NEC Future: Moving Sideways

The Northeast Corridor high-speed rail investment studies are moving forward, and four days ago the FRA released an early environmental impact study on the subject, as part of the NEC Future program. The study moves in part in the right direction, in that it considers many different segment-level improvements (for example, specific bypasses of curvy segments), but it still isn’t quite going in the right direction. It’s not a bad study in itself, but it does have a lot of drawbacks, and I would like to discuss the ultimate problems with its approach.

Overview

The EIS studies three alternatives, as well as an obligatory No Build option.

Alternative 1 includes minimal investment: capacity improvements already under consideration, including new Hudson tunnels; grade-separation of at-grade rail junctions, including Shell interlocking between the Metro-North New Haven Line to Grand Central and the NEC, which imposes a severe speed limit (30 mph, the worst outside major city stations) and a capacity constraint; and a limited I-95 bypass of the legacy NEC route in eastern Connecticut, to avoid the existing movable bridges. The bulk of the expense under this alternative, excluding the predominantly commuter-oriented new Hudson tunnels, involves replacing or bypassing obsolete or slow bridges with faster segments. I have advocated such an approach in certain cases for years, such as the Cos Cob Bridge; if anything, Alternative 1 does not do this enough, but I do appreciate that it uses this solution.

Alternative 2 constructs HSR along the NEC route, except for a major deviation to serve Hartford. It is also bundled with various bypasses and new stations elsewhere: under this alternative, Philadelphia and Baltimore get new stations, with extensive urban tunneling to reach those stations. Alternative 3 does the same, but considers more deviations, including a tunnel between Long Island and New Haven, and an inland route through Connecticut, closer to I-84 than to I-95 and the legacy NEC; it also constructs dedicated HSR tracks between New York and Washington.

The EIS does not include cost figures. It includes travel time figures on PDF-p. 51, which seem to be based on unfavorable assumptions: Alternative 2, called Run 5, does New York-Boston in 2:17 for trains making a few major-city intermediate stops; the Alternative 3 proposals vary widely depending on alignment, of which the fastest, the I-84 inland route, takes 1:51, again making intermediate stops.

The Good

First, the EIS includes service plan elements, stating the projected frequency of regional and express trains using the tracks. It also talks about clockface scheduling and proposes a pulse in Philadelphia, allowing timed transfers in all directions between local and express intercity trains as well as trains on the Keystone corridor. It goes further and discusses regional rail on the intercity tracks in the alternatives that include extensive new construction. In these ways, it focuses on regionwide rail integration far more than previous plans.

Second, in general, the correct way to think about NEC investment is component by component. The EIS gets closer to this ideal, by considering many different route combinations north of New York, and advancing several of them under the Alternative 3 umbrella.

And third, the concept of Alternative 1 is solid. In many cases, it is possible to bundle a trip time or capacity improvement into the replacement of an obsolete structure at very low additional cost. The example I keep coming back to is the Cos Cob Bridge, but it is equally true of the movable bridges east of New Haven. I also greatly appreciate that Alternative 1 recognizes the importance of grade-separating railroad junctions.

The Bad

Ultimately, the EIS does not take the three good concepts – integrated service planning, component-by-component thinking, and bundling trip-time improvements when the marginal cost of doing so is low – to their full conclusion. Thus, there is no attempt at running intercity trains at high speed on shared track with commuter rail with timed overtakes, as I have proposed for both the inner New Haven Line and the Providence Line. On the contrary, the plan for capacity investment on the Providence Line includes extensive three-tracking, rather than limited, strategic four-track bypass segments. This cascades to the trip times, which are quite slow between New York and New Haven (1:08, for an average speed of 103 km/h), and a bit slower than they could be between Providence and Boston (24 minutes, whereas about 21 is possible with about zero investment into concrete).

The concepts of Alternatives 1, 2, and 3 represent bundles of levels of investment. This is the wrong approach. Alternatives 2 and 3 include new tunneled city-center stations in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but wouldn’t we want to consider city-center station tunnels in those two cities separately? It’s possible for one to turn out to be cost-effective but not the other. It’s possible for neither to be cost-effective, but for other improvements included in Alternative 2, such as curve modification around Metropark and Metuchen, to pencil out.

There’s far more interaction between different macro-level alignments, by which I mean such questions as “inland route or coastal route?” and “serve Hartford on the mainline or put it on a branch?”, than between such micro-level investments as individual curve modifications and urban tunnels. This means that instead of discrete alternatives, there should be one umbrella, taking in Alternative 2 and 3 variants, proposing all of those options as possibilities. A future study, with detailed cost figures, could then rank those options in terms of trip time saving per unit of cost, or in terms of social and financial ROI. This way, there would be concrete proposals for what a $5 billion plan, a $10 billion plan, a $20 billion plan, and so on would be.

The Ugly

Two elements in the study are inexcusable. First, the service plan description explicitly keeps Amtrak’s current separation of premium-fare Regionals and even-more-premium-fare Acelas. This is not how the rest of the world structures HSR: even when the HSR fares are substantially higher than the legacy rail fares, as in Spain, the fare per passenger-km is not very high, and is not targeted exclusively at business travelers. In France, the intercity fare (including TGVs, which are the bulk of French intercity traffic) was on average €0.112 per passenger-km in 2011. Premium service is provided on the same TGVs as standard service, in first-class cars. In contrast, Amtrak charges about $0.29 per passenger-km on the Regional and $0.53 on the Acela.

And second, the investment alternatives appear to include more tunneling than is necessary. I will focus on the Hartford-Providence-Boston segment in Alternative 2, since it is less sensitive to assumptions on commuter rail track-sharing than the segments overlapping the New Haven Line. It is possible to go all the way from Hartford to the western margin of the Providence built-up area without any tunneling, and without outrageous bridging; see a past post of mine on the subject here, which concludes that it’s better to just go parallel to I-95 for trip time reasons. In Providence, tunnels are unavoidable, but can still be limited to short segments, mixed with elevated routes along pre-impacted freeway corridors. When I looked at it two years ago, I saw an alignment with just 2 km of tunnel, in Providence itself. In contrast, run A in figure 9 on PDF-p. 56 says that tunnels are about 27% of new construction between Hartford and Boston, which consists of, at a minimum, about 100 km of track between Hartford and Providence.

Conclusion

The EIS is a step in the right direction, insofar as it does consider issues of integrated service planning and prioritizing construction based on where it can be cheaply bundled into bridge replacement. However, it fails to consider cost limitations, as seen in the excessive tunneling proposed even in areas where high-speed tracks can run entirely above ground. It’s considering more options, which is good, but, Alternative 1, while representing a golden concept, is not sufficiently developed.

What I would like to see from a study in this direction is a mixture of the following:

  • Discussion of how to avoid tunnels, including various tradeoffs that have to be made (for example, above-ground construction may require more takings). Generally, I want to see much less tunneling than is currently proposed.
  • A well-developed incremental option, similar to Alternative 1 but more extensive, including for example I-95 bypasses all the way from New Haven to Kingston and along strategic segments of the New Haven Line, such as in Port Chester and Greenwich.
  • Greater integration with regional rail; one litmus test is whether the Providence Line is proposed to be three-tracked for long stretches, or four-tracked at a key bypass station (the options are Sharon and the Route 128-Readville segment), and another is discussion of high-acceleration electric multiple units on the Providence Line and the Penn Line.
  • Unbundling of projects within each alignment – there is no need to, for example, consider the Philadelphia and Baltimore tunnels together (I also think neither is a good idea, but that’s a separate discussion). The view should be toward an optimal set of projects within each alignment, since macro-level decisions such as whether to serve Hartford are more political than micro-level ones of which curves to fix. This permits explicit discussions such as “would you be willing to spend $2 billion and slow through-trains by 9 minutes to serve Hartford?”.

Except for the first, all are kind of present in this study, but in insufficient amount for me to view it as truly a step forward. The ultimate goal must be HSR in the Northeast on a reasonable budget – closer to $10 or even $20 billion than to the Amtrak Vision’s proposed $150 billion – and this requires carefully looking at which scope is required and which is not. The EIS has elements that can be used toward that goal, but ultimately it is a step sideways, not forward or in the wrong direction.

Third-World Train Speeds

Developing countries often have no railroads, or poorly developed ones. In India, the colonial railway network and more recent additions form a tight mesh, and train speeds today are in the 80-90 km/h range, respectable by the standards of legacy rail lines in Europe and the US that have not received significant upgrades. But in nearly all other ex-colonies in Africa and Asia, the situation is far worse – some countries have no railways, and others do but have slow lines from port to the interior. This is an attempt to catalog the average speeds of various countries’ fastest intercity trains; only in few cases are they even as fast as many Amtrak trains. Most of the information is taken from Seat61.

Syria: before the war, the fastest trains traveled the 361 km between Damascus and Aleppo in 4 hours, an average speed of 90 km/h.

Egypt: the fastest trains between Cairo and Alexandria (called Specials) do it in 2.5 hours, a distance of 208 km. This is 83 km/h.

Indonesia: the express trains between Jakarta and Surabaya do the 725-km trip in 9 hours. This is 81 km/h.

