Is Low-Cost Intercity Rail Possible?

Update: see corrected Shinkansen staffing numbers below

The last few decades have seen the growth of airlines and bus operators that reduce operating costs using a variety of lean-production ideas, chiefly using the equipment for more hours per day to earn more revenue with the same fixed costs. This hasn’t generally happened for rail, even in the presence of competition between operators. There is one low-cost option, on the TGV network, which like Ryanair and easyJey cuts costs not only by leaner production but also by reducing passenger comfort and convenience. I contend that an intermediate solution should be investigated: lean like Southwest and JetBlue, but without the extra fees, which are lower on those two airlines than on legacy US airlines.

First, the preexisting fares. In Japan, JR Central charges an average of $0.228 per passenger-km on the Shinkansen, JR East charges $0.245, JR West charges $0.208. In Japan nearly all intercity service is Shinkansen; averaging all JR East rail other than Tokyo-area commuter rail, even commuter rail around Sendai and Niigata, drops the average marginally, to $0.217. European intercity rail fares per passenger-km are lower: €0.104 on RENFE (PDF-p. 27), €0.108 on DB, and €0.112 on SNCF. All of those companies are profitable and do not receive subsidies for intercity rail, with the exception of RENFE, which loses small amounts of money (-0.8% profit margin). This is far lower than Northeast Corridor fare, which, as of the most recent monthly report, averages $0.534 per passenger-km on the Acela and $0.292 on the Regional.

Now, we can try penciling what operating costs should be. The most marginal costs, which grow linearly with the addition of new service, look a lot like those of low-cost private bus operators: crew, cleaners, energy, rolling stock acquisition, rolling stock maintenance. I am specifically handwaving the peak factor – frequency is assumed to be constant, to establish the operating cost of the base rather than that of the peak. I am going to assume 1,120 seats per train, all coach, about the same as a 16-car Shinkansen with 2+2 standard-class seating, or 70 per car. First class should be thought of as an equivalent of buying extra seats – fares should scale with the amount of space per passenger, and at any rate most cars are coach. Occupancy rate will be taken to be 57%, for a round 40 passengers per car; this is well within the range of HSR occupancy.

The cost turns out to be quite low – this is similar to the analysis in Reason & Rail from 2 years ago, except for now I’m leaving out infrastructure costs, which in that analysis are the dominant term, and so excluding them leads to very low costs. It is about three cents per passenger-km in operating and maintenance costs. This is of course not what HSR currently costs, but should be thought of as a lower limit or as the marginal cost of increasing base service.

A crew on a high-speed train is a train driver and a conductor. A 16-car Shinkansen train appears to have one conductor judging by the single conductor’s compartment has three conductors (see Andrew in Ezo’s comment below); the TGV has much more staffing, with the low-cost TGV having four. US salaries are high because the railroads have good unions: according to the Manhattan Institute’s applet for public employees’ salaries, on the LIRR, the average train driver makes $103,000 a year (search for “engineer”) and on Metro-North $115,000 (search for “locomotive engineer”). This is higher than on the Shinkansen. A conductor makes $98,000 on the LIRR and $105,000 on Metro-North. Figure $240,000 per year for a two-person crew $440,000 per year for a four-person crew.

We need to convert this to operating hours. On the LIRR and Metro-North, there are about 4,500 revenue car-hours per driver-year, which translates to about 600 revenue train-hours. At an average speed of 200 km/h, HSR would cost $2 $3.67 per train-km, or $0.003125 $0.0057 per passenger-km. But Metro-North and the LIRR are inefficient due to a prominent peak making smooth scheduling difficult; HSR can schedule a simple shift with a roundtrip of about 6-7 hours plus rest time, and if each employee does this 5 days a week minus holidays this is 1,200 revenue hours. This halves the cost. Conversely, going to 4 conductors, with a five-person crew paid a total of $540,000 per year, raises the cost to $0.007 per passenger-km, still low.

