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.

Bergenline Avenue and New Hudson Tunnels

The main street of Hudson County from Jersey City north is Bergenline Avenue. It passes through the densest cities in the US (denser than New York, which is weighed down by outer-urban areas), and hosts frequent jitney service. Last decade, New Jersey began to document jitney service in North Jersey, producing a report in 2011 that identified major corridors; Bergenline is the busiest, with a jitney almost every minute, and almost as frequent additional jitney and New Jersey Transit service on the northern part of the route running into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel. This was discussed extensively on Cap’n Transit’s blog three years ago, and I thought (and still think) Bergenline should eventually get a subway line. I bring this up because of a critical tie-in to Bergenline’s transit service: new mainline Hudson tunnels. If the new tunnels are built to host regional rather than intercity trains, then they should also make a stop at Bergenline to allow for easier transfers from the buses to Manhattan.

Unfortunately, there are no estimates of ridership on the Bergenline buses. The 2011 report did rough counts of passengers per hour passing through a single point, but that is not directly comparable to the usual metrics of ridership per day or per year. Moreover, the report assumed there are 16 passengers per jitney, where, at least in Cap’n Transit’s experience, the jitneys on Bergenline are considerably larger, in the 20-30 passenger range. Either way, they’re smaller than full-size buses, which means we can’t just compare the frequency on Bergenline with that on busy New York bus corridors. However, a bus in that size range almost every minute, both peak and off-peak, is bound to have comparable ridership to the busiest buses in New York: the single busiest, the M15, runs articulated buses every 3 minutes at the peak and every 4 off-peak.

There are several corridors heading into Manhattan. According to the summary on the report’s PDF-page 51, Bergenline has jitneys heading into Port Authority every 2-4 minutes at the peak, and New Jersey Transit buses (routes 156 and 159) every 5 minutes. Paralleling Bergenline, JFK Boulevard East has a jitney every 4-5 minutes (with larger vehicles than on Bergenline), and a New Jersey Transit bus almost every minute at the peak (route 128). There is also very frequent New Jersey Transit bus service, more than once per minute between routes 156, 159, and 166, running nonstop to Port Authority at the peak; unlike the jitneys, New Jersey Transit bus service is extremely peaky, with the combined routes 156 and 159 dropping to a bus every 15 minutes, and the Boulevard East routes (165, 166, 168) dropping to a bus every 9 minutes.

From the New Jersey Transit schedules, peak-hour buses spend 18-19 minutes getting into Port Authority from Bergenline, and 14 minutes getting into Port Authority from Boulevard East. In contrast, a train station located under Bergenline would have service to Penn Station taking about 3 minutes. Trains go through the existing older tunnel at about 100 km/h, and the new tunnel could support at least the same speed, while a through-running service plan would simplify the Penn Station interlockings enough that trains could enter and leave the station at speed. Even allowing for transfer time and for additional wait times, which are very short at the peak anyway, this represents an improvement of more than 10 minutes.

It goes without saying that the service should be frequent and affordable. The fare should be the same as on the subway, with free transfers. There’s some precedent in that PATH charges similar fares to the subway, but free transfers, a basic amenity in regions with integrated transportation planning, would be new to New York. At the peak, all trains would stop at Bergenline, since there’s not enough capacity to mix stopping and nonstop trains on the same tracks given expected traffic. But even off-peak, all trains should continue stopping at Bergenline – as well as at Secaucus – in order to maintain adequate frequency. Given how dense and close to Manhattan the area is, 10 minutes is the maximum acceptable headway, which corresponds to the combined off-peak frequency of all New Jersey Transit trains into Penn Station today.

While the busiest trunk line does not even enter Manhattan, the presence of fast, frequent regional rail with competitive fares is likely to change travel patterns. This is not the same as transit-oriented development: I am not assuming a single new building on top of the Palisades. Instead, some people who live and work in northern Hudson County would shift over time to working in New York, thanks to improved transportation links. In parallel, people working in New York would move to cheaper housing in Hudson County. In the other direction, companies that want to attract reverse commuters might locate to the area around the new station. The overall effect would integrate northern Hudson County into the core better, turning it into more of a bedroom community, like Brooklyn and Queens, while simultaneously concentrating its employment around the station. The upshot is that this station would already come equipped with a huge installed base of feeder buses, which run the route already without a connection to Manhattan. A longer-range plan to build a subway under Bergenline, from Fort Lee to Journal Square, would further integrate the entire west bank of the lower Hudson into the city core.