Pakistan: the Shalimar Express and Karakoram Express go between Karachi and Lahore in about 16 hours, a distance of about 1,250 km, according to Wikipedia. This is about 78 km/h.

Thailand: from Bangkok, trains go to Chiang Mai in (at the fastest) 10.5-11 hours for 751 km, Nong Khai in about 10 hours for 621 km, Ubon Ratchathani in 8 hours for 575 km, and Surat Thani in 8:40-9 hours for 651 km. At the fastest, it’s about 73 km/h.

South Africa: from Johannesburg, the long-distance trains average in the 50s. The fastest is Johannesburg-Cape Town, which does 1,530 km in 26 hours, an average of 59 km/h.

Zambia: the Golden Jubilee Express trains travel the 467 km between Livingstone and Lusaka in 12:27, for an average speed of 38 km/h. The through-trains to Tanzania go between the border and Kapiri Mposhi, a distance of 882 km, in 16:39 (and the source says they’re often late by many hours), an average speed of 52 km/h. Tanzania, in the same link, has an average speed from Dar es Salaam to the border of about 38 km/h.

Bangladesh: the fastest trains between Dhaka and Chittagong do the trip in just under 7 hours; on Google Earth, the route seems to be about 310 km. This is 45 km/h on average.

Burma: the fastest trains between Yangon and Mandalay, a distance of 622 km, do the trip in 14 hours, for an average of 44 km/h.

Kenya: Nairobi-Mombasa trains take about 15 hours. The line is 610 km long, for an average speed of 41 km/h.

Vietnam: trains go between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in about 56 hours, a distance of 1,726 km. This is 31 km/h.

What’s Going on with Hudson Tunnel Cost Overruns?

Twenty-five billion dollars. The New York region’s political heavyweights – Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Bill de Blasio – all want new Hudson tunnels, without any state funding for them; Schumer is proposing federal funding and a new interstate agency, parallel to the existing Port Authority, and a total budget of $25 billion. This is the highest figure I have seen so far; Amtrak still says $16 billion and Cuomo says $14 billion, and it’s likely the Gateway tunnels are indeed about $16 billion, while the remainder is for associated projects, such as fully four-tracking the line from Newark to the tunnel portal, a distance of about 11 kilometers. It is not my intention to criticize the cost; I’ve done that before.

Instead, I would like to point out that each time Gateway is the news, there usually seems to be a fresh cost escalation. Is it a $10 billion project? A $14 billion project? A $16 billion project? Or a $25 billion project? And what is included exactly? Amtrak does not make it clear what the various items are and how much they cost; I have not seen a single cost estimate that attempts to establish a baseline for new Hudson tunnels without the Penn Station South component, which would provide a moderate short-term boost to capacity but is not necessary for the project. The articles I’ve seen do not explain the origin of the $25 billion figure, either; it may include the tunnel and full four-tracking of Newark-New York, or it may include additional scope, for example Amtrak’s planned vertical circulation for a future (unnecessary) deep cavern for high-speed rail (see picture here).

The main issue here, the way I see it, is the interaction between public trust and political self-aggrandizement. It is common in all aspects of Israeli governance for new ministers to announce sweeping changes and reorganizations, just to remind the country that they exist and are doing something; this generally makes it harder to implement gradual reforms, and makes it completely impossible to do anything by consensus. Implementing a plan that was developed by consensus over many years makes one a bureaucrat; leaders change everything. In the US, this is the case not everywhere in government, but at least within public transportation infrastructure.

As we see in the case of Schumer’s call for a new interstate authority, the changes a heavyweight politician makes in order to appear as a leader have nothing to do with real problems that the project may have. Solving those problems requires detailed knowledge of the project at hand, which is the domain of bureaucrats and technocrats, and not of heavyweight politicians. Even a heavyweight who understands that there is a problem may not know or care about how to fix it: for example, Christie used the expression “tunnel to Macy’s basement,” invoking the deep cavern, to explain why ARC was wasteful, but chose to cancel the project rather than to remove the cavern and restore a track connection from the tunnel to Penn Station, which was in the official ARC Alt P plan until it was cut to limit the cost overruns. Managing a project is hard, and is, again, the domain of technocrats. The heavyweight will grandstand instead, regardless of whether it means canceling the project, or proposing an entirely new layer of government to build it.

As for trust, let us look at the benefits of new Hudson tunnels. The traditional, and least objectionable, is added capacity: the existing tunnels are currently at capacity during rush hour, and there’s much more demand for rail travel from New Jersey to Manhattan than they can accommodate. We can measure this benefit in terms of the combination of increased ridership from more service from more suburban areas, reduced crowding, and possibly slightly higher speeds. As a crude estimate of this benefit, current New Jersey Transit ridership at Penn Station is 87,000 per weekday in each direction. Doubling capacity means roughly doubling ridership, which would come from a combination of induced demand and diversion of traffic from cars, Port Authority buses, and commuter rail-PATH connections. This means the new tunnel can expect about 175,000 new commuter rail trips per weekday. At $10,000 per weekday trip, which is about average for very large non-US cities’ subway extensions, this justifies $1.75 billion. At $20,000, about the same as the projection for Grand Paris Express, Crossrail, and Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, all of which are justified on grounds of ridership and capacity on parallel lines, this is $3.5 billion. At $40,000, about the same as old projections for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, which I used to analyze de Blasio’s Utica subway proposal, this is $7 billion. A $25 billion budget corresponds to a cost per rider well into the range of airport connectors.

Now, I’d like to think that informed citizens can look at these costs and benefits. At least, the fact that public transit projects only cost as much per rider as Gateway if they’re airport connectors (thus, of especial interest to the elites) or if something very wrong happened with the ridership projections, suggests that there is, normally, a ceiling to what the political system will fund. Even at $14-16 billion, the two states involved and the federal government groaned at funding Gateway, speaking to the fact that it’s not, in fact, worth this much money. In contrast, a bigger project, with bigger benefits, would be funded enthusiastically if it cost this much – for example, California already has almost this much money for high-speed rail, counting Prop 1A funds that are yet inaccessible due to the requirement of a 50/50 match from other sources.

Against this background, we see scare stories that Gateway must be built for reasons other than capacity and ridership. The old tunnels are falling apart, and Amtrak would like to shut them down one track at the time for long-term repairs. The more mundane reality is that the tunnels have higher maintenance costs than Amtrak would like since each track can only be shut down for short periods, on weekends and at night. This is buried in technical documents that don’t give the full picture, and don’t give differential costs for continuing the present regime of weekend single-tracking versus the recommended long-term closures. The given cost for Sandy-related North River Tunnel repairs is $350 million, assuming long-term closures, and it’s unlikely the present regime is billions of dollars more expensive.

I am reminded of the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement: the existing bridge has high maintenance costs due to its age and poor state, but the net present value of the maintenance cost is $2.5 billion and that of the excess maintenance cost is less, both figures well below the replacement cost. The bridge itself is structurally sound, but in popular media it is portrayed as structurally deficient. This relates to the problem of heavyweight politicians, for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement is Cuomo’s pet project.

More fundamentally, who can trust any claim Amtrak makes about the structural soundness of tunnels? It says a lot that, when I asked on Twitter why transportation authorities do not immediately shut down unsafe pieces of infrastructure, various commenters answered “politics,” and on one (I believe James Sinclair) suggested that Amtrak order an emergency closure of one of the Hudson tunnel tracks just to drive home the point that new tunnels are necessary. I would like to stress that this is not Amtrak or a heavyweight proposing that, but the mere fact that commenters can seriously talk about it is telling. Most of the writers and commenters on the US transit blogosphere are very progressive and hate the Republicans; I have not seen a single comment recommending that the Democrats steal elections, fudge official statistics to make the party look more successful, or arrest Republican politicians on trumped-up charges, because in the US (and other first-world democracies), this is simply not done, and everyone except conspiracy theorists recognizes it. But politicizing the process of deciding which infrastructure projects are necessary for safety purposes and which are simply service expansions is normal enough that people can propose it half-seriously.

This brings me back to the issue of what I want the politicians to do, and what I expect them to do. What I want them to do is to be honest about costs and benefits, mediate between opposing interests (including different agencies that fight turf battles), and make decisions based on the best available information. This would necessarily limit costs, since, from the point of view of a member of Congress, if they get $25 billion for a piece of infrastructure then they cannot get $25 billion for another priority of theirs. They don’t do that, not in the US, and I’ve learned not to expect any better, as have the voters. Instead of working to make $25 billion go a longer way (to put things in perspective, I expect my regional rail tunnel proposal to cost $15-20 billion, at Crossrail 2 costs), Schumer is working to make $25 billion to sound like it’s going to a bigger deal than the new Hudson tunnels actually are.

None of this is a secret. American voters have learned to expect some kind of machine-greasing and politicking, to the point of losing the ability to trust either the politicians or the agencies, even in those cases when they are right. The result is that it’s possible to stretch the truth about how necessary a piece of infrastructure is, since people would believe or disbelieve it based on prior political beliefs anyway, and there is no expectation that the politicians or public authorities making those claims will have to justify them to the public in any detail. Lying to the public becomes trivially easy in this circumstance, and thus, costs can rise indefinitely, since everyone involved can pretend the benefits will rise to match them.