Electricity consumption can be calculated from first principles based on acceleration characteristics, or based on real-life HSR consumption levels. For the latter, a UIC paper claims 73 Wh/passenger-km on PDF-p. 17; this appears to be based on an assumption (see PDF-p. 33) of 70% occupancy but a train that is smaller (397 seats for 8 cars) and heavier (425 t vs. 365 t for an 8-car Shinkansen). Correcting for these gives 54 Wh/p-km. When I try to derive this from first principles assuming Northeast Corridor characteristics but with substantial segments upgraded to 360 km/h, I get about 50 Wh/p-km; this doesn’t include losses between catenary and wheel or regenerative braking, which mostly cancel each other out with losses being a little bigger. Rounding up to 56 Wh/p-km and using a transportation-sector electricity cost of $0.125 per kWh, we get $0.007 in electricity cost per passenger-km.

Cleaning should be done as fast as possible, with large crews working to turn trains around in the minimum amount of time based on safety margins and schedule recovery. JR East cleans Shinkansen trains in 12 minutes of Tokyo turnaround time minus 5 minutes for letting passengers disembark; the team size is 1 cleaner per standard-class car and 2-3 per green car, for a total of 22. This does not mean we can pencil in just 7 minutes of cleaning, since this doesn’t take into account the cleaning crew’s time waiting for a train to arrive, or downtime in case trains don’t arrive exactly one turnaround time apart. For a 4 tph operation, 15 minutes are fine, but for a 6 tph one, 10 may not be enough, requiring going up to 20. This is once per train run, so once per 720 km. With a team size of 24, that’s 24 person-hours per 720 train-km, or 32 in the 6 tph version.

Again using Manhattan Institute data, cleaners make $50,000 a year; it’s possible wages will have to go up to attract people who can consistently clean a car on the tight schedules posited, but there’s no base of comparison of companies having both Japanese standards for scheduling and American union scales. Say $30 per hour on the job (including downtime and waiting for a train, but not scheduled breaks). In the 6 tph version, this costs $0.002 per passenger-km.

RENFE’s above-linked executive summary includes a breakdown of employees by category (regular, support, and managerial) and gender on PDF-p. 46, whence we can obtain that for each operations employee there are 0.2 managers and 0.07 support employees. For capital projects, the California HSR estimates add 20% for overhead, management, and design, not including contingency, and the Penn Design estimate adds 18% (PDF-p. 247). This should be taken as the marginal cost of extra managers to oversee extra employees hired to provide additional service. In total, this is roughly $0.019 per passenger-km assuming higher crew staffing, and $0.013 $0.0175 assuming lower staffing.

Rolling stock is more expensive, and should spend as much time earning revenue as feasible based on established maintenance protocols. A large share of the operating costs of high-speed rail comes from the rolling stock: 20% on Madrid-Barcelona according to a RENFE presentation to California HSR whose official source is now a dead link, and, from eyeballing, perhaps 25% according to PDF-p. 8 of a UIC presentation about track access charges. The low-cost TGV doubles train utilization to about a million kilometers a year. This should be routine on Northeast Corridor operations: two round-trips per train, about 14-15 hours per day including turnaround time, 1 million train-km a year. Procurement of new N700s costs about $3 million per car, and Japanese depreciation schedules are over 20 years. Other trains capable of more than 250 km/h cost $4 million per car in China; with mid-life refurbishment of non-trivial cost, they can last up to 40. With 4% interest cost, depreciation and interest are about $280,000 per car-year either way, and if a car travels a million km with 40 people on average, that’s another $0.007 per passenger-km, a substantial sum so far.

Rolling stock maintenance is also relatively expensive. California HSR’s 2012 business plan has a list of costs around the world on PDF-p. 136. JR Central’s rolling stock maintenance is $7.20 per trainset-mile, which with our assumptions translates to $0.007 per passenger-km. European rolling stock maintenance costs are $4.16 per trainset-mile, which appears to be for an 8-car train, so scaling up by a factor of two gives $0.008 per passenger-km. Note that the maintenance of the rolling stock costs as much as the depreciation and interest on its acquisition.

