cancels out with the more complex situation between Stamford and New Rochelle, so 7% is the best that can be squeezed with maximally simple schedules.

Speed zones and curves

The New Haven Line is rather curvy, having been built in the 1840s. But its speed limits are still too low for its curves. I wrote here about cant and cant deficiency, and am not going to repeat myself too much. But, in brief, the speed on curves is governed by the formula

$v^2 = ar$

where v is speed, a is lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane, and r is curve radius. The value of a is usually expressed not in units of acceleration, but in units of distance, scaled so that, on standard-gauge track, 150 mm (of cant) correspond to 1 m/s^2 lateral acceleration. Typical maximum regulatory limits on cant range between 160 and 180 mm; the US permits 7″, but nowhere is more than 6″ used, and the New Haven Line’s curves mostly range between 3″ and 5″ cant. Cant deficiency limits depend on the train – regular passenger trains typically do 130-150 mm at the relevant speeds, but in the US, the normal practice is to limit commuter trains to 3″ cant deficiency, and only use 5″ on Amtrak Regional trains (the Acela tilts and is capable of 7″ today, with the new trains rated for 9″).

The curves on the New Haven Line are, for the most part, built to a standard of 2° radius, or, in metric units, r = 873. The most aggressive common cant and cant deficiency limits, 180 and 150 mm respectively, allow a = 2.2, and thus v = 43.82 m/s = 157.77 km/h; our timetables limit commuter trains to 150 km/h, and there are surprisingly few curves with tighter limits. In contrast, current practice restricts a to about 1.2, which means trains take the same curves at a speed of about 116 km/h, which is rounded down to 70 mph.

The slowdowns also affect intercity rail more than is required. While Amtrak trains are cleared for 5″ cant deficiency, Metro-North prefers to timetable all trains at its own trains’ speed on curves. Then, because there are so few opportunities under current standards for trains to run faster than 70-75 mph within CTDOT territory, the entire line from the state line to New Haven is maintained to those standards, and thus even on relatively straight sections, there is no opportunity to gain speed. East of New Haven, the curves are if anything tighter, but Amtrak dominance means the tracks are cleared for 100-125 mph, cant is higher, and cant deficiency is higher as well.

All of these restrictions can be lifted. The work required to redo a line from 110 km/h to 160 km/h or even more is rather routine, as long as it can be done within the right-of-way. The standards for track irregularity get tighter as speed increases, but all of this can be handled with track laying machines, which use the track itself to do the work, at a pace of about 0.5 km/h, or about 1.5 km in a three-hour nighttime work window; the entire New Haven Line can be regraded in about a year this way.

Unfortunately, Metro-North is used to manual track inspections rather than modern machinery. It finally bought a track laying machine on the model of Amtrak, but appears not to use it very well; the productivity I hear quoted is one tenth what was expected. But what is hard for Metro-North and CTDOT is not objectively hard, and even other Northeastern American railroads are often capable of it.

Supportive infrastructure

Infrastructure construction and timetabling work in tandem normally. Swiss practice is to use insights from the timetable in theory and in practice to inform where to build new tracks. American practice does no such thing – for one, Metro-North is allergic to systematic track improvement, so over the generations, the timetable has diverged from the infrastructure that could support it.

In fact, a very high-frequency peak schedule requires eliminating at-grade conflicts whenever it is even remotely feasible. Shell Interlocking at CP 217, just south of New Rochelle, is a flat junction on which trains from the north can go to either Grand Central or Penn Station. Grade-separating the junction was occasionally on the wishlist for Northeast Corridor improvements, but Metro-North is not currently asking for it, even though it is especially important as Penn Station Access is about to open. The junctions with the branches farther north – New Canaan, Danbury, Waterbury – are flat as well, for which the solutions can be a forced transfer (as is sometimes practiced with Waterbury, the weakest of the three) or grade-separation. This does not cost a large amount of money – New Jersey Transit is applying for money for its equivalent of Shell, Hunter Flyover connecting the Raritan Valley Line to the Northeast Corridor, and the budget is $300 million in the plan and, I’ve been told, $400 million with recent inflation and perhaps some small cost overrun.

Then there is the issue of the Grand Central approaches. The current throat limits trains to 10 mph on the last mile into the station. In other words, the last mile takes six minutes. It should take about two, based on actual throat and turnout geometry; the turnouts are #12 until around 700 meters from the end of the platform, and in Germany, a 1:12 switch is 60 km/h, and closer to the platforms, the turnouts are #7 and (on one cluster of tracks) #6.5, where in a Germany, a 1:7 is 40 km/h. Even with bumper tracks, the last mile has no reason to take longer than two minutes, saving all Metro-North travelers to Grand Central four minutes. The turnouts would need to be regraded to tangential standards, but this can be done within their existing footprint; the cost of a new turnout in a selection of European countries and also on American freight railroads is around $250,000 in the prices of the 2010s, whereas Metro-North’s switches cost perhaps five times much in the same era.

Finally, the movable bridges impose certain speed restrictions. Those are the biggest projects currently in planning for speeding up the New Haven Line. In truth, the slowdowns imposed are secondary (though our timetables still assume they are fixed). They are also extremely expensive – one of them is currently slated for in situ replacement for $1 billion, for a span of 220 meters from tower to tower, on a river about 100 m wide. CTDOT rail projects are generally absurdly expensive even by American standards – infill stations on the Hartford Line are coming in at $50 million or more, twice the cost of suburban Boston and more than twice that of suburban Philadelphia – for which the culprit must be poor project management and lack of in-house expertise.

Conclusion

The New Haven Line is a busy railroad at the peak, but nothing about it is special. It is old, but no older than faster sections of the Northeast Corridor or fast legacy intercity main lines in parts of Europe, especially the United Kingdom. It is busy, but its total ridership is unimpressive by European S-Bahn standards – the single trunk line in Munich with its seven branches on each side generates about 900,000 daily riders, perhaps a bit more than all three New York-area commuter railroads combined. It is branched, but the branching is simpler than on the busier systems, and the graph of the Northeast Corridor overall is acyclic, simplifying planning.

The reason the trains are slow is not the infrastructure. The elements of the infrastructure that need to be fixed to shorten the trip times from about 1:35 intercity and 2:00 commuter to 0:52 intercity and 1:16 commuter are cheap. Rather, the reason is that the line is managed not just by Americans, which is usually bad enough, but specifically by Metro-North and CTDOT. The schedules are designed not to work; the maintenance is designed not to work either and is too expensive.