Why Labor Efficiency is Important

In North America, commuter trains run with conductors, often several per train. On most systems they walk the entire length of the train to check every passenger’s ticket, whereas on a few, namely in California, they do not do that anymore, but there are nonetheless multiple conductors per train. In addition, the scheduling is quite inefficient, in that train drivers do not work many revenue hours. I investigated what effect this has on operating costs, and it turns out that the effect on the marginal operating costs, which are important for off-peak service, is large: on the LIRR and Metro-North, nearly fivefold improvements in revenue train-hours per on-board employee (driver or conductor) are possible, which would halve the marginal operating cost per train-km. The bulk of this post is dedicated to explaining the following breakdown of variable operating costs:

train costs

The National Transit Database has figures for service in car-km and car-hours for a variety of US transit agencies. In New York State, the Empire Center has lists of every public employee’s position and pay, which we can use to figure out the average pay of a train driver and conductor and the productivity of their labor. The NTD numbers are as of 2011, so I will use the number of employees of 2011, but the pay per employee of 2014 (at any rate, there have been no major service changes since 2011, so numbers are similar). In 2011, the LIRR averaged 5,000 car-hours per driver-year, and Metro-North averaged 4,000; the LIRR runs longer trains than Metro-North, so the figure for both railroads appear to be about 500 train-hours per driver-year. Both railroads had a little bit more than 2 conductors per driver on average (2.14 Metro-North, 2.47 LIRR). The average pay of a driver, as of 2014, is $109,000 on the LIRR and $120,000 on Metro-North, whereas the average pay of a conductor is $112,000 on the LIRR and $96,000 on Metro-North.

From this, we can piece together the average operating cost of commuter rail derived from on-board labor, per train-hour: $771 on the LIRR, $714 on Metro-North. Assuming 8 cars per train (and again, the LIRR tends to run longer trains), this is around $90-95 per car-hour. According to the NTD, the average operating cost of both was about $550 per car-hour in 2011, but this includes fixed costs, such as management and rolling stock. As we will see, variable operating costs are much lower.

As a digression, I’d like to point out that the peaky schedule of commuter rail contributes to the low productivity of the drivers. Crew schedules include substantial gap time between trips, and occasionally, especially on low-frequency diesel branches, they deadhead. That said, the subway’s number of revenue train-hours per driver is not materially different. For higher figures, one must leave New York. Toei got about 700 revenue hours per driver when I last checked, but I can no longer find the reference. On the London Underground, I do have fresh references, pointing in the same range: 76.2 million train-km per year at 33 km/h average speed (from TfL’s facts and figures), and a bit more than 3,000 train operators. In 2012, the last year for which there’s actual rather than predicted data (see also PDF-p. 7 of the TfL Annual Report), there were 720 revenue hours per train driver. This is in tandem with a less peaky schedule than in New York: although the average speed is barely higher than that of the New York subway, as reported in the NTD, the trains travel about 180,000 km per year (see fact 149 here), twice as long as in New York. In Helsinki, metro trains run every 10 minutes all day on each branch, every day, without any extra peak service, contributing to even higher utilization: the schedules show 65,000 revenue-hours per year, whereas a factsheet from 2010 shows 75 metro drivers, for a total of 867 revenue hours per driver. In both the UK and Finland, average hours per employee are marginally shorter than in the US; London Underground drivers have 36-hour workweeks.

The importance of this computation is not just to highlight that 44-73% improvement in revenue-hours per employee is possible, but to point out that, on the margins, adding off-peak service would make crew schedules more efficient, since higher frequency would reduce the need to deadhead and to wait between trains. This means that, although the average operating cost may be about $750 per train-hour, the marginal cost is lower, even without changes to work rules.

Suppose now that trains run without conductors, using proof-of-payment as on light rail lines, even ones in North America, and on countless commuter rail systems in Continental Europe. Suppose also that there are 720 revenue-hours per driver, and that a driver is paid $115,000 per year. This means that running extra trains would not cost $90-95 in on-board labor per car-hour, but only $20, a nearly fivefold improvement. At Helsinki’s level of productivity, a nearly sixfold improvement to $16.60 is possible. At the LIRR’s present average speed of 50 km/h (compared with 53 on New Jersey Transit and 59 on Metro-North), the fivefold improvement based on London Underground productivity would cut the average cost per car-km from $1.80-1.90 to $0.40; at a higher but still realistic 67 km/h, it’s a cut from $1.35 to $0.30. A large majority of this cut comes from eliminating conductors, which, by itself, would cut costs threefold, but raising driver productivity would allow an additional cut of 30-40%. I again stress that the marginal cost is lower than the average cost computed here, since less peaky schedules come with simpler crew scheduling; more off-peak service would by itself cut the average cost, which means its marginal cost would be quite low.

Let us now look at other variable costs than on-board labor. Two years ago, I did this computation for high-speed rail, and found that, provided the schedules did not have extra rush hour service, operating expenses would be very low. We can do the same computation for commuter rail, and note that the lower speeds imply that operating and maintenance costs are spread across less passenger-km, raising costs. Let us consider train maintenance, cleaning, and energy.

I do not have information about train maintenance costs on commuter rail. Instead, I will use those of high-speed rail, for which standards are higher. As I noted in my computation from two years ago, the reference here is California HSR’s 2012 Business Plan, which aggregates these figures from around the world on PDF-p. 136. Maintenance costs per train-km are $4.47 for the Tokaido Shinkansen (with 16-car trains) and $2.58 per the UIC (with what I assume are 8-car trains), both in 2009 dollars. These figures cluster around $0.30 per car-km in 2009 dollars, or $0.30-35 per car-km in 2014 dollars.

With cleaning, there is some information about commuter rail: the Empire Center has lists of coach cleaners on Metro-North (there are 314) and their pay (on average, a little less than $50,000 a year). This seems high given the amount of service Metro-North runs – about $0.15 per car-km. Shinkansen trains are cleaned on a seven-minute turnaround in Tokyo, using one cleaner per standard-class car; this includes tasks that are not required on commuter rail, such as flipping seats to face forward. A cleaner making $30 per hour cleaning a single car per 15 minutes, with each train cleaned once per 150 km roundtrip, would cost $0.05 per car-km. I suspect that part of the low productivity of Metro-North cleaners is again a matter of low off-peak frequency – Shinkansen cleaners work almost continuously – but I don’t have comparative data to back this up; New York City Transit pays even more per cleaner per car- or bus-km, but this is on much lower average speed, and per car- or bus-hour, it pays about $6.40, vs. about $8.90 for Metro-North. I’m going to pencil in $0.10 per car-km as the cost of cleaning.

Energy costs we can compute from first principles. This is easier than for HSR, since commuter trains travel at such speed that a large majority of their energy consumption is in acceleration, rather than cruising. The explicit assumptions I am making is that the top speed is 130 km/h (the two main LIRR lines are mostly 80 mph territory), each car weighs 54 metric tons (the LIRR M7s weigh 57.5 and the Metro-North M8s even more, but this is very high by international EMU standards, thanks to FRA regulations), the average distance between stations is 4 km (the LIRR’s average is less than that if all trains make all stops and more if there are some express trains), and the track resistance per unit of train mass is the same as for the X 2000, for which data exists on PDF-p. 64 of a thesis on tilting trains. Regenerative braking is assumed to exactly cancel out with losses in transmission. Train acceleration performance is assumed to be like that of the FLIRT, which would take about a kilometer to accelerate to line speed and have about 2 km of cruising before slowing down for the stop; the M7 has inferior performance, but this would reduce energy consumption since trains would spend more time at lower speed.

With the above assumptions, each acceleration, cruise, and deceleration cycle between stations consumes about 13 kWh, of which 10 kWh is required to accelerate the train to top speed, and the other 3 are for overcoming track resistance. See rough computations in a subthread on California HSR Blog starting with this comment, and bear in mind the initial comment made a large computational error. As for April of this year, transportation electricity costs in the state are $0.1245 per kWh, giving us about $1.60 per 4-km interstation, or $0.40 per car-km.

Overall, those three items are $0.80 per car-km. This means that going from paying train crew $1.35 per car-km to paying them $0.30 per car-km represents halving of direct marginal operating expenses: it means going from $2.15 to $1.10 per car-km. Finally, let us add management costs, which are not exactly marginal costs, but do grow as the workforce grows, since more employees require supervisors. At RENFE, we can extract 0.27 support and management employees per operations employee from the data on PDF-p. 46 of its 2010 executive summary. On the Helsinki urban rail network, the corresponding figure is 0.34 as per the factsheet referenced above. This affects train crew, cleaning, and maintenance staff, but not energy. If this means 30% extra costs, this means going from $2.675 to $1.31 per car-km – again, we see costs are halved.

The off-peak LIRR fare is 15 cents per kilometer at long distances (14 to Ronkonkoma, but much more at shorter distances, for example 21 to Hicksville). If the marginal cost of running off-peak service is $1.31 per car-km, it means a car needs to have 9 passengers without season passes on it paying 15 cents per km for the trip to break even. If it’s $2.675, it needs 18. Passengers who commute off-peak and get season passes for those commutes also contribute, but less – a monthly pass for Ronkonkoma is $377, which at 46 trips a month is 10 cents per kilometer. It is not hard to have 9 passengers even on a long train, or even 13 (at the lower rate of season passes); Ronkonkoma itself is a park-and-ride, where this is less likely, but high enough passenger volumes as far as Mineola and Hicksville and all over the Babylon Branch are quite likely. If the required minimum is 18, let alone 26, this is substantially harder.