In reality, maintenance depends on both time and distance, so increasing rolling stock utilization leads to lower costs per train-km. Since with those assumptions, the rolling stock costs about as much as the actual operations, this is a major cost cutter, though not a game changer given other costs. Note that the RENFE presentation slide also includes a large array of fixed costs and infrastructure (maintenance, which is very cheap at about $100,000 per route-km per year, and depreciation and interest on construction, which aren’t so cheap) as well as managerial overheads, hence the 20%; the UIC presentation includes some overheads as well. However, those fixed costs are more affordable if they’re spread across more service. A line built to have a 6 tph capacity has the same infrastructure cost at any frequency up to 6 tph.

So far, adding up all the operating and rolling stock costs totals to about $0.03 $0.033 per passenger-km. This means $11 $12 direct operating costs between New York and Washington or New York and Boston. It’s also a quarter what the Europeans charge for HSR tickets, and an eighth of what the Japanese charge. Despite this, the California HSR numbers are similar, so this analysis passes a sanity check. Again referring to the business plan’s PDF-p. 136, the table claims operating costs per trainset-mile that, after scaling from 8- to 16-car trains, are $0.04 per passenger-km. They exclude rolling stock acquisition, but include maintenance; but the assumptions in the Operations and Maintenance Peer Review are worse than in this post, with worse train utilization (turnaround times are assumed to be 40 minutes on PDF-p. 21) and more staff on board each train (an engineer, a conductor, an assistant conductor, a ticket collector, and a special services employee per 8-car unit, for a total of ten employees for 16 cars).

Still, I have no expectation that anyone can charge $11 $12 profitably for HSR service between New York and Washington. However, I strongly believe costs could be brought substantially below current rates. I believe the reason SNCF has only begun to do that and other operators not at all comes from two places.

First, infrastructure charges, a third of the cost of both the TGV and the Madrid-Barcelona AVE, are not just about paying off infrastructure costs (both Spain and France are low-construction cost countries for HSR). They transfer profits from the HSR operator to the monopoly infrastructure owner: track access charges were specifically increased in France ahead of the opening of the European rail market to competition, ensuring HSR surplus would go to state-owned infrastructure owner RFF rather than to foreign companies or the customers.

And second, unlike in the US, in Europe low-cost airlines are associated with terrible service: low seat pitch, hidden fees, rigid policies toward carry-on baggage, rigid policies toward missed flights, worse customer satisfaction, secondary airports located far from the cities they purportedly serve. The US has some of this in Spirit Airlines and Allegiant Airways, but it also has Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin Atlantic, which have high customer satisfaction, flexible tickets, secondary airports located close to city centers (such as Dallas Love Field), and seat pitch equal to or better than that of the legacy airlines, which have degraded service. Europeans hate low-cost flying; Americans hate flying. The result is that Ryanair tars any attempt to lower costs in Europe by associating lean production and high equipment utilization with no-frills third-class service. This might make managers more wary of adopting some of the more positive aspects of low-cost carriers. Japan has no major low-cost carriers, so although it does not have the stigma, it doesn’t have the domestic experience, either.

I do not believe it’s possible for a train to charge $11 $12 one-way between New York and Washington and stay in business. There needs to be some profit margin, plus paying back infrastructure construction costs. However, I do believe it’s possible to charge closer to that than to present European HSR fares for the same distance (about $45), let alone present Amtrak fares. California HSR is actually pointing the way, but has such high construction costs that paying off even part of construction represents a major rise in ticket fares. The Northeast can and should do better.

Loopy Ideas Are Fine, If You’re an Entrepreneur

There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it’s important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn’t need to provide references or evidence – even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.

Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. And thus a fair amount of the media coverage is analysis-free summary of what Tesla already said: see stenography by ABC, Forbes, the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, and even BusinessWeek (which added that critics deal with “limited information”). Some media channels are more nuanced, sometimes even critical; the Wall Street Journal deserves especial credit, but Wonkblog also has a second, mildly critical post. But none has pressed Musk or Tesla about the inconsistencies in his proposal, which far exceed the obvious questions about the proposed $6 billion price tag (compare $53 billion in today’s money for California HSR). For better prior criticism, see James Sinclair’s post and Clem Tillier’s comment on California HSR Blog.