2024-08-04

New York Has Too Few Subway Countdown Clocks

When I was visiting New York in June-July, I was stricken by how hard it was to figure out when the next train would come. Every subway station is equipped with countdown clocks, the A Division (numbered lines) and L trains having older installations than the rest of the B Division (lettered lines). However, the B Division stations that I used did not have many countdown clocks, and I found myself having to walk long distances along hot platforms to figure out which train to take. I counted the number of clocks at a few stations, and asked ETA members to do the same; now back in Berlin, I’ve done some counts here as well, confirming that it’s not just me – New York’s B Division platforms have fewer and harder to find countdown clocks than the standard on the Berlin U- and S-Bahn platforms, even though New York’s more complex subway network requires if anything more clocks as passengers have multiple options. Based on what I’ve seen in Berlin, I recommend that New York install a minimum of four overhead clocks per B Division platform, with the screen going in both directions.

The situation in Berlin

The U-Bahn platforms seem standardized to me. The traditional norm was that stations were built cut-and-cover, right underneath a major street, with an entrance at each end of the central island platform. Nowadays almost all stations have elevators and there are plans for retrofitting the rest, which BVG estimates will be completed in 2028, the date having been pushed later over the years I’ve lived in the city. The elevators always connect two levels, with opposite side doors for the two levels, so that wheelchair users don’t have to turn.

There are, at the stations I use, two overhead countdown clocks for each platform face. Nearly all platforms are islands, and each direction has separate countdown clocks. The clocks display the times on both sides, and are typically located at the quarter points of the station, so that passengers are never more than a quarter of the platform length from a clock, with good sight lines; the platforms are 100-110 meters long.

The S-Bahn is less standardized. A full-length eight-car train is 150 meters is long. The countdown clocks are double-sided and overhead as on the U-Bahn, and each platform face has a separate clock even when the tracks are in the same direction (as at Ostbahnhof), but the number is inconsistent; there are stations with just one, but Friedrichstraße on the North-South Tunnel has three.

The situation in New York

The A Division has overhead countdown clocks, connected to the train control system (automated train supervision, or ATS), installed in the early 2010s; the L has countdown clocks of the same provenance. The number of clocks per station is not fixed, but ranges between two and four per track. The B Division’s train control system let the control center know where trains were but not which train was which – that is, which train on the same track is an A, which is a D, and so on – and therefore the same system was not installed at the time. Years later, a different system was installed, with nicer graphics and a different connection to the control center, which is sometimes less accurate.

This newer system on the B Division has a combination of overhead clocks, often single- rather than double-sided, and floor-mounted clocks facing sideways, toward the tracks rather than toward the front and back of the platforms. The floor-mounted clocks are difficult to read unless I’m standing right there. The platforms are obstructed so it’s hard to tell from a distance where the clock is. Worse, many floor-mounted installations look identical from a distance to the clocks, but instead display advertisements or service changes but no information about the next train.

What’s more, there just aren’t a lot of these clocks. At 2nd Avenue on the F, heading downtown toward Marron, I counted a single clock, but six boards displaying system maps or ads. ETA’s Alex Sramek checked several stations in Lower Manhattan, including Chambers on the A/C/E and on the J/Z, Fulton Street, Cortlandt Street on the R/W, and Broad Street, and found one to three clocks, always a mix of overhead and floor-mounted – and the floor-mounted clocks sometimes would only show the next train and not the subsequent ones, even for platforms serving multiple routes.

There should be more clocks in New York than in Berlin. The platforms are much longer – the A Division platforms are 155 meters, the L and J/Z platforms are 145 meters, the other B Division platforms are 185 meters. The extensive branching means that even while waiting on the platform, regardless of what information is displayed outside the station, it is important to know when each service using the station will come, to plan out which line to take. I made mistakes on trips from Brooklyn to Queens just because I wasn’t sure what to do when transferring at West 4th, where, having just missed the E, I needed to make a decision on whether to wait for a delayed F or try to make the B/D and transfer to the E at 53rd, opted for the latter, and missed the E at 53rd.

If a Berlin U-Bahn station has two double-sided clocks, and a major S-Bahn station has three, then New York should have four per B Division platform. These should be overhead and double-sided – the floor-mounted screens are difficult to see from a distance along the direction relevant to most passengers, and easily confused with ads, ensuring that their utility is marginal.

2024-07-31

The Meaning of Construction Costs Per Rider

I’ve written a lot about urban rail construction costs per kilometer, but from time to time, my colleagues and I have been asked about what happens if we compare costs, not per kilometer, but per rider. There’s an intuition among people in transportation advocacy (including anti-transit activists who prefer cars) that the construction costs of urban rail lines per rider are a meaningful measure of cost-effectiveness. This intuition is true, and yet, it must be interpreted delicately.

First, modes of transit with different operating cost structures should tolerate different levels of capital costs; in particular, the current practice in which subways are built at higher cost per rider than light rail, which in turn is built at higher cost than bus lanes, reflects real differences in operating costs and does not mean there is overinvestment in subways and underinvestment in buses. And second, costs per rider can be too low, in a sense – if a city’s construction costs per rider are very low, indicating a very high benefit-cost ratio, then it shouldn’t be lauded for its fiscal prudence but scolded for not having built these lines long ago and for not building more today. In truth, places with healthy decisionmaking about infrastructure expand their networks to the limit of cost-effectiveness, which means that costs per rider averaged over an entire region vary less than costs per kilometer, and this just reflects that cities build what they can, so low-cost cities can afford to build lines to lower-ridership areas, which higher-cost cities would reject as too expensive for the benefit. This way, costs per rider are not too different in New York and in cities that build for an order of magnitude lower cost per km than New York.

The meaning of cost per rider

In the remainder of this post, the meaning of “cost per rider” is “cost divided by the ridership on a working day.” In Europe, workers get around six weeks of paid vacation, and tend to take them in the summer, leading to depressed ridership around July or August, depending on the city; daily counts usually avoid this period, so for example Stockholm specifies that daily ridership figures are taken in winter. This, as I will explain shortly, does not unduly make European lines look more cost-effective than they actually are.

The cost per rider is best understood as a cost-benefit measurement. All benefits of public transportation scale with ridership, generally linearly: higher ridership indicates tighter economic and social ties if it comes from more travel, and better environmental outcomes if it is at the expense of car travel. What’s more, raw ridership measured in trips is better at capturing these benefits than passenger-km. The issue is that focusing on p-km overrates the success of extremely suburban systems, which have low environmental benefits for their p-km (the users are typically park-and-riders and therefore drive extensively, just not to their city center jobs) and usually also high net operating costs since they are peaky and tend to charge low per-p-km fares. Conversely, the short-hop trip is a net profit to the system – even subways with distance-based fares charge degressive rather than linear fares – and comes from dense networks that cut out car-based travel entirely. These effects roughly cancel out to the point that ridership is a good proxy for actual benefits.

That said, all outcomes need to be scaled to regional or even national incomes. Economic benefits are usually measured relative to worker wages anyway; in some business case analyses, such as that of the United Kingdom, the economic benefit is even scaled to rider income rather than regional or national income, which favors lines built to rich neighborhoods over lines built to poor ones, and isn’t really how cities need to think about their public transit networks. Social benefits are usually taken on a willingness-to-pay basis, and the same is true of health benefits including reduced air and noise pollution from cars and reduced car accidents.