This tilts the best traffic plan for new tunnels away from Amtrak’s Gateway plan and back toward New Jersey Transit’s various flavors of ARC. First, it’s easier to build the station while the tunnel is excavated than to build the station in the preexisting tunnel. At the same time, whichever tunnel has the station should be the one without intercity trains: all peak trains would have to stop at the station for capacity reasons (there’s no room for bypass tracks), and this would slow down intercity trains unacceptably. Put together, this means Amtrak should stay in the old tunnels and all traffic in the new tunnels should be regional.

Second and more importantly, a high-grade new tunnel pair from New Jersey to Penn Station should also continue onward to Grand Central, with trains running through to Metro-North territory. The importance of through-running and good service to multiple urban nodes is greatest for local service and smallest for long-distance service. In Paris, the RER involves through-service for shorter-range commuter trains; the Transiliens, which terminate at the traditional terminal stations, serve farther-away suburbs. And in Tokyo, the local lines of the JR East network run through whereas the express lines either don’t or have only started doing so recently. The reason is similar to a pattern I mentioned before about airports: at long range, people only travel to the city for functions that their region lacks, and those are usually centered on the CBD, whereas at short range, people travel in all directions. The upshot of this discussion is that a Bergenline stop is likely to add many local travelers to the system, and they should get the service that’s more useful for their needs.

Of course, a good service plan will involve through-running in both the old and new tunnels. However, through-running is more valuable in the new tunnel, going to Grand Central, than in the old tunnel, going to Long Island and the Northeast Corridor. As a judgment call, I believe that through-running to Grand Central, Harlem, and the South Bronx connects to more neighborhoods than through-running to Sunnyside, Flushing, and Jamaica. It also has better subway connections, to the 4/5/6 if to nothing else, and local riders are accustomed to two-seat rides and subway connections. Finally, under a fuller regional rail plan, including service to Lower Manhattan, Grand Central has connections to Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn whereas Penn Station and Sunnyside don’t.

In contrast, Amtrak’s plan gets it exactly backward in proposing to use the Gateway tunnel for its own trains and some additional regional trains. The only advantage of this plan is that it would be possible for regional trains to maintain higher speed through the wider-diameter new tunnel (intercity trains could raise speeds more easily, since high-speed trains are pressurized to limit ear popping when they enter tunnels). But by hogging slots in the Penn Station-Grand Central tunnel, Amtrak would force many local and regional rail riders onto trains that do not serve their destination directly and do not have an easy transfer to it.

The only drawback of this plan is cost. The station would be located deep beneath the Palisades, complicating its construction. While the access shafts are not difficult – vertical bores for elevators are simply to build – the station itself would require blasting a cavern, or using a large-diameter bore. The cavern option is not cheap. I am not going to try coming up with a cost estimate, but I will note that the station caverns of Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, which are built cut-and-cover rather than blasted from inside, are around a billion dollars each. A large-diameter bore is more attractive, but is more expensive than twin small-diameter bores if there are no stations, and may well have difficulties emerging at the Manhattan end.

Without reliable estimates for either the incremental cost or the incremental ridership, I can’t say whether this is a cost-effective proposal. I suspect that it is, given the high ridership of the Bergenline buses and the high density of the region. Part of what makes an S-Bahn or RER system successful is its service to urban neighborhoods and not just suburbs and CBDs, and Bergenline could be a good addition to the system that the region should be building.

Redundancy is Overrated

The night before last, a Northeast Corridor Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, killing seven people. For some overviews of what happened, see Vox and Huffington Post. I am not going to talk directly about the accident here; it appears to be the same kind of derailment as on Metro-North a year and a half ago. Instead, I’m going to talk about the general issue of redundancy, which I saw people bring up in response to the train shutdowns that followed the crash. This is not the first time I hear about this; redundancy figures prominently into the list of benefits touted for new rail tunnels across the Hudson, allowing Amtrak to shut down the existing tunnels for repairs. Even before Amtrak proposed the Gateway project, transit activists talked about redundancy as a positive feature, for example Cap’n Transit. In this post, I am going to explain why, in public transportation and intercity rail, redundancy is in fact far less useful than other investments for the same amount of money.