My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR. All of these come from Musk’s complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field; these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable.

In principle, Hyperloop is supposed to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, running in a tube with near-vacuum at speeds topping at 1,220 km/h. In practice, both the costs and the running times are full of magic asterisks. The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin; with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. There is a crossing of the San Francisco Bay, but there’s no mention of the high cost of bridging over or tunneling under the Bay – we’re supposed to take it on faith the unit cost is the same as along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley.

There is no systematic attempt at figuring out standard practices for cost, or earthquake safety (about which the report is full of FUD about the risks of a “ground-based system”). There are no references for anything; they’re beneath the entrepreneur’s dignity. It’s fine if Musk thinks he can build certain structures for lower cost than is normal, or achieve better safety, but he should at least mention how. Instead, we get “it is expected” and “targeted” language. On Wikipedia, it would get hammered with “citation needed” and “avoid weasel words.”

The worst is the cost of the civil infrastructure, the dominant term in any major transportation project’s cost. Hundreds of years of incrementally-built expertise in bridge building is brushed aside with the following passage:

The pods and linear motors are relatively minor expenses compared to the tube itself – several hundred million dollars at most, compared with several billion dollars for the tube. Even several billion is a low number when compared with several tens of billion proposed for the track of the California rail project.

The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder. By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn.

In reality, an all-elevated system is a bug rather than a feature. Central Valley land is cheap; pylons are expensive, as can be readily seen by the costs of elevated highways and trains all over the world. The unit costs for viaducts on California HSR, without overhead and management fees, are already several times as high as Musk’s cost: as per PDF-page 15 of the cost overrun breakdown, unit costs for viaducts range from $50 million to $80 million per mile. Overheads and contingencies convert per-mile cost almost perfectly to per-km costs. And yet Musk thinks he can build more than 500 km of viaduct for $2.5 billion, as per PDF-page 28 of his proposal: a tenth the unit cost. The unrealistically low tunnel unit cost is at least excused on PDF-page 31 on the grounds that the tunnel diameter is low (this can also be done with trains if they’re as narrow as Hyperloop, whose capsule seating is 2-abreast rather than 4- or 5-abreast as on HSR; see below on capacity). The low viaduct unit cost is not.

This alone suggests that the real cost of constructing civil infrastructure for Hyperloop is ten times as high as advertised, to say nothing of the Bay crossing. So it’s the same cost as standard HSR. It’s supposedly faster, but since it doesn’t go all the way to Downtown Los Angeles it doesn’t actually provide faster door-to-door trip times.

Nor is the system more comfortable for the passenger. Levitating systems can get away with higher cant than conventional rail because they sway less: Transrapid’s lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane is about 3.6 m/s^2 in Shanghai, and the company claims 4.37 m/s^2 is possible. On standard-gauge rail, the conversion rate is approximately 150 mm of total equivalent cant per 1 m/s^2. HSR cant tops at 180-200 mm, and cant deficiency tops at 180 mm for Talgos and 270-300 mm for medium-speed Pendolinos, so about 2.5 m/s^2 at high speed; this was shown safe by simulation in Martin Lindahl’s thesis, which is also a good source for track construction standards.

But Hyperloop goes one step further and proposes a lateral acceleration of 4.9 m/s^2: 0.5 g. This is after canting, according to the standards proposed:

The Hyperloop will be capable of traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco in approximately 35 minutes. This requirement tends to size other portions of the system. Given the performance specification of the Hyperloop, a route has been devised to satisfy this design requirement. The Hyperloop route should be based on several considerations, including:

  1. Maintaining the tube as closely as possible to existing rights of way (e.g., following the I-5).
  2. Limiting the maximum capsule speed to 760 mph (1,220 kph) for aerodynamic considerations.
  3. Limiting accelerations on the passengers to 0.5g.
  4. Optimizing locations of the linear motor tube sections driving the capsules.
  5. Local geographical constraints, including location of urban areas, mountain ranges, reservoirs, national parks, roads, railroads, airports, etc. The route must respect existing structures.