The next step is then to compare the cost per rider with GDP per capita, which is not perfect but is good enough as a proxy for incomes. This also takes care of the issue of Europe’s synchronized summer troughs in local travel: those six weeks of paid vacation are visible in reduced GDP per capita, so the apparent bonus to the European system of using cost per daily trip where “day” means “workday outside the summer vacation season” rather than cost per annual trip cancels out with reduced annual GDP per capita.

The rough rule of thumb I use is that the absolute limit of cost-effectiveness for a subway or commuter rail line is when the cost per rider is equal to GDP per capita. This is a coincidence: a one-time cost has no reason to be equal to an annual income – this just follows from Börjesson-Jonsson-Lundberg’s estimate of the Stockholm Metro’s benefit-cost ratio compared with its cost per rider relative to the GDP per capita of 1960s’ Sweden. In practice, infrastructure is never built down to a benefit-cost ratio of 1, due to construction risks; in countries that make decisions based on benefit-cost analyses, the minimum is usually 1.2 or 1.3. In this schema, the United States can afford to build up to an envelope of $85,373/1.3 to $85,373, which is $65,000-70,000/rider in 2024 prices. The frontier lines, like the Interborough Express, are fairly close to this limit already; in practice, there’s a range, with some lines in the same city built well over the limit for political reasons (often airport connectors) and others built far below it.

Cost per rider by mode

The above analysis works for subways and commuter rail. It does not work for trams or buses. The reason is that surface transit never achieves the same low operating costs as metros, so in practice, the total cost to be truly comparable needs to be incremented by the additional operating costs.

To be clear, this is just a rule of thumb. There are different metro lines, even with the exact same technology in the same city, with different projected operating cost profiles; for example, in Vancouver, the Broadway extension of SkyTrain toward UBC was projected in the 2010s to reduce net operating costs as many buses would be replaced by fewer, larger trains, but the outward extension of the same system deeper into Surrey and Langley is projected to increase net operating costs. There are different ways to interpret this – for example, the Surrey extension is in a more auto-oriented area, with more likely car-to-train switchers (this is still much denser than an American park-and-ride); on net, though, I think the differences are not huge and could to an extent even be folded into the notion of cost per rider, which is substantially better on Broadway than in Surrey and Langley.

That said, metros consistently have much lower operating costs than light rail and buses in the same city; here are American cost profiles. As far as I can tell from CoMET data, most European and Asian metros cluster toward the bottom end of the American cost profile (such as the Chicago L; the New York City Subway is the top end among the big systems); bus operating costs are more or less proportional to driver wages times operating hours throughout the developed world. Here we need to briefly switch to cost per p-km, since mature urban rail networks use buses as short-hop feeders – the counterfactual to a bus-based network for New York isn’t people riding the same bus routes as today but at higher intensity, but people riding longer bus routes, so the cost would roughly scale to cost per p-km, not per passenger.

In rich Asia, metros are profitable. In Europe, it depends – the London Underground operationally broke even in the early 2010s, and the Berlin U-Bahn was said to do the same in the late 2010s. In healthy European systems, it’s never reported directly, since there’s fare integration across the region, so financial data are reported at metropolitan scale without much breakdown between the modes, but the farebox operating ratios in at least Germany and Scandinavia, and probably also Paris (which has much higher ridership density than London or Berlin, comparable costs per car-km, and higher fares than pre-2022 Berlin), suggest that metros and the inner sections of commuter rail systems can break even, and then the subsidies go to the buses and to suburban extensions.

Individual bus systems can be profitable, but never at metropolitan scale, not in the first-world cities I’m aware of. In New York, the buses between New Jersey and Manhattan are profitable and run by private companies, but that’s one specific section of the system, and on net the bus system in New Jersey, including not just these cross-tunnel buses but also internal buses within the state, loses money, covered by New Jersey Transit subsidies, and the financial performance of buses within New York is, frankly, terrible.

One potential complication is that BRT infrastructure is usually installed on the highest-performing individual routes, and those can have rather low operating costs. But then, the operating costs of the buses on Broadway in Vancouver are extraordinarily low, and still the projections are for the SkyTrain extension that would replace them to, on net, reduce systemwide operating subsidies. If your city has a bus corridor so strong that ordinary BRT would be profitable, the corridor has high enough ridership for a subway.

Light rail is essentially a via media between metros and buses: higher operating costs than metros, in theory lower ones than buses. I say in theory, because in the United States, light rail as a mode comprises different things, some behaving like lower-efficiency subways with shorter cars like the Boston Green Lines, and others running as mostly grade-separated urban rail in cities like the Los Angeles and Portland cities with extremely low ridership and high resulting operating costs. But a light rail system with serious ridership should comfortably obtain better operating outcomes than buses, if worse ones than metros.

Costs per rider can be too low

In New York, as mentioned above, the current urban rail extensions under construction (Second Avenue Subway Phase 2) or discussion (Interborough Express) have costs not far from the frontier relative to American incomes. In Berlin, the extensions instead are far cheaper; U8 to Märkisches Viertel was projected to cost 13,160€ per daily rider in 2021, which is a fraction of Germany’s GDP per capita.

This does not mean Berlin builds cost-effectively. It means Berlin builds too little. A line that costs less than one third the country’s GDP per capita should have been built when the GDP per capita was one third what it is now. If there are a lot of such possibilities in the city, it means there was a crisis it’s only now recovering from or there has been too much austerity, or both, in the case of Berlin.

Healthy construction environments – that is, not Germany, which has normal costs per kilometer and chooses to barely build intercity or urban rail – will instead build to the frontier of what’s cost-effective. In New York, it’s Second Avenue Subway; in Madrid, it’s extensions into deep suburbia making the system almost as long as that of New York, on one third the metro area population. Rational yes/no decisions on whether to build at all can coexist with good construction practices or with deeply irrational ones.

2024-07-28

More American Station Construction Extravaganza

Los Angeles has plans to extend its urban rail network. They’re taking forever, because construction costs are extremely high – and Nick Andert just pointed out one reason: the station caverns are huge. The overage on the proposed northern extension of the K Line, also known as the Crenshaw/LAX Line, is a good deal larger than on Second Avenue Subway, making it the most wasteful station construction that I am aware of. This is driving up the construction cost estimate to, depending on which alignment the K Line is to take as it goes north into West Hollywood, around $1 billion per kilometer.

Nick provides some station footprint diagrams. The K Line’s stations are designed for a maximum train length of three cars, or about 81 meters in total. The stations on the proposed extension, however, start at 124 meters when there is no crossover, or 50% overage, and most are 300 meters with crossovers. In other words, an underground light rail extension with trains less than half the length of New York City Subway trains is proposed to have stations about as long as those on Second Avenue Subway, which are already about twice as long as they need to be by New York standards. (In the low- and medium-cost countries for which I have this information, the overage is not 50%, but ranges between 3% and 17%.)