First, let us list the various high-caliber rail networks of the world. In high-speed rail, the biggest networks are those of China, Japan, and France. None of them has redundancy, in the sense that there is more than one way to get between two cities on high-speed track. JR Central is building a second line from Tokyo to Osaka, but this is because the existing line is at capacity, running about 14 trains per hour into Tokyo at the peak; redundancy is a minor consideration. In regional rail, the busiest networks do have some redundancy, in the sense that if one line is shut down then people can take a parallel line, but this is because these networks are so busy that in most directions there’s enough demand to fill multiple lines. In Tokyo, which has the largest regional rail network, the parallel line is usually run by a competing company, so within each company’s network there’s little redundancy.

The reason for this non-redundant operation is simple: building new rail lines is expensive, while maintaining them adequately so that they don’t break down is cheap. Amtrak thinks that the Gateway tunnel will cost $16 billion. The program to repair the damage the preexisting tunnels suffered in Hurricane Sandy is $700 million, which assumes an accelerated construction schedule in which the tunnels will be shut down one track at a time, but conversely also includes work in the worse-damaged East River tunnels and not just the tunnels across the Hudson. This is a one-time repair after salt water intrusion, not annual ongoing maintenance. New Hudson tunnels are a necessary project for capacity reasons, but whatever benefit they have for redundancy is a fraction of their cost.

For high-speed rail, too, the costs of maintenance are far smaller than those of construction. The average maintenance costs of a single route-km of HSR are about €100,000 per year, versus €20 million for construction (see PDF-p. 9 of a study by Ginés de Rus about HSR between Stockholm and Gothenburg). With this amount of maintenance, there need not be any closures or disruptions in service.

Consider the Northeast Corridor, more concretely. To guarantee redundancy everywhere, so that train accidents do not disrupt the line, is to restore some passenger service along the former Baltimore and Ohio and tie-ins. Between Philadelphia and New York this means the West Trenton Line; between Philadelphia and Washington this means the CSX freight line. This also requires new Hudson tunnels. The cost of each of these elements is in the billions, and for the most part, with the exception of the new Hudson tunnels the transportation benefit is very low, especially south of Philadelphia, where there aren’t enough people to justify a second commuter line. Between New York and New Haven, there are no good alignments for a second route except for short bypasses; that’s what makes constructing HSR there so difficult.

Redundancy is a good feature of networks where failures are frequent and unavoidable; for such systems, redundancy is useful, as is the concept of failing gracefully. Rail transit is not such a network. It is both possible and desirable to reduce accident rates to levels approaching zero. Natural disasters remain hazardous, but are extremely infrequent, and at any rate when a deadly earthquake strikes, there are higher priorities than providing alternative passenger rail routes.

This is not to say that redundancy has no uses. Dense subway systems are redundant in the sense of providing multiple routes through the city – although, at the peak, they’re usually all very crowded. This makes it possible to shut down lines off-peak for maintenance; New York and London are both notorious for weekend service changes, and Paris shuts down short segments of lines for maintenance for a few weeks at a time (see for example here). But small subway systems manage to make do with just ordinary overnight shutdowns, and Copenhagen even runs trains 24/7, shutting down one track at a time at night and using the driverless operation to run trains on single track. It’s just more convenient to have more options, but not necessary.

The upshot is that when a subway or mainline rail network chooses where to lay additional lines, it should ignore all needs of redundancy, except possibly as tie-breakers. The benefits are there, but do not outweigh the cost of building less optimal lines. The operator should instead invest in systems, worker training, and maintenance regimes that ensure high reliability, and expand the network based on ordinary criteria of expected ridership and capacity needs. There’s no need to worry about failure, and it’s much better to design the network not to fail in the first place.