For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop is
typically:

  • 300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii < 1.0 mile (1.6 km)
  • 760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0 miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.

These bend radii have been calculated so that the passenger does not experience inertial accelerations that exceed 0.5 g. This is deemed the maximum inertial acceleration that can be comfortably sustained by humans for short periods. To further reduce the inertial acceleration experienced by passengers, the capsule and/or tube will incorporate a mechanism that will allow a degree of ‘banking’.

0.5 g, or 4.9 m/s^2, is extreme. Non-tilting trains do not accelerate laterally at more than 1.2 m/s^2 in the plane of the track (i.e. after accounting for cant), and at high speed they have lower lateral acceleration, about 0.67 m/s^2 with limiting cases of about 0.8 for some tilting trains relative to the plane of the train floor. For example, the Tokaido Shinkansen has 200 mm of cant and maximum speed of 255 km/h on non-tilting trains on 2,500-meter curves, for 100 mm of cant deficiency, or 0.67 m/s^2.

The proposed relationship between curve radius and speed in the Hyperloop standards is for a lateral acceleration much greater than 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane: 480 km/h at 1,600 meters is 11.1 m/s^2. This only drops to 5 m/s^2 after perfectly canting the track, converting the downward 9.8 m/s^2 gravity and the sideways acceleration into a single 14.8 m/s^2 acceleration vector downward in the plane of the capsule floor, or 5 m/s^2 more than passengers are used to. This is worse than sideways acceleration: track standards for vertical acceleration are tighter than for horizontal acceleration, about 0.5-0.67 m/s^2, one tenth to one seventh what Musk wants to subject his passengers to. It’s not transportation; it’s a barf ride.

Even 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane is too much. With perfect canting, it combines with gravity to accelerate passengers downward by 11 m/s^2, 1.2 m/s^2 more than the usual, twice as high as the usual standards. Motion sickness is still to be fully expected in such a case. Transrapid’s 4.37 m/s^2, which adds 0.93 m/s^2 in the vertical component with perfect canting, is the limit of what’s possible.

Speaking of vertical acceleration, this gets no comment at all in the Hyperloop proposal. At 1,220 km/h, it is very hard to climb grades, which would require very tall viaducts and deep tunnels under mountains. Climbing grades is easy, but vertical acceleration is such that the vertical curve radius has to be very large. A lateral acceleration of 0.67 m/s^2 would impose a minimum vertical curve radius of 170 km, versus 15 km at 360 km/h HSR speed. Changing the grade from flat to 2% would take 3.4 km, and changing back would take the same, so for climbing small hills, the effective average grade is very low (it takes 6.8 km to climb 68 meters).

Nor does jerk get any treatment. Reversing a curve takes several seconds at the cant and cant deficiency of conventional HSR (about 3 seconds by Swedish standards, more by German ones); reversing a curve with the extreme canting levels of Hyperloop would take much longer. Maintaining comfort at high total equivalent cant requires tight control of the third derivative as well as the second one; see a tilting train thesis for references.

The barf ride that is as expensive as California HSR and takes as long door-to-door is also very low-capacity. The capsules are inexplicably very short, with 28 passengers per capsule. The proposed headway is 30 seconds, for 3,360 passengers per direction per hour. A freeway lane can do better: about 2,000 vehicles, with an average intercity car occupancy of 2. HSR can do 12,000 passengers per direction per hour: 12 trains per hour is possible, and each train can easily fit 1,000 people (the Tokaido Shinkansen tops at 14 tph and 1,323 passengers per train).

But even 30 seconds appears well beyond the limit of emergency braking. It’s common in gadgetbahn to propose extremely tight headways, presuming computerized control allowing vehicles to behave as if they’re connected by a rod. Personal rapid transit proponents argue the same. In reality, such systems have been a subject of research for train control for quite a while now, with no positive results so far. Safety today still means safe stopping distances. If vehicles brake at a constant rate, the safe headway is half the total deceleration time; if a vehicle brakes from 1,220 km/h to zero in 60 seconds, the average acceleration is more than 5 m/s^2, twice the current regulatory safety limit for passengers with seat belts.