I harp on North American mainline rail operations for a variety of antiquated practices, but the on-board overstaffing is by far the worst. While improvement in train driver productivity can occur as a natural byproduct of improvement in off-peak frequency, getting rid of conductors is not so easy. It means a fight with the unions over job losses. Some of the required layoffs can be mitigated by retraining conductors as train drivers and running more service, but this would not boost service hours by a factor of 5; on the Ronkonkoma Branch, the peakiest of the three long LIRR lines, boosting off- and reverse-peak frequency to half the peak frequency would only increase train service by a factor of about 1.8.

I am not an expert on labor relations, so I do not know if any solution barring a prolonged SEPTA-style strike could work, alone or in combination. One possibility would be to commit to reducing working hours in the next five or ten years instead of hiking pay; working hours would be gradually reduced to core Western European levels, with 35-hour workweeks and 6 weeks of paid vacation, and hourly pay would rise as scheduled while annual pay would be frozen. Another possibility is that the MTA would help laid off employees find private-sector work, as happened in the 1980s with Japan National Railways (see PDF-pp. 103-4 of a handbook on rail privatization). This possibility requires implementing the reform at a time of wage growth and low unemployment, when private-sector work is easier to find, but the US is posting strong job growth numbers nowadays and is projected to keep doing so for at least another year.

But whatever happens, the most important reform from the point of view of reducing marginal off-peak service provision costs is letting go of redundant train crew. Halving the variable operating costs is exactly what is required to convert the nearly empty off-peak trains from financial drains to an extra source of revenues, balancing low ridership with even lower expenses. This would of course compound with other operating efficiencies, limiting the losses of branch lines and turning the busier main line trains into profit centers. But nowhere else is there the possibility of cutting costs so much with one single policy change as with removing conductors and changing the fare enforcement system to proof-of-payment.

Update 7/31: first, check comments below about maintenance costs: as far as I can tell from poorly presented Empire Center data, they are about 2.5 times higher, for both trains and the infrastructure, than the maintenance costs of high-speed rail. Although the effect of reducing those costs to conventional HSR level is larger than the effect of eliminating conductors, the details of reducing maintenance costs are far more delicate than those of eliminating conductors and running trains more often so that train drivers have less downtime.

Second, there is a small error in the above calculations: the figure of $90-95 in crew salary per car-hour is based on two conflicting assumptions. To get to $771 per train-hour on the LIRR, I assumed the LIRR ran 10-car trains. To get down to the $90-95 range, I assumed 8-car trains; 10-car trains would make this $77/hour. If we redo the entire calculation with 10-car trains, still with HSR maintenance costs, then instead of a cut from $2.675/car-km to $1.31/car-km, improved labor efficiency would cut costs from $2.415/car-km to $1.21/car-km. This is based on exact LIRR salaries, whereas the original calculation assumes hybrid LIRR/Metro-North salaries, and Metro-North pays drivers better than the LIRR.

Now, trains are somewhat longer at the peak than off-peak. If off-peak service is already with 8-car trains, and the average number of conductors is constant, then the original calculation (a cut from $2.675 to $1.31) still holds. After all, the salaries of train drivers and conductors are the same no matter how long the train is. But the number of conductors is not constant – let’s say it is proportional to train length, so 8-car LIRR trains have 2 conductors instead of 2.47, just as Metro-North’s average number of conductors per train is shorter than the LIRR’s, in tandem with its shorter consists. This changes the calculation to a cut from $2.535 (reflecting fewer conductors than in the original calculation) to $1.31. Observe that no matter what assumption we use, the operating cost cut coming from removing conductors and using drivers more efficiently is about 50%, give or take 1-2%.

New Theme Warning

I am planning to change this blog’s theme in the next few days, since the current Twenty Ten theme is not friendly to long nested comment threads. I am hunting for various free WordPress themes and will make decisions soon; I’m looking for somewhat smaller fonts so that more text can fit per line, but also less indent between comments (compare comment threads here today with threads on Second Avenue Sagas or California HSR Blog). Keeping the reverse chronology is a must – I emphatically do not want a theme that makes people click on posts to be able to see them at all.

If people have opinions, I am listening.

Update 7/23: hey everyone, go read Queens Transit, both for the regional rail posts (which I don’t fully agree with, but think are thoughtful and interesting), and for the theme; it looks like just what I need.

Update 7/25: I narrowed it down to a few themes, and chose Blaskan.

Penn Station Elimination Followup

Several commenters, both here and on Streetsblog, have raised a number of points about my proposal to eliminate above-ground Penn Station and reduce the station to a hole in the ground. A few of those points are things I’d already thought about when I wrote that post and didn’t want to clutter; others are new ideas that I’ve had to wrestle with.

Waiting

On Streetsblog, Mark Walker says, “Getting on a train at Penn is not like using the subway. Instead of a train that runs every five minutes, you’re waiting for a train that runs once per hour (more or less),” implying nicer waiting areas and lounges are needed. My proposal, of course, does not have dedicated waiting areas. (That said, there’s an immense amount of space on the platforms under the escalators, which could be equipped with chairs, tables, and newsstands.)

However, I take exception to the notion that when the train runs every hour, passengers wait an hour. When I lived in Providence, a few trips to Boston, New Haven, and New York taught me the exact amount of time it’d take me to walk from my apartment to the train station: 21 minutes. I learned to time myself to get to the station 2 minutes before the train would leave, and as I recall, I missed the train twice out of maybe 30 trips, and one of those was when I had a lot of luggage and was in a taxi and couldn’t precisely gauge the extra travel time. Walking is that reliable. People who get to Penn Station by subway have to budget some extra time to account for missed subway trains, but from much of the city, including the parts of the CBD not within walking distance from Penn, the required spare time is less than 10 minutes. Moreover, Penn is at its most crowded at rush hour, which is precisely when subway frequency is the highest, and people can reliably time themselves to within less than 5 minutes.

Outlying train stations in Switzerland are deserted except a few minutes before a train shows up, because the connecting transit is all timed to meet the train. This is of course inapplicable at very large stations with many lines, but the modes of transportation that most Penn Station users take to the station are reliable and frequent, if you can even talk of frequency for walking. The result is that the amenities do not need to be extravagant on account of waiting passengers, and do not need to be more than those of a busy subway station in a busy area.

Shelter

Several commenters raised the idea of shelter. One option, raised by James Sinclair, is an arched glass roof over the station, on the model of Milan. This involves above-ground infrastructure, but the arched structure is only supported at the margins of the compound, which means that the primary feature of a hole-in-the-ground station, the lack of anything that the track area must support the weight of, is still true. I do not think it’s a bad idea; I do, however, want to raise three additional options:

Do nothing. A large proportion of the usable area of the platforms would be located under the walkways above, or under the escalators and staircases. Having measured the depth more precisely, through Plate 14 here, I found it is 13 meters from street level to top of rail, or 12 from street level to platform level, translating to 21 meters of escalator length, plus 2.2-2.5 meters on each side for approach (see page 23 here). About 16 of those 21 (18.5 out of 25.7, counting approaches) meters offer enough space for passengers to stand below the escalators, leading to large areas that could be used for shelter, as noted in the waiting section above.

Build a simple shelter. Stockholm-area train stations have cheap corrugated metal roofs over most of the length of their platforms. These provide protection from rain. Of course those roofs require some structural support at the platform, but because they’re not supposed to hold anything except rainwater, those supports are narrow poles, easy to move around if the station is reconfigured.

Build a street-level glass pane. This may be structurally intricate, but if not, it would provide complete shelter from the elements on the track level, greatly improve passenger circulation, and create a new public plaza. But in summer, the station would be a greenhouse, requiring additional air conditioning.

Note that doing nothing or building a simple shelter would not protect any of the track level from heat or cold. This is fine: evidently, open-air stations are the norm both in cities with hotter summers than New York (Milan is one example, and Tokyo is another) and in cities with colder winters (for example, Stockholm). Passengers are usually dressed for the weather anyway, especially if they’re planning on walking to work from Penn or from the subway station they’re connecting to.

Architecture

Multiple commenters have said that public art and architecture matter, and building spartan train stations is unaesthetic, representing public squalor. I agree! I don’t think a hole-in-the-wall Penn Station has to be drab or brutalist. It can showcase art, on the model of the mosaics on the subway, or the sculptures on the T-Bana. It can use color to create a more welcoming environment than the monotonous gray of many postwar creations, such as the Washington Metro. The natural sunlight would help a lot.

But more than that, the walkways themselves could be architectural signatures. The best way to build them without supporting them on the track level is some variant on the arch bridge – either the classical arch bridge (which would require three or four spans), or a through-arch. This gives a lot of room to turn the bridges into signature spans. The design work would raise their cost, but short pedestrian bridges tend not to display the same cost structure as massive vehicular ones; the Bridge of Strings, a Calatrava-designed light rail bridge on a line that cost far more to build than light rail should cost, was $70 million for 360 meters. The walkways would not carry light rail, and would be about 140 or 150 meters in span.