The Utica Subway

Last week, Bill de Blasio released a plan for New York’s future called OneNYC, whose section on subway expansion called for a subway under Utica Avenue in Brooklyn (PDF-pp. 45-46). The call was just a sentence, without mention of routing or cost or ridership projections, and no plan for funding. However, it remains a positive development; last year, I put the line at the top of a list of underrated subways in North America. Presumably the route would be a branch off the Eastern Parkway Line, carrying the 4, while the 3 continues to go to the current New Lots terminus.

The cost is up in the air, which means that people forming opinions about the idea don’t have the most important and variable number with which to make decisions. In this post, I am going to work out the range of cost figures that would make this a worthwhile project. This has two components: coming up with a quick-and-dirty ridership estimate, and arguing for a maximum acceptable cost per rider.

Before doing anything else, let us look at how much such a subway extension should cost, independently of ridership. Between Eastern Parkway and Kings Plaza, Utica is 6.8 km. The non-English-speaking first-world range is about $300 million to $3 billion, but around $1.4 billion, or $200 million/km, is average. Utica is a wide, relatively straight street, without difficult development alongside it. In fact, I’ve been convinced in comments that the line could be elevated nearly the entire way, south of Empire Boulevard, which would reduce costs even further. Normal cost should then be around $100 million per km (or $700 million), and even in New York, the JFK AirTrain came in at a $200 million/km. I doubt that an elevated solution could politically happen, but one should be investigated; nonetheless, a $1.4 billion subway would be of great benefit.

Now, let us look at ridership. Recall that Utica’s bus route, the B46, was New York’s third busiest in 2014, with 46,000 weekday riders. But two routes, Nostrand’s B44 and Flatbush’s B41, run parallel and provide similar service, and have 67,000 riders between them. Those numbers are all trending down, as residents gradually abandon slow bus service. A subway can realistically halt this decline and generate much more ridership, via higher speed: B46 limited buses average 13 km/h south of Eastern Parkway, but a new subway line could average around 35 km/h. Second Avenue Subway’s ridership projection is 500,000 per weekday, even though all north-south bus lines on Manhattan’s East Side combined, even ones on Fifth and Madison Avenues, total 156,000 daily riders.

Vancouver is considering replacing its busiest bus, the 99-B, with a subway. The 99-B itself has 54,000 weekday riders, the local buses on Broadway (the 9 and 14) have 43,000, and the 4th Avenue relief buses (the 4, 44, and 84) add another 27,000. Those are much faster buses than in New York: the 99-B averages 20 km/h, while the 44 and 84, running on less crowded 4th Avenue, average nearly 30 km/h west of Burrard. SkyTrain is faster than the New York subway since it makes fewer stops, so the overall effect would be similar, a doubling of travel speed, to about 40 km/h. The ridership projection is 250,000 per weekday in 2021, at opening, before rezoning (see PDF-p. 75 here). This represents a doubling of ridership over current bus ridership, even when the buses provide service SkyTrain won’t, including a one-seat ride from the Westside to Downtown and service along 4th Avenue.

In New York, as in Vancouver, the subway would provide service twice as fast as current buses. The distance between Nostrand and Utica Avenues is much greater than that between 4th Avenue and Broadway in Vancouver, so the analogy isn’t perfect (this is why I also support continuing Nostrand down to Sheepshead Bay). Conversely, the speed advantage of subways over buses is greater than in Vancouver. Moreover, Nostrand already has a subway, so actual demand in southeastern Brooklyn is more than what the B41, B44, and B46 represent. A doubling of ridership over bus ridership, to about 220,000, is reasonable.

For a quick sanity check, let us look at Nostrand Avenue Line ridership again. South of Franklin Avenue, the stations have a combined weekday ridership of 64,000 per weekday, as of 2014. But this is really closer to 128,000 daily riders, counting both boardings and alightings; presumably, few people ride internally to the Nostrand corridor. The Nostrand Avenue Line is 4.3 km long; scaled to length, we get 200,000 weekday riders on Utica.

Put together, a normal-cost Utica Line, with 200,000 weekday riders, would cost $7,000 per rider. This is quite low even by non-US standards, and is very low by US standards (Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 is about $23,000 according to projections, and is lower than most US rail lines).