Most of this could be chalked to the feeling of some entrepreneurs that they must reinvent everything. The indifference to civil engineering costs, passenger comfort issues, and signal safety could all be chalked to this. So could the FUD about earthquake safety of HSR on PDF-page 5.

However, one thing could not: the chart on PDF-page 9 showing that only the Hyperloop is energy-efficient. The chart has a train consuming nearly 900 megajoules per person for an LA-San Francisco trip, about as much as a car or a plane; this is about 1,300 kJ per passenger-km. This may be true of Amtrak’s diesel locomotives; but energy consumption for HSR in Spain is on average 73 Watt-hour (263 kJ) per passenger-km (see PDF-page 17 on a UIC paper on the subject of HSR carbon emissions), one fifth as much as Tesla claims. Tesla either engages in fraud or is channeling dodgy research about the electricity consumption of high-speed trains.

Indeed, a train with a thousand seats, 20 MW of power drawn, 60% seat occupancy, and a speed of 360 km/h can only ever expend 333 kJ per passenger-km while accelerating, and much less while cruising (acceleration at lower speed requires more energy per unit of distance, but cruising at lower speed expends only a fraction of the energy of full-power acceleration). Tesla’s train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn’t put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk’s current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter.

There is no redeeming feature of Hyperloop. Small things can possibly be fixed; the cost problems, the locations of the stations, and the passenger comfort issues given cost constraints can’t. Industry insiders with ties to other speculative proposals meant to replace conventional rail, such as maglev, are in fact skeptical of Hyperloop’s promises of perfect safety.

It’s possible to discover something new, but people who do almost always realize the context of the discovery. If Musk really found a way to build viaducts for $5 million per kilometer, this is a huge thing for civil engineering in general and he should announce this in the most general context of urban transportation, rather than the niche of intercity transportation. If Musk has experiments showing that it’s possible to have sharper turns or faster deceleration than claimed by Transrapid, then he’s made a major discovery in aviation and should announce it as such. That he thinks it just applies to his project suggests he doesn’t really have any real improvement.

In math, one common sanity check on a result is, “does it prove too much?” If my ten-page paper proves a result that implies a famous open problem, then either my paper is wrong or I’ve proved the famous open problem, and it’s up to me to take extra care to make sure I did not miss anything. Most people in this situation do this extra step and then realize that they were subtly wrong. If a famous question could be solved in ten pages, it probably wouldn’t still be open. The same is even true in undergrad-level proof classes: if your homework answer proves things that are too strong, you’ve almost certainly made a mistake.

Musk’s real sin is not the elementary mistakes; it’s this lack of context. The lack of references comes from the same place, and so does the utter indifference to the unrealistically low costs. This turns it from a wrong idea that still has interesting contributions to make to a hackneyed proposal that should be dismissed and forgotten as soon as possible.

I write this not to help bury Musk; I’m not nearly famous enough to even hit a nail in his coffin. I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won’t check his numbers against anything.

There are two stories here. In the less interesting one, Musk is a modern-day streetcar conspiracy mogul: he has a car company, he hopes to make money off of it in the future and uses non-generally accepted accounting to claim he already does, and he constantly trash-talks high-speed rail, which competes with his product. Since he’s not proposing to build Hyperloop soon, it could be viewed as clever distraction or FUD.

The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he’s rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can’t be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions.

This culture of superstars is a major obstacle frustrating any attempt to improve existing technology. It more or less works for commercial websites, where the startup capital requirements are low, profits per employee are vast, and employee turnover is such that corporate culture is impossible. People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would’ve done the same six months later. Valve, a video game company that recognizes this, oriented its entire structure around having no formal management at all, but for the most part what this leads to is extremely rich people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who get treated like superstars and think they can do anything.