TOD

Commenters both here (Caelestor) and on Streetsblog (Bolwerk, Matthias, C2check) have brought up transit-oriented development as a reason to allow a tall building on top of the station. With respect, I think on top of a train station is exactly the wrong place to build a tower. Let’s Go LA has an explanation for why the engineering for air rights is so complicated, although he stresses that Penn Station and Grand Central, which were built with the expectation of future high-rise air rights, are exceptions. I’ll add that Penn Station track simplification would also remove many crossovers and switches, making it easier to build air rights. That said, the track spacing is not friendly to the column spacing he proposes.

In New York, the tallest and most expensive recent private-sector office tower on solid ground, the Bank of America Tower, cost around $6,000 per square meter of floor space, in today’s money. Some of the luxury residential towers are more expensive; so are the new World Trade Center buildings, e.g. One World Trade Center was $12,000 per m^2. But the office towers cluster in a specific band of cost, around $2,500 to $5,000 per square meter, with taller towers generally more expensive. The Hudson Yards air rights towers cost in the $10,000-14,000 per square meter range, as much as One World Trade Center. Contrary to Bloomberg’s promises of windfall property tax revenues as his justification for the 7 extension, the city has had to offer tax abatement to encourage developers to build at those prices. Amtrak’s plan for Penn Station South assumes the block immediately south of Penn Station would cost $769 million to $1.3 billion to acquire; when I roughly computed its floor area by counting floors per building, I got 100,000 m^2, which means the price of real estate in that area, $7,700-13,000/m^2, is no higher and may be lower than the construction cost of air rights towers.

In contrast, some sites on firm ground immediately surrounding Penn Station are ripe for redevelopment. The block south of Penn Station, as noted above, has about 100,000 m^2, for a block-wide floor area ratio of 6.7. The Empire State Building’s floor area ratio is 33, so replacing the block with closely spaced supertall towers would require developers to burn just 20% of their profit on acquiring preexisting buildings. To the north of Penn Station, the two sites at 7th and 8th Avenues, flanking One Penn Plaza, are flat; so is nearly all of the western part of the block northeast of Penn, between 33rd and 34th Streets and 6th and 7th Avenues. Eighth Avenue is not developed intensely at all in that latitude – it only becomes important near Times Square. Supertall buildings surrounding Penn Station could even be incorporated into the station complex: railroads using the station might decide to lease offices in some of them, and the exteriors of some of those buildings could incorporate large clocks, some signage, and even train departure boards.

Phasing

TheEconomist, who has had some truly out-of-the-box ideas, raises a very good point: how to phase the deconstruction of Penn Station in ways that allow service to continue. I don’t have a complete answer to that. Arch bridges, in particular, require extensive falsework, which may complicate matters. However, a general phase plan could consist of knocking down the above-ground buildings, then removing the upper concourse (leaving only the lower), and then removing arms of the lower concourse one by one as the walkways above them are built.

Passenger Throughput

In comments here, people have suggested several alternatives to my proposal to reconfigure Penn Station to have 12 tracks and 6 island platforms between them. There should be 6 approach tracks, as I outlined here: southern approach tracks, combining new Hudson tunnels with a link to Grand Central (which I call Line 2); central tracks, combining the preexisting Hudson tunnels with the southern East River Tunnels (Line 1); and northern tracks, combining the realigned Empire Connection and West Side Yard with the northern East River Tunnels (Line 3).

In my view, each approach track should split into two platform tracks, flanking the same platform. In this situation, there is no need to announce track numbers in advance, as long as the platform is known. Stockholm does this on the commuter lines at Stockholm Central: the northbound lines use tracks 15 and 16 and the southbound lines use tracks 13 and 14, with a platform between each of these track pairs, and until a few minutes before a train arrives, it’s signed on the board as “track 13/14” or “track 15/16.”

The compound looks 140 or 150 meters wide; the maps are unclear about to what extent Penn extends under 31st and 33rd, but according to a diagram Joey shared in comments, it extends quite far, giving 150 meters or even a bit more. Under my proposal, this is enough for 6 platforms of 17 or 18 meters. It sounds like a lot, but it isn’t, especially on Line 3, where Penn Station is the only CBD train station, which implies entire trains would empty at Penn in the morning rush hour. (Line 2, which I expect to be the busiest overall because it’d serve both Penn and Grand Central, is the one I expect to have the least platform crowding problems, precisely because it’d serve both Penn and Grand Central.)

Staircases should be 3 meters wide. Escalators with 1-meter steps have 1.6-meter pits; their capacity is theoretically 9,000 passengers per hour, but practically only 6,000-7,000. Clearing 30 entire trains per hour, filled to seating capacity with 4 standees per square meter of standing space, requires moving about 75,000 passengers per hour. (Per meter of train length, this is comparable to the 4/5 trains and the RER A at their peaks.) With 6 access points, this requires 2 up escalators per access point. The minimum is then 3 escalators, running 2-and-1 at the peak; 4 is better.

In comments, Ari Ofesvit proposes the Spanish solution, which I’ve discussed in previous posts. I’m now convinced it is not the right solution, simply because it compels platforms to be too narrow (about 8.6 meters), which has room for exactly half of what a standard platform twice the width would have, without the possibility of running 4 escalators 3-and-1 at the peak. My comment in that post has more detail, albeit with the assumption that the compound is 140 meters wide.

Fbfree proposes something else: more platforms for intercity trains. Giving intercity trains more platforms (as is done in Stockholm, which has just two approach tracks to the south) gives them more time to dwell; unfortunately, it also narrows the platforms for the regional trains, precisely the ones that can expect the most crowding. Even a single-track platform would take up space out of proportion to the number of passengers it would serve.

Pedestrian throughput is, at the maximum, 81 people per meter of walkway width per minute; this assumes two-way flow, but the numbers for one-way and multiway flow aren’t too different. This is a little less than 5,000 per meter-hour. An escalator bank with two up escalators then needs almost 3 meters of unobstructed platform width on one side (the other side can be used as overflow, but most passengers would use the side of the platform the train discharged them on). This is easy to supply with a 4-escalator bank on a 17-meter platform (there would be 3.8 meters); on an 8.6-meter Spanish platform, there’s only one up escalator per bank, so half the width is required, and is indeed obtainable. But if there are extra platforms for intercity trains, this becomes more strained.

For maximum throughput, it is necessary to minimize separation between escalators on the platform, down to about 6 meters plus approaches, in order to allow wider walkways, which in this case would make the walkways about 25 meters wide. The point here is that the walkways have to have very high pedestrian capacity, since each of them is fed by escalators from all platforms. At 25 meters, the capacity is about 15% less than that of two up escalators per access point (121,500 vs. 144,000), which is fine since some platforms (Line 2 in both directions, Line 3 eastbound in the morning and westbound in the afternoon) would not have so much traffic. But putting in elevators would disrupt this flow somewhat.

I see two ways to increase capacity in the future, if train traffic warrants it: first, build the glass floor/ceiling I outlined above, in the shelter section. This is the simplest possibility. Second, build three more walkways, midway between 7th and 8th Avenues and the two walkways already discussed, and have each walkway or avenue serve only half the platforms – one serving eastbound platforms, one serving westbound platforms. At this point the station would be half-covered by walkways, if they are all about 24 meters wide, but the walkways could be narrowed; as long as they are longer than 15 meters, any passenger arriving on a platform by any of the included access points would be sheltered by the walkway serving platforms in the opposite direction. Elevators should go from each walkway to each platform still, which would facilitate transfers, but the workhorse escalators would spread the load among different walkways.

Concessions

I’d originally thought that the walkways could host retail and food concessions. The calculation in the preceding section suggests that this wouldn’t be possible, unless the walkways are widened beyond the escalators, with concessions on the outside. Every meter of walkway width would be required for passenger circulation. Even information pamphlets might be restricted to the very edges of the walkways; train departure boards would have to be mounted in the air, for example on the support cables if the through-arch option were chosen for the walkways.

However, there is ample room directly beneath the escalators, staircases, and walkways. With the caveat that escalators of such length need an extra midway support point, they would still have a lot of space underneath: 15-16 meters with sufficient clearance for people to stand comfortably (say, at least 2.5 meters of clearance above); with the upper approaches and the walkways, this is 60-62 meters of largely unobstructed space, for a 60*10 space that could be used in almost any way. Even in the 5-6 meters with less clearance above to the escalator, it’d be possible to use the space at least partly – for example, for sitting, or for bathrooms, the minimum clearance is reduced (I’m writing this post from my apartment, where the ceilings slope down, and the ceiling height above my couch is about 1.5 meters).

There would be two such 60*10 spaces per platform, plus two smaller spaces, near 7th and 8th Avenues, depending on exact placement of access points to the subway. This gives us twelve 60*10 spaces. I doubt that they could ever host high-end concessions, such as full-service restaurants: passengers would probably not go out of their way, to a platform that they weren’t planning on using. This means newsstands could succeed, but not much else; food would have to be shunted to the streets, and presumably restaurants would pay extra to locate right outside the compound. In lieu of concessions, those spaces could host sundry uses, including additional circulation space, information pamphlets, busker performance space, waiting areas for passengers, public art displays, and waiting areas for train crew and cleaners.