The 50% overage without crossovers is completely unjustifiable. But the crossovers, which turn the 50% into nearly 300% overage, are equally unjustifiable. It is not normal to build bored tunnel subways with so many crossovers, precisely because it’s expensive to blast caverns for them. Marco gives the example of Milan M4, which, counting the soon-to-open extension, has four crossovers in 15.5 km and 21 stations.

To this I can add that the Copenhagen Metro, built with bored tunnel with blasted caverns for crossover, has on the original line just two underground crossovers; the City Circle Line has only two as well, plus two on the M4 branch. There are more crossovers above ground, where it’s not so expensive to build them, but still less than one per station. This is a system designed for 24/7 operation; crossovers are required to allow trains to run on a single bidirectional track at night to permit maintenance, one track at a time. Without this constraint, even fewer crossovers are needed – only at the ends of the line, which includes the end of each operating segment if the line opens in stages.

If the K Line extension’s split between station and tunnel costs is similar to that of Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, 3:1, then shrinking the stations to the normal overage of a few percent would slash their cost by a factor of close to four, which would cut the line’s cost by more than half. This is what the extravaganza of crossovers is doing to Los Angeles and its ability to build mass transit infrastructure.

2024-07-24

What it Means That Miri Regev Wants to Cancel Congestion Pricing

Minister of Transportation Miri Regev is trying to cancel the Tel Aviv congestion pricing plan, slated to begin operations in 2026. Congestion pricing is still planned to happen, but 2026 is already behind schedule due to delays on past contracts required to set up the gantries. The plan is still to go ahead and use the revenue to help fund the Tel Aviv Metro project, to comprise three driverless metro lines at regional scale to complement both the longer-range commuter trains and the shorter-range Light Rail system, which opened last year with a subway segment after several decades of design and construction. But Regev has wanted to cancel it since she became transportation minister early last year, and her latest excuse is the war, never mind that usually during war one raises taxes and aims to restrain private consumption such as personal vehicle driving.

I bring this up partly to highlight that Regev has not been a good minister; the civil servants at the ministry quickly found that she routinely bypasses them, makes decisions purely with her own political team, and sometimes doesn’t even inform them before making public announcements. More recently, she’s been facing corruption investigations, since much of the above behavior is not legal in Israel, a country where one says “the state” with a positive connotation that exists in French and German but not in English.

But more than that, I bring this up to highlight the contrast between Regev and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who outright canceled the New York congestion pricing plan last month on no notice, weeks before it was about to debut rather than years. At a personal level, Regev is a worse person than Hochul. But Regev’s ability to cause damage is constrained by far stronger state institutions. The cabinet can collectively decide to cancel congestion pricing, in the same way a state legislature could repeal its own laws, but that would involve extensive open debate within the coalition. Thus, the ministry of finance already said that if the ministry of transportation is bowing out, it will have to take over the program, since it’s necessary for financing the metro, which is still on-budget; the civil servants at finance have long drawn ire from populists over their control over the budget, called the Arrangements Law, and unless the metro is formally canceled, the money will have to come from somewhere.

A formal repeal is still possible, but it cannot be done on a whim. Netanyahu, an atypically monarchical prime minister in both power within the coalition and aspirations, might be able to swing it if he wants, but he’d still have to persuade coalition partners. His power derives from long-term deals with junior parties that are so widely loathed they feel like they have to stick with him, and from over time turning Likud into a party of personal loyalists; at the same time, he has to govern roughly within the spectrum of opinions of the loyalists, and while their opinions on the biggest issues facing the state align with his or else they would not be in this position, on issues like transportation they may have different opinions and express them. At no point does a loyalist like Regev get absolute control of one aspect of policy; the coalition gets a vote and absent a formal repeal, the legislation creating congestion pricing still binds.

In other words, Israel is a functioning multiparty parliamentary democracy, more or less. Mostly less these days, let’s be honest. But much of the “less” comes from a concerted attempt to politicize the civil service, which Regev is currently under investigation for. In the United States, it’s fully politicized; one governor can announce the cancellation of a legislatively mandated congestion pricing program on a whim, the MTA board (which she appointed) will affirm that she indeed can do it and will not sign a statement saying the state consents to congestion pricing, and the question of whether it’s legal will be deferred to courts where the judges were politically appointed based on governor-legislative chief deals. Israel can make long-term plans, and a minister like Regev can interfere with them, but would need to do a lot of work to truly wreck them. The United States, as we’re seeing with New York congestion pricing, really can’t.

2024-07-21

Northeast Corridor Realignment Webtool

Here is an interactive webtool for the Northeast Corridor alignment options we’re timetabling. All credit for the data visualization goes to Devin Wilkins; my contribution is to draw the options in a more static format.

There are still some tweaks to the system, but the physical location of the tracks should be considered secure, and the same is true of the curve database. The units are mixed; curves use the formula 1° = 1,746 meter radius, and speeds are in metric units, with lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane of 2.2 m/s^2 (330 mm total equivalent cant) at low and medium speed and 2.07 at high speed (310), both of which are limit values but do exist in this part of the world and are a rounding error away from American limit values. If there is any discrepancy between the listed speed and the curve radius, the curve radius is correct, and corresponds to the correct speed in our timetable spreadsheets.

Deviations from the current alignment are marked with yellow triangles. The bigger ones are presented as alternatives: it’s possible to build the deviation or stay on the present course. This is especially notable in Connecticut, with many build-or-no-build choices for New Haven Line bypasses as well as for the longer New Haven-Kingston bypass; at one place, Milford, there are two build options, a bypass along I-95 and a straightening of the route close to its current alignment.

I believe but am not completely certain the choice alignment we’ll present will include the bypasses east of New Haven but few to none west of it, of which the likeliest is the one in Greenwich and Cos Cob, where the bypass would provide a six-track section where there are three speed classes (commuter local, commuter express, intercity). South of New York, the curve easement in Metuchen is not currently part of our timetables – it’s too much property acquisition for too little speed gain – but the deviations in Frankford Junction and northeast Maryland are, and the Douglass Tunnel in Baltimore is already funded and in the design phase before physical construction.

2024-07-17

Project 2025 and Public Transportation

The Republican Party’s Project 2025, outlining its governing agenda if it wins the election later this year, has been in the news lately, and I’ve wanted to poke around what it has to say about transportation policy, which hasn’t been covered in generalist news, unlike bigger issues. The answer is that, on public transportation at least, it doesn’t say much, and what it does say seems confused. The blogger Libertarian Developmentalism is more positive about it than I am but does point out that it seems to be written by people who don’t use public transit and therefore treat it as an afterthought – not so much as a negative thing to be defunded in favor of cars, but just as not a priority. What I’m seeing in the two pages the 922-page Project 2025 devotes to public transit is that the author of the transportation section, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, clearly read some interesting critiques but then applies them in a way that shows she didn’t really understand them, and in particular, the proposed solutions are completely unrelated to the problems she diagnoses.