As far as I’ve seen, from glancing at lines in large cities such as London, Paris, and Tokyo, the normal cost range for subways is $10,000-20,000 per rider. Paris is quite cheap, since its ridership per kilometer is so high while its cost per kilometer is not very high, keeping Metro extensions in the four figures (but Grand Paris Express, built in more suburban geography, is projected at $34 billion for 2 million daily passengers). Elsewhere in Europe, lines north of $20,000 are not outliers. If we set $25,000/rider as a reasonable limit – a limit which would eliminate all US rail lines other than Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, Houston’s light rail extensions, and Los Angeles’s Regional Connector – then Utica is worth $5 billion. A more generous limit, perhaps $40,000 per rider to allow for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, would boost Utica to $8 billion, more than $1 billion per km. Even in the US, subways are rarely that expensive: the Bay Area’s lines are only about $500 million per km.

The importance of the above calculation is that it is quite possible that Utica will turn out to have a lower projected cost per rider than the next phase of Second Avenue Subway, a project for which there is nearly universal consensus in New York. The original cost projection for Second Avenue Subway’s second phase was $3.3 billion, but will have run over since (the projection for the first phase was $3.7 billion, but actual cost is nearly $5 billion); the ridership projection is 100,000 for each phase beyond the first, which is projected at 200,000. In such a situation, the line would be a great success for New York, purely on the strength of existing demand. I put Utica at the top of my list of underrated transit projects for a reason: the line’s worth is several times its cost assuming world-average per-km cost, and remains higher than the cost even at elevated American prices. The de Blasio administration is doing well to propose such a line, and it is nearly certain that costs will be such that good transit activists should support it.

Quick Note: MBTA Electrification

I’ve been thinking about MBTA modernization recently, and realized that although the principles underlying modernization are similar throughout North America, the concrete benefits and the resulting political alliances that could push for it are very different. In New York and Chicago, commuter rail is already quite good if you’re a suburban middle-class commuter working in the CBD at regular business hours. Penn Station may not be ideally located for Midtown commuters, but the LIRR is building East Side Access to fix that; this leads to arguments such as this one, about which group of riders (or potential) riders to prioritize.

The MBTA is completely different. It does not provide adequate service even for peak-hour commuters, because the speed leaves a lot to be desired; where the LIRR runs decent if not good rolling stock, the MBTA rolling stock loses 70 seconds accelerating just to 60 mph (FLIRTs lost 24 seconds accelerating to 160 km/h). As Purple City notes in comments, electrification would be a Pareto-improvement, allowing large increases in speed even with infill stops. The discussion of whether to prioritize short-distance or long-distance service is still important, but any choice would substantially improve service to everyone over the current offering.

This means that the politics of modernization is different. In New York, Long Island commuters are the primary obstacle: modernization would replace their peak express trains with reverse-peak trains on the one-way Main Line, and crowd their trains in the outbound direction. In Boston, there aren’t enough urban riders to result in so much crowding, the speed would go up substantially, and, with the North-South Rail Link, North Side commuters would have service to the CBD and not just North Station.

The cost of such modernization consists of four main projects: the North-South Rail Link itself, complete electrification of all lines, full-length high platforms at all stations, and new rolling stock. The latter is perhaps $1.5 billion initially, corresponding to 600 cars, but in reality displaces equivalent or higher cost that has to be spent on new diesel locomotives and cars under the current operating pattern. The NSRL was pegged at $3-4 billion, but since it’s in easy geology (the ground was already cleared during the Big Dig), costs do not have to be higher than in the rest of the world, which would be closer to $2 billion for two large-diameter bores. Complete electrification is perhaps another $1.5 billion. It’s a fraction of what the state spent on the Big Dig, and not a large multiple of what it’s spending on a few thousand daily riders for South Coast Rail.

The political alliance in this case would be the exact one that would oppose modernization in New York and Chicago. This list of projects does little for the inner city, with exceptions around possible infill station sites like Allston. However, it provides much higher speeds for the suburbs. This is what’s so interesting about it. It’s not even easy to unbundle the parts that are useful to the suburbs from the parts that improve service in general, since the North-South Rail Link, which is crucial for service from the north to Boston, requires electrification, and once that’s in place, high platforms and infill stations are cheap. Whereas elsewhere, political inertia makes modernization hard, in the Boston area, once someone proposes it, I believe large chunks of the mainstream will jump on the idea.