Eliminate Penn Station

Note: this is a somewhat trollish proposal, but I do think it should be considered.

New York Penn Station is a mess. Its platforms are infamously narrow, with only enough room for single-direction escalators, leading to overcrowding during peak hours, as passengers scramble to find an up escalator or a staircase. Its two concourses are confusing and cramped, and have claustrophobic low ceilings. Trains’ track assignments are only announced minutes in advance (as at other major US stations), leading to last-minute passenger scrambles to get onto the platforms. Everyone with an opinion, from the city’s architect community to the Regional Plan Association to Amtrak, wants to build an alternative. Let me propose something simpler and cheaper, if uglier: eliminate all above-ground structures, and reduce Penn Station to a hole in the ground.

Most of the preexisting plans for Penn Station do not do anything about the track level. It’s assumed that the tracks will remain narrow, that trains will not run reliably enough for consistent track assignments, and that dwell times will remain high. The architects’ proposals involve a nice station headhouse to make passengers feel important. Amtrak wants to decamp to a nice headhouse at Moynihan Station, again to make its passengers feel important, and add a few extra tracks without fixing the existing ones. The RPA proposal is heavy on redevelopment but says nothing about moving trains in and out more efficiently. Only Penn Design’s proposal says anything about consolidating platforms, in addition to constructing a headhouse, but the need to maintain a pretty headhouse places constraints on the ability to move tracks and platforms.

Eliminating the headhouse moves the focus from making passengers feel important to getting passengers in and out as fast as possible. Most importantly, it means there’s no need for girders and columns all over the track level; they support the buildings above the station, including the headhouse, and would not be needed if the station were a simple open cut. Those girders make it hard to move the tracks and platforms – the only reasonable option if they are kept is to pave over pairs of tracks between platforms to create very wide platforms, which would not be well-aligned with the approach tracks.

In the hole in the ground scenario, the two blocks from 7th to 8th Avenue, from 31st to 33rd Streets, would have no above-ground infrastructure. This requires demolishing Two Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden. Two Penn Plaza is a building of 140,000 m^2, in a city where the private sector builds office towers of such size for about $750 million (at least when they’re not above active railyards); the city has been making noises about moving Madison Square Garden, although in 2013 it extended its lease by ten years. The tracks and platforms would thus be in the open air, and even from the depth of the platforms, passengers could see the surrounding buildings, just as they can in the open cut west of 9th Avenue, just before trains head into the North River Tunnels.

The two-block compound would be trisected by a pair of wide walkways, as wide as a Manhattan street, parallel to 7th and 8th Avenues. Each of the two walkways would have an access point in each direction toward each platform; with the current narrow platforms this means single-direction escalators, but as tracks would be moved and platforms widened, this would be a pair of wide single-direction escalators flanking a wide staircase. There would be an additional access point heading west out of 7th Avenue and one heading east out of 8th, for a total of six per platform. This is an improvement over the current situation, in which the number of access points ranges from four to six, excluding the LIRR’s West End Concourse, which is west of 8th and thus excluded from this discussion; see diagram here. Penn Station’s tracks are about 14 meters below street level; with 30-degree escalator angles, this means that the escalators would be 24 meters long plus short approaches, say 28 meters total, and this provides adequate separation between access points on the platforms as well as on the two walkways, although unfortunately the spacing on the platform would not be even. For disabled access, elevators would be provided at 7th and 8th Avenues and on both walkways.

The main functions of a train station would be devolved to the surrounding streets and the two walkways. Large clocks, mounted on the high-rise towers next to the station, would show the time. Screens posted over the entire compound would show train departure and arrival times and track assignments. The walkways, and the sides of 7th and 8th Avenues facing the compound, would have ticket-vending machines, selling tickets for all railroads using the station; if the platforms were widened, then there would be room for TVMs and some retail on the platforms themselves. There might even be room for some kiosks on the walkways and food trucks on the streets and avenues. Large ticket offices are not required, and small ones can fit either on the walkways or in a building storefront on the perimeter of the compound.

The technological advances of the last half-century or so have largely made station headhouses obsolete. Train stations used to have telegraph operators; they no longer do. They used to have mail sorting space; mail is now carried by air and road, or electronically. TVMs allow passengers to obtain tickets without buying them at ticket offices, and nowadays e-tickets are making TVMs somewhat obsolete as well. Checked baggage is largely a thing of the past. Transportation companies that aim at low costs, including low-cost airlines and intercity express buses, barely have stations at all: intercity buses pick up at curbs, while low-cost airlines often prefer budget terminals with reduced infrastructure. As far as possible, this is the way forward for train stations as well. Recall that my proposal for a Fulton Street regional rail station followed the same logic, using the street as its mezzanine. This is the way forward for Penn Station, too.

On Penn Station South

There’s an article in the New York Times by its architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, making a forceful case for the Gateway Project’s necessity. Like nearly all transit activists in New York, I think new Hudson tunnels are the top infrastructure priority for regional rail; like nearly all transit activists, I groan at Amtrak’s proposed budget, now up to $16 billion (but unlike most, I think that it should not be built unless costs can be brought down – I’d peg their worth at $5 billion normally, or somewhat more in a crunch). I would like to explain one specific piece of scope in Amtrak’s plan that can be eliminated, and that in fact provides very little transportation value: Penn Station South.

Like all proposals for new Hudson tunnels, Gateway is not just a simple two-track tunnel between New Jersey and Penn Station. No: the feuding users of Penn Station all think it needs more tracks. The rejected ARC proposal had a six-track multilevel cavern, and Gateway has Penn Station South, a proposal to demolish an entire block south of Penn Station and build seven additional platform tracks. The cost of just the real estate acquisition for Penn South: $769 million to $1.3 billion, at today’s prices. Trains using the preexisting tunnels would have to go to the preexisting Penn Station tracks, which I will call Penn Classic; trains using the new tunnels could go to either Penn Classic or Penn South, but the junction is planned to be flat. For illustration, see PDF-p. 12 of a press release of the late Senator Lautenberg, and a clearer unofficial picture on Railroad.net.

As a result of this proposed track arrangement, train services would initially suffer from the capacity limitations of flat junctions. Like Penn Station’s tracks 1-4, Penn South would be terminal tracks. This means that the only service possibilities are as follows:

1. Schedule all through-trains, such as Amtrak trains, through the preexisting tunnels.

2. Do not schedule any westbound trains from Penn South or any eastbound trains entering the preexisting Penn Station tracks: for example, no westbound trains from Penn South in the morning peak, and no eastbound trains entering Penn Classic in the afternoon peak.

3. Schedule around at-grade conflicts between opposing traffic.

Option #2 is impossible: Penn South has 7 tracks. If trains can enter but not leave in the morning, there will be room for 7 trains entering in the morning, a far cry from the several dozens expected. Option #1 is the better remaining option, but is ruled out, since Amtrak wants to use the new tunnels for its own trains. This leaves option #3, which restricts capacity, and complicates operations. Thanks to Amtrak’s imperialism, taking over regional rail projects for its own ends, Penn South has negative transportation value relative to just building new tunnels to Penn Classic’s tracks 1-4 (the transportation value relative to doing nothing is of course positive).

I emphasize that the negative transportation value of Penn South comes entirely from Amtrak’s involvement. The same infrastructure, used by passenger rail agencies that were more interested in providing high-quality public transportation than in turf wars, would have positive transportation value. However, as I explained to Kimmelman, this positive transportation value is low, and does not justify even the cost of real estate acquisition, let alone that of digging the station.

Briefly, as can be seen in the diagrams, the interlocking between the two new tunnel tracks and Penn’s eleven terminal tracks – tracks 1-4 of Penn Classic, and all of Penn South – is exceedingly complicated, which would limit approach speed, and not provide much flexibility relative to the number of tracks provided. This is to a large extent unavoidable when two approach tracks become eleven station tracks, but it does lead to diminishing returns from extra tracks. This is one of the reasons it’s easier if trains branch: it’s easier to turn 12 trains per hour on two tracks than to turn 24 on four (although both are done in Tokyo – indeed, the Chuo Line still turns 27 tph on two tracks).

Avoiding large crunches like this at urban terminals a benefit of through-running. This is hard to realize initially unless the new tunnel is what I call ARC-North. It’s still possible to through-run trains, pairing the new tunnels with the southern pair of East River Tunnels and the old tunnels with the northern pair, but it requires a lot of diverging moves at interlockings, limiting speed. Penn Station plans should be built with a long-term goal of simple moves at interlockings, to (slightly) increase speed and capacity and reduce maintenance needs.

However, it’s still possible to square the circle by requiring trains to turn fast on tracks 1-5 of Penn Station (track 5 splits to a terminating end and an end that runs through east of New York). Tokyo would be able to turn a full complement of 24 trains per hour on these tracks. Most other cities would not. However, as somewhat of a limiting European case, the RER A turns a peak train every 10 minutes on single track at Le Vésinet-Le Pecq, the next-to-last station on the Saint-Germain-en-Laye branch; Le Pecq has two through-tracks (also hosting a train every 10 minutes) and one terminal track. See map and schedule. This does not scale to 24 tph on four tracks; somewhat tellingly, those trains do not continue to the terminus, which is a three-track station, implying turning 12 tph on three tracks is problematic. The RER E turns 16 tph at the peak at Haussmann-Saint Lazare, a four-track city terminus, pending under-construction extension of the line to the west, which would make it a through-station.