What’s not in the report?

Project 2025 is notable not in what it says about public transit, but in what it doesn’t say. As I said in the lede, the 922-page Project 2025 only devotes slightly less than two pages to public transportation, starting from printed page 634. The next slightly more than one page is devoted to railroads, and doesn’t say anything beyond letting safety inspections be more automated with little detail. Additional general points about transportation that also apply to transit can be found on page 621 about grants to states and pp. 623-4 extolling the benefits of public-private partnerships (PPPs, or P3s). To my surprise, the word “Amtrak,” long a Republican privatization target, appears nowhere in the document.

There are no explicit funding cuts proposed. There are complaints that American transit systems need subsidies and that their post-pandemic ridership recovery has not been great. There is one concrete proposal, to stop using a portion of the federal gas tax revenue to pay for public transit, but then it’s not a proposal to use the money to fund roads instead in context of the rest of the transportation section. The current federal formula is that funds to roads and public transit are given in an 80:20 ratio between the two modes, which has long been the subject of complaints among both transit activists and anti-transit activists, and Project 2025 not only doesn’t side with the latter but also doesn’t even mention the formula or the possibility of changing it.

The love for P3s is just bad infrastructure construction; the analysis speaks highly of privatization of risk, which has turned entire parts of the world incapable of building anything. (Libertarian Developmentalism has specific criticism of that point.) But the section stops short of prescribing P3s or other mechanisms of privatization of risk. In this sense, it’s better than what I’ve heard from some apolitical career civil servants at DOT. In contrast, the Penn Station Reconstruction agreement among the agencies using the station explicitly states that the project must use an alternative procurement mechanism such as design-build, construction manager/general contractor, or progressive-design-build (which is what most of the world calls design-build), of which the last is illegal in New York but unfortunately there are attempts to legalize it. This way, Project 2025’s loose support for privatization of planning is significantly better than the actual privatization of planning seen in New York, ensuring it will stay incapable of building infrastructure.

This aspect of saying very little is not general to Project 2025, I don’t think. I picked a randomly-selected page, printed p. 346, which concerns education. There’s a title, “advance school choice policies,” which comprises a few paragraphs, but these clearly state what the party wants, which is to increase funding for school vouchers in Washington D.C., expanding the current program. Above that title is a title “protect parental rights in policy,” which is exclusively about opposing the rights of transgender children not to tell their parents they’re socially transitioning at school.

Okay, so what does Project 2025 say?

The public transit section of the report, as mentioned above, has little prescription, and instead complains about transit ridership. What it says is not even always true, regarding modal comparisons. For one, it gets the statistical definition of public transit in the United States wrong. Here is Project 2025 on how public transit is defined:

New micromobility solutions, ridesharing, and a possible future that includes autonomous vehicles mean that mobility options—particularly in urban areas—can alter the nature of public transit, making it more affordable and flexible for Americans. Unfortunately, DOT now defines public transit only as transit provided by municipal governments. This means that when individuals change their commutes from urban buses to rideshare or electric scooter, the use of public transit decreases. A better definition for public transit (which also would require congressional legislation) would be transit provided for the public rather than transit provided by a public municipality.

Leaving aside that the biggest public-sector transit agencies in the US are not municipal but state-run or occasionally county-run (in Los Angeles), the definition of public transit in federal statistics and funding is exactly what Project 2025 wants. There are private transit operators; the biggest single grouping is privately-operated buses in New Jersey running into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel. These buses count as public transit in census commuting statistics; they have access to publicly-funded transit-only infrastructure including the Lincoln Tunnel’s peak-only Express Bus Lane (XBL) and Port Authority Bus Terminal.

What’s true is that rideshare vehicles aren’t counted as transit, but as taxis. Larger vanshare systems could count as public transit; the flashiest ones, like last decade’s Bridj in Boston and Chariot in San Francisco, were providing public transit privately, but went to great lengths to insist that they were doing something different.

Other complaints include waste, but as with the rest of this section, there isn’t a lot of detail. Project 2025 complains about the Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program, saying it leads to waste, but it treats canceling it as unrealistic and instead says “a new conservative Administration should ensure that each CIG project meets sound economic standards and a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.” In theory, I could read it as a demand that the FTA should demand benefit-cost analyses as a precondition of funding; current federal practices do not do so, and to an extent this can be blamed on changes in the early Obama administration. But the FTA is not even mentioned in this section, nor is there a specific complaint that American transit projects are federally funded based on vibes more than on benefit-cost analysis.

The two main asks as far as transit is concerned are about labor and grants to states.

On labor, the analysis is solid, and I can tell that the Project 2025 authors read some blue state right-wing thinktanks that do interface with the problems of transit agencies. Project 2025 correctly notes that transit worker compensation is driven by high fringe benefits and pensions but not wages; it’s loath to say “wages are well below competitive levels” but it does say “transit agencies have high compensation costs yet are struggling to attract workers.” So far, so good.

And then the prescribed solution, the only specific in the section, is to reinterpret a section of the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 to permit transit agencies to reduce overall compensation, which is currently illegal. As a solution, it is unhinged: transit agencies are having trouble finding qualified hires, so reducing compensation is only going to make these problems worse. It doesn’t follow at all from Project 2025’s own analysis; what would follow is that agencies should shift compensation from benefits to cash pay, but that’s already legal, and at no point does Project 2025 say “we recommend that agencies shift to paying workers in cash and will legally and politically back agencies that do so against labor wishes,” perhaps with a mention that the Conservatives in the United Kingdom gave such support to rail operators to facilitate getting rid of conductors. There’s no mention of the problems of the seniority system. Furchtgott-Roth used to work at the Manhattan Institute, which talks about way more specific issues including backing management against labor during industrial disputes and how one could cut pensions, but this is nowhere in the report.

On grants to states, Project 2025 is on more solid grounds. It proposes on p. 621 that federal funding should be given to states by formula, to distribute as they see fit:

If funding must be federal, it would be more efficient for the U.S. Congress to send transportation grants to each of the 50 states and allow each state to purchase the transportation services that it thinks are best. Such an approach would enable states to prioritize different types of transportation according to the needs of their citizens. States that rely more on automotive transportation, for example, could use their funding to meet those needs.