If we accept 16 tph as the capacity of new Hudson tunnels without new Penn Station tracks, then the question should be what the most cost-effective way to raise future capacity is. An extra 9 tph, the equivalent of the difference between 16 tph and the 25 tph that the current tunnel runs and that Amtrak projects for Gateway, is within the capabilities of signaling improvements and better schedule discipline. Again looking to Paris for limiting cases, the combined RER B+D tunnel between Gare du Nord and Châtelet-Les Halles runs 32 tph, without any stations in the tunnel (the RER B and D use separate platforms), while the moving block signaling-equipped RER A runs 30 tph on its central segment, with stations (as do the S-Bahn systems of Berlin and Munich). The RER E was planned around a capacity of 18 tph, but only 16 tph are run today. 18+32 = 50 = 25+25. France is not Japan, with its famous punctuality: French trains are routinely late, and as far as I remember, the RER B has on-time performance of about 90% based on a 5-minute standard, worse than that of Metro-North in its better months.

More importantly, dropping Penn South from the Gateway plan saves so much money that it could all go to through-running, via a new tunnel from tracks 1-5 to Grand Central. This is about 2 km of tunnel, without any stations; in a normal city this would cost $500 million, the difficulty of building in Midtown canceling out with the lack of stations, and even at New York construction costs, keeping the tab to $2 billion should be doable. The 7 extension is $2.1 billion, but includes a station; an additional proposed infill station at 10th Avenue, dropped from the plan, would’ve $450 million, giving us $1.6 billion for about 1.6 revenue route-km, rising to 2.3 km including tail tracks – less than a billion dollars per kilometer.

At $2 billion, the premium over $1 billion of impossible-to-cut real estate acquisition costs is down to $1 billion. It’s unlikely the construction cost of Penn South could be just $1 billion, without general reductions in city construction costs, which would enable the Penn-Grand Central link to be cheaper as well. Each Second Avenue Subway station is about a billion dollars, and those stations, while somewhat deeper than Penn Station, are both much shorter and narrower than a full city block. The result is that building a Penn-Grand Central link is bound to be cheaper than building Penn South, while also providing equivalent capacity and service to a wider variety of destinations via through-running.

One difficulty is staging the tunnel-boring machines for such a connection: building a launch box involves large fixed costs, especially in such a crowded place as Midtown. One of the reasons Second Avenue Subway and the 7 extension are the world’s most expensive subway project per kilometer is that they’re so short, so those fixed costs are spread across less route length. The best way to mitigate this problem is to build the link simultaneously with the new Hudson tunnels. The staging would be done on Penn’s tracks 1-4, whose platforms would be temporarily stripped; the construction disruption involved in the tunnels is likely to require shutting those tracks down anyway. Depending on the geology, it may even be possible to use the same tunnel-boring machine from New Jersey all the way to Grand Central.

This doesn’t save as much money – the Penn-Grand Central link is extra scope, with its own costs and risks. However, unlike Penn South, it is useful to train riders. Penn South allows terminating trains at Penn Station more comfortably, without having to hit the limit of large-city terminal capacity; the Penn-Grand Central link creates this capacity, but also lets riders from New Jersey go to Grand Central and points north (such as Harlem, but also such more distant commercial centers as Stamford), and riders from Metro-North territory go to Penn Station and points west (such as Downtown Newark).

Normally, I advocate unbundling infrastructure projects, because of the tendency to lump too many things together into a single signature plan, which then turns into political football, a sure recipe for cost overruns. However, when projects logically lead to one another, then bundling is the correct choice. For example, building an entire subway line, with a single tunnel-boring machine and a single launchbox, usually costs less than building it in small stages, as is the case with Second Avenue Subway. New Hudson tunnels naturally lead into a new tunnel east of Penn Station, regardless of where this tunnel goes; and once a tunnel is built, its natural terminus is Grand Central.

When Nationwide Electrification is Called For

Small, dense developed countries should electrify their entire national rail networks. Usually, railroads think in terms of electrifying lines, but this hides the systemwide benefits of transitioning the entire network to run under electricity. I have previously written about this in the context of regionally funded commuter rail systems, as have Paul Druce and Clem Tillier. But some countries are so small and dense that the analysis for a single large metro area holds nationwide as well.

In this post I am going to focus on Israel, which is completely unelectrified, but also foray into mostly-electrified Belgium and the Netherlands, and currently-electrifying Denmark. Switzerland has already completed electrification; it is less dense than all of those countries except Denmark, but has cheap hydro power, which makes it cheaper to run trains under electricity, and key mainlines through mountainous terrain, where electrification is a major performance booster.

First, let us recall the performance benefits of electrification in flat terrain. The major rolling stock manufacturers sell DMUs with top speeds of 120-140 km/h, and EMUs with top speeds of 140-200 km/h; faster trains are generally more expensive, and with a few exceptions not of much use outside dedicated high-speed rail lines. The difference in acceleration performance is large: when the top speed is 100 km/h, an EMU such as the FLIRT takes less than 30 seconds to accelerate from standstill to top speed, corresponding to an acceleration time penalty of about 14 seconds, whereas the Stadler GTW DMU has a penalty of about 28 seconds (see data on PDF-p. 43); the GTW EMU version, a less powerful train than the FLIRT, loses 19 seconds. DMUs are also less comfortable than EMUs, because the diesel engines are right under passengers’ feet; longer-distance lines almost never use them, and instead use diesel locomotives, which accelerate even more slowly.

Because of this large difference in acceleration performance, electrification delivers the greatest performance benefits on lines with closely-spaced stops and high traffic. These are usually commuter rail lines rather than intercity lines. For example, suppose the top speed is 130 km/h, the stop spacing is 3 km, station dwell times are 30 seconds, and schedules are padded 7%. The FLIRT’s acceleration penalty is about 19 seconds, that of the diesel GTW (to 125 km/h) is 43 seconds; the deceleration penalties are both a bit lower than the acceleration penalties, but not too much lower, to avoid overheating. An EMU will average 68 km/h, a DMU 52 km/h. Independently of comparative energy and maintenance costs, this represents a 23% cut in the rolling stock requirement and in the on-board labor cost, and a larger cut in the required subsidy thanks to higher ridership. In contrast, if the stop spacing is 50 km, the difference in speed shrinks to 116 km/h vs. 113 km/h. Even if the EMU can do 160 km/h, its average speed is 140 km/h, still a smaller percentage difference than in the case of commuter rail, while the cost of providing this higher average speed is larger because tracks need to be upgraded to a higher top speed.

In small countries, short stop spacing is the normal state of affairs. In Israel, few segments of track have stops spaced more than 10 km apart, and those are mostly on the under-construction high-speed line from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which is planned to host 200 km/h electric trains. In the Tel Aviv and Haifa metro areas, stop spacing in the 3-4 km range is normal. Even intercity trains make all stops within Tel Aviv and Haifa proper, skipping the stations between those two cities. There are no major cities north of Haifa, only suburbs and small cities, and thus making many stops in and north of Haifa is justified for intercity trains – there aren’t many through-passengers who are being inconvenienced. South of Tel Aviv there are some moderate-size cities (as well as Jerusalem, but the legacy rail line to it is so curvy that the train from Tel Aviv takes twice as long as the bus), but because of high traffic, all trains make all four Tel Aviv stops.

With the exception of Belgium, all four countries under discussion also have dominant primate city regions, with about 40% of their respective national population; those city regions have dense rail networks, which are electrified in all countries except Israel. Denmark runs the Copenhagen commuter lines as a separate S-tog from the rest of the network, but in the Netherlands, Israel, and Belgium, there is no sharp difference. The result is that a large fraction of the overall rail network is urban commuter rail, which should be electrified, while additional chunks are regional rail with enough frequency to justify electrification even without a large city in the center.

Moreover, the service pattern makes it hard to electrify just a few lines in isolation, even if they’re the busiest. Regional rail networks frequently employ through-running. In small countries, this is common for the entire rail network, for different reasons: in Israel, the route through Tel Aviv is a new line from 20 years ago, without many platform tracks for terminating trains, whereas in the Netherlands and Belgium it’s the result of a highly nonlinear population distribution, which favors a mesh of lines, such that busy routes share tracks extensively with less busy ones. Compare these population distributions with that of the Northeastern US, where there is clear division into a trunk from Washington to Boston and branches heading inland.

Finally, these are all small countries. This is why I am not including South Korea in this proposal, even though it is denser, more mountainous, and more primate city-centric than all countries under discussion: South Korea is large enough that it’s plausible to run the Seoul-area commuter rail as an isolated electrified system, keeping the remainder of the legacy network unelectrified, with several maintenance shops for diesel trains around the country. In contrast, the unelectrified portion of the Dutch rail network consists of isolated branch lines, making it less economic to keep operating diesel trains. Israel has no electrification at all, but if it electrifies the Tel Aviv and Haifa commuter trains, the remainder of the network will be disjointed, requiring inefficient solutions such as considerable deadheading, or regular runs of diesel trains under long stretches of catenary.

One example I keep harping on, which I got from The LIRR Today before its blackout, is the LIRR’s diesel runs. The LIRR is almost completely electrified, and its diesel branches see little service, especially at the easternmost end of Long Island. Between this and work rules that separate diesel and electric train crew, the crew on one of the diesel trains work 2.5 hours per workday, running a train once in one direction and deadheading the way back; this and the bespoke nature of diesel trains on the LIRR lead to high operating costs.

The situations in the countries in question are not as comical as on the LIRR, but there are bound to be inefficiencies in Belgium and the Netherlands, and soon to be Denmark, which is electrifying its main lines, which together with the S-tog are a majority of its network. In Israel, the situation is the worst, since its rail network is even smaller: 1,100 km, compared with 2,600 km in Denmark, 3,600 in Belgium, and 2,900 in the Netherlands; this means that a partially electrified situation involves even smaller train orders and higher operating costs, while an entirely unelectrified network involves poor service in the urban areas.

Israel also has no rail links with any of its neighbors, nor any plans to construct any. This means that its branch lines are truly isolated, unlike those of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark, which sometimes connect to other unelectrified lines in neighboring countries.

The way out of high diesel operating costs is to spend the money on completing electrification. As the example of Denmark shows, the costs are not outrageous: about $1.1 million per kilometer (I do not know whether track- or route-km, but I believe this is track-km). In the case of Israel, whose rail network is almost entirely single-track, this is not much more than $1 billion either way; to put things in perspective, the projected cost of the first Tel Aviv subway line is now up to $4.2 billion, while the Ministry of Transportation’s overall budget is $3 billion per year (PDF-p. 10), mostly spent on roads, in a country with only 300 cars per 1,000 people.

All-diesel railroads resist electrifying their busiest lines because they prefer to be able to let every train substitute for any train, and, for smaller operations, maintain all trains in one yard. For the same reason, small railroads with high traffic, such as the national railroads of dense countries, should instead go all-electric, in order to retain the benefits of interchangeable trains and maintenance facilities while also capturing the benefits of electrification. It’s not terribly relevant to the countries I’ve recently lived in, but for the same reason Switzerland fully electrified, similar small, dense countries should do the same.

Transit-Oriented Airports

There are recurrent discussions of how to best connect public transportation to airports; I, too, have made my comments both on how desirable such connections are and how to best build them. What I think is less discussed is how to build airports in a way that makes it easier to serve them by public transit. Airport authorities spend billions every few decades rebuilding terminals, sometimes even moving the entire airport to a new location, but they never consider how to do so in a way that makes transit access the easiest; this means airport access is done by car, or another high-cost scheme must be implemented to bring a rail line to the airport. Now that there is a plan to replace the Newark AirTrain for a billion dollars, just twenty years after it was first built, it’s worth discussing what capital projects on the airport side should facilitate transit access.

First, recall from previous discussions on this blog that the best way to serve a major international airport is by a mainline train, which is capable of both providing fast service to the CBD (where most inbound air travel is headed) and to many suburbs (which have outbound travelers).

However, we can say more: it is better, other things being equal, for the airport to be on the way, rather than at the end of a line. If the airport must be at the end of a line, it should not be far from where the line would’ve ended if the airport were not there. For example, LaGuardia is a few kilometers east of the end of the Astoria Line, which can be extended. Vancouver’s airport is on a short branch of the Canada Line, which would have been built to Richmond Centre even without the airport.

An even better example would have been Floyd Bennett Field, just past where the Utica subway should end; there were plans in the 1930s to build such a subway, but not only were they never realized, but also Mayor LaGuardia preferred to build the airport that currently bears his name, for easier auto access to Manhattan than Bennett Field had. Thus we can catalog the decision to open the new airport and close Bennett Field as bad for transit access, and oppose similar moves when cities today propose them. The best location for an airport, from the point of view of transit access, is near a subway or commuter rail station, ideally close enough that no further people mover is required.

Let us now discuss internal airport design. I claim that, to maximize transit accessibility, airports should have just one terminal (or several terminals that can be served from the same station), or, failing that, one dominant terminal, as at such fortress hubs as Detroit, Frankfurt, and Charles-de-Gaulle. The reason is that trains are slowed down by additional stations, whereas cars are not slowed down by additional bays and driveways. Mainline trains, in particular, rarely make more than one stop at an airport, and in the cases I know of where they do, the airport is at the end of a branch (such as the RER B and the lines serving Narita), rather than on the way.

This introduces some tension into airport design. Large airport terminals are dendritic, to maximize the perimeter available for gates and jetways; in some cases, they feature satellite terminals, connected to the main terminal by underground passageways, people movers, or even landside buses (as at Charles-de-Gaulle). I encourage people to look at satellite images of Frankfurt, O’Hare, Atlanta, Zurich, and Charles-de-Gaulle. Frankfurt’s Terminal 1 is a kilometer from entry to the farthest branches to the west. This creates some demand for quicker small terminals, which are harder to serve by rail. In addition, the most efficient dendritic design has branches coming out from the center in every direction, except perhaps one direction for an access road; this makes it harder to be on the way of a rail line.

I think it is telling that the single- or dominant-terminal design is less common at airports that are not a single airline’s fortress hub. Haneda and Narita have two major terminals each, one used by Japan Airlines and one used by ANA. Madrid has four terminals, one for Iberia and three connected ones, sharing a Metro station, for competitors, including several low-cost airlines. In all three cases, there are two train stations per line connecting to the airport (with the understanding that Narita has multiple lines, operating by competing railroads).

Usually, airports make an effort to group airlines by alliance. Thus Charles-de-Gaulle and Frankfurt put their respective dominant airlines and partners in their main terminals, and competing airlines in smaller terminals; and Narita makes sure to group Star Alliance airlines with ANA and Oneworld airlines with JAL. Among the largest airports of Europe, Heathrow is the big exception, since it organizes terminals by alliances but splits Oneworld between Terminal 5 for British Airways and Terminal 3 for the rest.

In the US, this is not common, with some exceptions such as Detroit and JFK’s Terminals 7 and 8. This is because the US does not permit connecting air passengers to transit its airports. All passengers arriving at a US airport from a foreign airport without preclearance, even ones in transit, have to go through immigration, collect their bags, go through customs, recheck their bags, and go through security again; between the inconvenience and the real risk of literally being disappeared, few people connect in the US between two foreign countries. Hub terminals elsewhere facilitate easy transfers by maintaining large international areas where passengers can walk between gates, and keeping the passport controls between the international and domestic terminals short. Regardless, even with the vagaries of American immigration policy, it is easier to connect without having to go between terminals; moreover, for passengers leaving the US rather than arriving, the situation is if anything easier than in Europe since there’s no passport control at exit.

Let us now apply these concepts to New York’s two main international airports. Newark may be a fortress hub, but it is not configured as one; United and its Star Alliance partners are sprawled across all three terminals. Moreover, the terminals are just far enough from the commuter rail station to require a people mover. Since it’s better for an airport to be on the way, and have just a single terminal, what this suggests is that Terminal C should be lengthened to approach the train station.

There is currently a plan to replace Terminal A, for $1-1.25 billion of construction budget and $2 billion total development budget. Under this single-terminal paradigm, the terminal should not be redeveloped. Instead, it should be demolished, and replaced by extensions of Terminal C to the west, with additional concourses and piers both to the north and to the south, replacing the current road loop serving the terminals. People would arrive by road via US 1 or by rail via the commuter rail station. Security checkpoints would be conducted at a building just west of Route 1, and the airside terminal’s western end would be an overpass over the road. Rail passengers would have enclosed overpasses to the checkpoints; there would not be any need for a people mover, only moving walkways given the distance between the station and the terminal’s current eastern end. There is enough space for the new concourses to also replace Terminal B, which is of similar vintage to Terminal A.

At JFK, the situation is different. First, it is not a fortress hub. Its top three carriers – JetBlue, Delta, and American – are all reasonably happy with their terminals (Delta’s terminal is 4, not 2, which it is abandoning). British Airways is considering abandoning Terminal 7 and joining American at Terminal 8. Consolidating the airlines that use Terminal 1 at Terminal 4 is impossible until the US resolves its endless immigration lines, which at Terminal 4 are often longer than an hour.

Second and more fundamentally, the transit access situation there is good enough. JFK is far from any subway or commuter rail line, so the only way to serve it by rail is by a dedicated people mover, of which the AirTrain is not bad. The connection to Jamaica approaches the “be on the way” maxim well, since Jamaica is central to the LIRR network and has fast service to Manhattan on the subway as well. Some transit advocates in the region periodically propose a direct subway or commuter rail line to replace the AirTrain connection, but such plans always run against network design issues, since the branching is set up in a way that reduces frequency to Jamaica, a more important station. Given that there must be some people mover connection, traveling in a circle among the terminals is not terrible; straightening the route has some benefits, but the cost of rebuilding the infrastructure is almost certainly too high to be justified.

Update: James Sinclair argues convincingly that the Newark AirTrain is not really at the end of its life, but Port Authority is saying that to justify spending billions of dollars on a better replacement, including either a PATH extension to the airport station (which is largely dead) or an extension of the AirTrain to Newark Penn Station, as a sweetener for United.