American transit activists are going to hate this, because, as in Germany and perhaps everywhere else, they disproportionately use the public transit that most people don’t use. On pre-corona numbers, around 40% of transit commuters in the United States live in metropolitan New York, but among the activists, the New York share looks much lower than 40% – it’s lower than that in my social circle of American transit activists, and I lived in New York five years and founded a New York advocacy group. The advocates I know in Texas and Kentucky and Ohio are aware of their states’ problems and want ridership to be higher, but, at the end of the day, American transit ridership is not driven by these states. Texas is especially unfortunate in how, beyond Houston’s original Main Street light rail line, its investments have not been very good. Direct grants to states are likely going to defund such projects in the future, but such projects are invisible in overall US transit usage, unfortunately.

In the core states to US transit usage – New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington, Pennsylvania – the outcome of such change would be to replace bad federal-state interactions with bad state politics. But then, to the extent that there’s a theme to the problems of Project 2025 beyond “they aren’t saying much,” it’s that it’s uninterested in solving competent governance problems in blue states, and essentially all of American public transit ridership today is about the poor quality of blue state governance.

What does this mean?

I’ve seen criticism of Project 2025 on left-wing social media (that is, Bluesky and Mastodon) that portrays it as evil. I haven’t read the document except for the transportation section and the aforementioned randomly-selected pair of pages, so I can’t judge fully, but on public transit, I’m not seeing any of this. I’m not seeing any clear defunding calls. I’m seeing a reference to anti-transit advocate Robert Poole, the director of transportation policy at Reason, but only on air traffic control; he’s written voluminously (and shoddily) about public transit, but Furchtgott-Roth isn’t referencing any of that.

What I am seeing is total passivity. Maybe it’s specific to Furchtgott-Roth, who I didn’t hear about before, and who just doesn’t seem to get transportation as an issue despite having served as a political appointee at USDOT. Or maybe, as Libertarian Developmentalism points out, it’s that the sort of people who’d write a Republican Party governing program don’t think about public transit very much and therefore resort to catechisms about reducing the role of the federal government and repealing a labor law that isn’t a binding constraint. Occasionally this can land on a proposal that isn’t uniformly bad, like granting money to states rather than projects; more commonly, it leads to misstating what the federal and state governments consider to be public transit. I’m not seeing anything nefarious here, but I am seeing a lot of ignorance and poor thinking about solutions.

2024-07-13

Quick Preliminary Notes on Rolling Stock Costs

At the Transit Costs Project, we’re starting to build a database not just of infrastructure construction costs but also rolling stock acquisition costs. The database is extremely incomplete and not at all ready for public consumption, so please read the following preliminaries with the understanding that more data may reverse some conclusions. All costs below are in 2023 PPP dollars.

The $100,000/linear meter cost for single-deck rolling stock, which I mentioned in previous blog posts, looks like it holds for European regional trains and Chinese metros. Smaller trains, such as trams, may just be more expensive per linear meter.
The variation in costs is, as expected, much narrower than in the costs of infrastructure. $200,000/meter exists but is unusual and generally indicates something wrong happened, such as the Berlin S-Bahn stock, which suffered from a lawsuit by Alstom over losing the bid to Stadler.
There is a rolling stock premium for rubber-tired metros in Paris, on the order of 40% over steel-wheeled metros.
Berlin and London have expensive metro stock as well, and reading some about their production, I am left to wonder if there’s somewhat of a prima donna premium for cities of such size.
To my surprise, in cases where the costs of a base order and options can be disaggregated, the options aren’t consistently cheaper than the base.
There doesn’t seem to be any secular increase in real rolling stock acquisition stock going back to the early 2000s.
The PPP conversion is dicey within Europe; there’s an integrated European supply chain, and then the question in non-euro countries is which PPP rate to delfate to, which makes a big difference where the PPP conversion differs substantially from the euro’s, in one direction in Switzerland (with its cross-border lines, to add a complication) and in the other in Eastern Europe. In contrast, it’s easy in China, with its domestic supply chain, and in the US, with its pretense of one.
American costs are near the high end, and rising gently, but even the New York City Subway orders of the 1990s and 2000s had somewhat of a premium – I’m getting $148,000/meter for the base R142/R142A (source) and $120,000/meter for the base R160 (source) with higher costs for the options. Nonetheless, at worst the cost premium for the R211 ($160,000 base, $145,000 option) is a factor of 1.6, not the factor of around 10 we see for infrastructure.
Some orders come with maintenance and some don’t, and we try to disaggregate this when we can, but sources are inconsistent on whether they mention maintenance bundles in the contract; in at least two cases, the maintenance contract drives up the cost premium, but in some others (like rubber-tired Parisian trains), the premium is not about maintenance.

2024-07-09

Reports on High-Speed Rail and the Northeast Corridor

Two reports that I’ve collaborated on are out now, one about high-speed rail planning for Marron and one about Northeast Corridor maintenance for ETA. A third piece is out, not by me but by Nolan Hicks, about constant-tension catenary and its impact on speed and reliability. The context for the latter two pieces is that the Northeast Corridor has been in a recurrent state of failure in the last three weeks, featuring wire failures, circuit breaker failures, track fires, and transformer fires. The high-speed rail planning piece is of different origin – Eric interviewed officials involved in California High-Speed Rail and other American projects that may or may not happen and this led to synthesizing five planning recommendations, which aren’t really about the Northeast Corridor but should be kept in mind for any plan there as well.

The broader context is that we’re going to release another report specific to the Northeast Corridor, one that’s much more synthetic in the sense of proposing an integrated infrastructure and service planning program to cut trip times to about 1:53 New York-Washington and 2:00 New York-Boston, informed by all of these insights. Nolan’s piece already includes one key piece of information that’s come out of this work, about the benefits of constant-tension catenary upgrades: 1:53 requires constant-tension catenary, and if it is not installed, the trip time is 2:04 instead, making this the single biggest piece of physical infrastructure installation the Northeast Corridor needs.

The catenary issue

Trying to go to Philadelphia, I was treated to a train stuck at Penn Station without air conditioning, until finally, after maybe 45 minutes of announcements by the conductor that it would be a while and they’d make announcements if the train was about to move, I and the other passengers got out to the station, waiting for anything to change, eventually giving up as the train and several subsequent ones were canceled. My post from three days ago about Germany has to be read with this context – while publishing I was waiting for all three pieces above to appear.

I encourage people to read the ETA report for more detail about the catenary. In brief, overhead wires can be tensioned by connecting them to fixed places at intervals along the tracks, which leads to variable tension as the wires expand in the heat and contract in the cold; alternatively, they can be tensioned with spring wires or counterweights, which automatically provide constant tension. The ETA report explains more, with diagrams, some taken from Garry Keenor’s book on rail electrification, some made by Kara Fischer (the one who made the New Mexico public transit maps and others I’ll credit upon request, not the USDOT deputy chief of staff). The catenary on the Northeast Corridor has constant tension north of New York, and for a short stretch in New Jersey, but not on the vast majority of the New York-Washington half of the line.

Variable-tension catenary is generally unreliable in the heat, and is replaced with constant-tension catenary on main lines even in Europe, where the annual temperature range is narrower than in the United States. But it also sets a blanket speed limit; on the Northeast Corridor, it is 135 mph, or 217 km/h – the precision in metric units is because 217 km/h is the limiting speed of a non-tilting train on a curve of radius 1,746 meters, a common radius in the United States as it is a round number in American units (it’s 1°, the degree being the inverse of curve radius). This blanket speed limit slows trains by 11 minutes between New York and Washington, subject to the following assumptions:

The tracks otherwise permit the maximum possible speed based on curvature, up to 320 km/h; in practice, there are few opportunities to go faster than 300 south of New York. There is an FRA rule with little justification limiting trains to 160 mph, or a little less than 260 km/h, on any shared track; the rule is assumed removed, and if it isn’t, the cost is about one minute.
Trains have the performance of the Velaro Novo, which trainset is being introduced to the United States with Brightline West. Other trainsets may have slightly better or worse performance; the defective Avelia Liberty sets are capable of tilt and therefore the impact of maximum speed is larger.
Intercity trains make one stop per state, counting the District of Columbia as a state.
Intercity and regional trains are timetabled together, on a clockface schedule with few variations. If a train cannot meet these requirements, it stays off the corridor, with a forced transfer at Philadelphia or Washington. All train schedules are uniformly padded by 7%, regardless of the type of catenary. If variable-tension catenary requires more padding, then the impact of constant-tension catenary is increased.

The bulk of the difference between 1:53 and the current trip time of about 2:50 is about timetabling, not infrastructure – when the trains are running smoothly, there is extensive schedule padding, in one case rising to 35 minutes south of New York on a fast Regional. Rolling stock quality provides a boost as well, to both reliability and acceleration rates. Faster speeds on curves even without tilt matter too – American standards on this are too conservative, and on a built-out line like the Northeast Corridor, being able to run with 180 mm of cant and 130 mm of cant deficiency (see explanation here) is valuable. But once the regulatory and organizational issues are fixed, the biggest single piece of infrastructure investment required is constant-tension catenary, simultaneously reducing trip times and improving reliability.

Nolan’s piece goes more into costs for catenary repair, and those are brutal. The Northeast Corridor Project Inventory includes $611 million to just replace the catenary between Newark and New Brunswick, without constant-tension upgrades. This is 36.5 route-km, some four- and some six-track; the $16.7 million/cost electrifies a new line from scratch around six times over in non-English-speaking countries, and while the comparison is mostly to double-track lines, around half the cost of electrification is the substations and transformers, and those aren’t part of the project in New Jersey.

State of Good Repair projects always end up as black holes of money, because if half the money is spent and there’s no visible improvement, it’s easy for Amtrak to demand even more money, without having to show anything for it. An improvement project would be visible in higher speeds, better ride quality, higher reliability, and so on, but this is free money in which the cost is treated as a positive (jobs, the appearance of work, etc.) and not something to be minimized in pursuit of another goal. One conclusion of this is that no money should be given to catenary renewal. Money can be spent on upgrades with visible results, in this case constant-tension catenary. On all else, Amtrak cannot be trusted.

High-speed rail planning

The report we wrote on high-speed rail planning at Marron is longer than the ETA report, but I encourage people to read it as well, especially anyone who wishes to comment here. In brief, we give five broad recommendations, based on a combination of reviewing the literature on high-speed rail, cost overruns, and public infrastructure management, and interviewing American sources in the field.

The federal government needs to nurture local experimentation and support it with in-house federal expertise, dependable funding, and long-term commitment.
The FRA or another federal entity should have consistent technical standards to ensure scale and a clear operating environment for contractors.
The federal government should work with universities to develop the technology further, which in this case means importing standards that work elsewhere – high-speed rail in 2024 is a mature technology, not requiring the inventions of new systems that underlay the Japanese, French, and German networks.
Agencies building high-speed rail should have good project delivery, following the recommendations we gave in the subway construction costs report. Using consultants is unavoidable, but there needs to be in-house expertise, and agencies should avoid being too reliant on consultants or using consultants to manage other consultants.
Agencies and states should engage in project planning before environmental reviews and before making the decision whether to build; the use of environmental reviews as a substitute for planning leads to rushed designs, which lead to mistakes that often prove fatal to the project.

Currently, all American high-speed rail plans should be treated as case studies of what to avoid. However, this does not mean that all of them fail on all five criteria. For one, California High-Speed Rail largely used pan-European technical standards in its planning; Caltrain did not in related planning including the electrification project and the associated resignaling (originally intended to be the bespoke CBOSS). The criterion on technical standards becomes more important as different projects interact – for example, Brightline West is inconsistent about what it’s using. Then there’s Texas Central, which uses turnkey Shinkansen standards, but as it’s turned over to Amtrak is bound to get modifications that conflict with what Japan Railways considers essential to the Shinkansen, such as total lack of any infrastructure mixing with legacy trains.

Notably, none of this is about the Northeast Corridor directly. My own interpretation of the report’s recommendations points out to other problems. For example, the Northeast Corridor’s technical standards are consistent but also bad, coming from an unbroken legacy of American railroader traditions whose succors can barely find Germany on a map, let alone bother to learn from it or any other foreign country. This way, the New Haven Line, which with modern trainsets and associated standards has few curves limiting trains to less than 150 km/h, is on a blanket speed limit of 75 mph, or 121 km/h, in Connecticut, with several further slowdowns for curves. There’s long-term planning for the corridor, and it’s bipartisan, but this long-term planning involves agencies that fight turf wars and mostly want to get the others out of what they perceive as their own turfs. There is lush funding, but it goes to the wrong things – Moynihan Train Hall but no improvements at the track level of Penn Station, extensive track renewal at 1.5 orders of magnitude higher cost than in Germany, in-place bridge replacements on curvy track instead of nearby bypasses.

The current planning does use too many consultants – in fact, Penn Reconstruction’s interagency agreement stipulates that they use consultant-centric project delivery methods, with one possibility, progressive design-build (what most of the world calls design-build; what New York calls design-build is different and better), not even legal in New York state law, but the local power brokers are trying to legalize it and break their own construction cost records. But it’s not quite the same as not bothering to develop in-house talent – there is some, and sometimes it isn’t bad, but poor project management and lack of interagency coordination has caused the budgets for the big-ticket items that Amtrak wants to explode beyond anyone’s ability to manage. The five recommendations, applied to the Northeast, mostly speak to the low quality of the existing agencies, rather than to a hodgepodge of standards as is happening at the interface between California High-Speed Rail and Caltrain or Brightline West.

The ultimate problem on the Northeast Corridor is that it is held together with duct tape, by people who do not know how to use more advanced tools than duct tape. They constantly fight fires, sometimes literally, and never ask why fires always erupt when they’re around; it’s not the heat, because the Northeast isn’t any warmer than Japan or South Korea or Italy, and it’s not underinvestment 30+ years ago, because Germany has that history too. Nolan points out the electric traction backlog on the Northeast Corridor grew from less than $100 million in 2018 to $829 million today; the people in charge are substantially the same ones who deferred this much maintenance over the six-year period that included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I didn’t get into this project in order to study other people’s failures again, as we did with the construction costs report. But everything I’m seeing on the Northeast Corridor, even more than in California or Texas, points to what may be the worst intercity rail planning of any even vaguely modern country.

2024-07-06

Germany and Summer Maintenance

I’ve been looking at some intercity rail trips in Germany for later this summer, and was reminded of how nonfunctional the system is this season. I was asked specifically about Cologne-Frankfurt trips, and discovered that for later this month, they’re timetabled to take 2.5 hours. These cities are 180 km apart on the high-speed line, where trains normally take a little longer than an hour, but right now the trains don’t seem to be using the line – rather, they’re on the classical line, which follows the Rhine and is not at all fast. This is not the only line or the only summer that this is happening; since I moved to Germany, my summer travel plans have been constrained by these seasonal slowdowns, and between them and the mediocre average speed of most German intercity lines, I’ve forgone trips I would have made at French speeds and reliability. The rationale for these summer closures for maintenance is wholly without merit on intercity rail, and this practice holds back rail travel at the time when demand is highest. Deutsche Bahn should cease this practice and instead do like neighbors with year-round intercity rail travel.

Why?

Rail lines must have regular closures for maintenance. The norm is that this is done overnight, on both urban rail and mainline rail. However, overnight closures are sometimes supplemented by daytime closures, especially for longer-term renewal; daytime closures are especially common on lines that don’t close overnight at all. Readers from New York with its 24/7 service are all too familiar with weekend service changes, which may shut down entire line segments and direct riders to alternative routes. German U-Bahns don’t run 24/7, but do run overnight on weekends, so there are only five nights of maintenance windows and not seven. New York-style weekend closures are not common in Berlin, but occasionally some segments are shut, though in my experience it’s more common on the S-Bahn.

To be clear, there are good and bad reasons to engage in daytime shutdowns. Long maintenance windows allow higher productivity, so agencies prefer them when they can get away with them. The balance of when agencies and rail companies use daytime maintenance windows depends on all of the following factors:

Traffic: daytime shutdowns are used more often during less busy times – for example, RATP uses them in the summer, when everyone is on vacation and so Métro traffic is reduced.
Redundancy: systems on which passengers can bypass closed sections, such as the New York City Subway or the German national rail networks, can reroute passengers onto alternatives, which does not eliminate the cost to passengers of the closure but does reduce it. RATP also uses the redundancy of the Métro with the RER to do summertime shutdowns and tells passengers to transfer.
Single-tracking options: this is specific to weekend closures rather than longer-term ones, but, if the system is set up in a way that permits trains to single-track around obstacles, which is common in twin-bore tunnels, then weekend closures are rather easy. The Copenhagen Metro’s combination of twin-bore tunneling and driverless operations permits single-tracking even overnight, permitting 24/7 service without weekend service changes.
Agency culture: some agencies are just more accepting of disruptions than others. MBTA insiders insist to me that concrete curing requires weekend shutdowns, often of multiple lines at once, even though Boston has regular nighttime shutdowns; evidently, Japanese subways manage to run without this.

The situation of German intercity rail

Germany uses long-term shutdowns, measured in months, to do rail infrastructure renewal. These are usually in the summer, because, in Germany as in Paris, this is vacation season and therefore people are less likely to be going to work. The national network here is highly redundant, and intensive summertime shutdowns slow down passengers but do not make trips literally impossible: the Cologne-Frankfurt work is evidently adding about 1.5 hours to trips, and work previously done on the Frankfurt-Mannheim line slowed passengers by about 40 minutes (while still permitting some timed connections); in contrast, unscheduled breakdowns on the Northeast Corridor due to summer heat lead to trip cancellations.

The stupid thing about this is that while summer vacation travel reduces demand on urban rail, it has the opposite effect on intercity rail. The summer is consistently high season for intercity travel, precisely because it’s when people take vacations. In France, at least on domestic TGVs, fast trains are in plenty. But not here – instead, the trains are the least likely to be running, due to maintenance.

Much of the problem is that, unlike Shinkansen lines and LGVs, most German high-speed lines do not have regular nighttime closure windows. They run mixed traffic – passenger trains during the day, freight trains during the night. This feature allows for more flexibility of freight rail, but raises the construction and maintenance costs. Mixed lines must be built with freight-friendly features including gentler grades and lower superelevation (see explanation for superelevation here), the latter requiring wider curves to allow high speeds on passenger trains; both features require more tunneling, and as a result, German high-speed lines are much tunnel-heavier than French ones, raising costs. Maintenance is more difficult as well due to the lack of regular nighttime shutdowns.

That said, the Cologne-Frankfurt line is not a mixed line. It’s a passenger-only line, with a ruling grade of 4%, higher than any other high-speed line I know of (LGVs use 3.5%). It also has the tightest curves I know of on newly-built high-speed lines relative to speed, running at 300 km/h on 3.35 km radius curves, a lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane of 2.07 m/s^2; only the Shinkansen has faster lateral acceleration, and that’s on older lines running tilting trains. Consequently, it’s actually the least tunnel-heavy of the German high-speed lines. Nonetheless, it evidently does not run every day, every year, the way LGVs and Shinkansen lines do.

This is where I suspect agency culture comes into play. American cities other than New York and to some extent Chicago shut down their subway systems overnight, but still force passengers onto bus diversions on weekends for maintenance, where their foreign counterparts do no such thing; this has to be understood as a combination of managers not really caring about weekend service (leading to lower base frequency as well) and comparing themselves to New York even without 24/7 service. In Germany, the culture is that high-speed lines should be built to mixed standards, even if they are useless for freight, for political reasons, and renewal should consequently be done in long-term shutdowns with accelerated work, and this culture is evidently also affecting a line that is built to passenger-only standards. This may also be compounding with the European culture of summer vacations, leading to reduced urban rail service during summers – I am not sure, having seen explicit service reductions in Paris and Stockholm but not here.

Conclusion

Long-term closures have tradeoffs. In some cases they are legitimate, especially when the time cost to passengers is greatly reduced and when traffic is lower. However, neither of these two conditions applies in the case of intercity rail traffic in Germany. The closures are happening during the busiest time of intercity travel, and delaying passengers by an hour or even more. Worse, this practice is used not just on mixed lines like Hanover-Würzburg but also on passenger-dedicated Cologne-Frankfurt, which has regular nighttime work windows. When the reason for the closures is cultural, it ceases to be legitimate; it instead points out to an agency that refuses to think outside of its box, and will not assimilate better practices from elsewhere.

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