In infrastructure, this is not workable. Trains are 19th-century technology, as are cars and buses. Planes are from the 20th century. Companies can get extremely successful improving the technology somehow, but this works differently from the kind of entrepreneurship that’s successful in the software and internet sectors. The most important airline invention since the jet engine is either the widebody (i.e. more capacity) or the suite of features that make for low-cost flights, such as quick turnarounds. What Southwest and its ultra low-cost successors have done is precious: they’ve figured how to trim every airline expense, from better crew utilization to incentives for lower-transaction cost booking methods. This requires perfect knowledge of preexisting practices and still takes decades to do. The growth rate of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook is not possible in such an environment, and so the individual superstar matters far less than a positive corporate culture that can transmit itself over multiple generations of managers.

There is plenty of room for improvement in HSR technology, then, but it’s of a different kind. It involves adapting techniques used by low-cost airlines to reduce costs, as SNCF is doing right now with its new low-cost TGV product. It perhaps involves controlling construction costs more tightly, though $5 million per km for viaducts seems like an impossible fantasy. But it has to come from within the business, or from someone who intimately understands the business.

And with the kind of success that US media harps on, this is almost impossible to do domestically. Someone as smart as Musk, or any of many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could find a detailed breakdown of the operating and construction costs of civil infrastructure, and figure out ways of reducing them, Megabus- or Southwest-style. That’s what I would do if I had the unlimited resources Musk has: I’d obtain unit costs at far greater detail than “X meters of tunnel cost $Y” and compare what New York is doing wrong that Madrid is doing right. But I don’t have the resources – in money, in ability to manage people, in time. And the people who do are constantly told that they don’t need to do that, that they’re smart enough they can reinvent everything and that the world will bow to their greatness.

Update: people all over the Internet, including in comments below, defend the low cost projections on the grounds that the system is lighter and thinner than your average train. The proposal itself also defends the low tunneling costs on those same grounds. To see to what extent Musk takes his own idea seriously, compare the two proposals: the first for a passenger-only tube, and the second for a larger tube capable of carrying both passengers and vehicles. On PDF-pp. 25-26, the proposal states that the passenger-only tube would have an internal diameter of 2.23 meters and the passenger-plus-vehicle tube would have an internal diameter of 3.3 meters, 47% more. Despite that, the tunneling costs on PDF-p. 28 are $600 and $700 million, a difference of just 17%.

The same is true of the “but the Hyperloop capsule is lighter than a train” argument for lower pylon construction costs. Together with the differences in tube thickness posited on PDF-p. 27, 20-23 mm versus 23-25, there is 60% more tube lining in the passenger-plus-vehicle version, but the tube and pylons are projected to cost just 24% more. In this larger version, the twin tube has 0.025*3.3*pi*2 = 0.5 cubic meters of steel per meter of length, weighing about 4 tons. This ranges from a bit less than twice to a bit more than twice the weight of a train. To say nothing of the pylons’ need to support their own considerable weight, which is larger than for HSR due to the need for taller viaducts coming from the constrained ability to change grade. They are far more obtrusive than trees and telephone poles, contra the claims of minimal obtrusiveness and disruption.

Update update (12/24): Hyperloop is in the news again; I’ve been getting a lot of pingbacks copying this article. You can read the plan here; the construction costs are now up from a laughable sub-$10 million per kilometer to $10-30 million, which is perfectly feasible if you’re building in flat terrain and if what you’re building is conventional rail and not a vactrain. There’s virtually no discussion of why the costs are so much lower, just an assurance that the team ran the numbers and that they’re looking into minimizing the costs of the construction material (costs that, for conventional HSR, are a small proportion of the total construction costs – concrete is cheap, it’s pouring it that’s expensive). On PDF-p. 19 of the new plan, the accelerations are explicitly stated to be 0.5 g in normal service, which the person heading the team trying to build it claims is not a barf ride in the article, but which is in reality is again worse than the acceleration felt by passengers on an airplane taking off. There already exists a mode of transportation that involves security theater, travel at 1,000 km/h, poor comfort, and motion sickness.

Tel Aviv Needs a Subway, Done Right

After decades of false starts, Tel Aviv is finally building a subway-surface line. The political opinions of activists and urban planners in Israel are divided between supporters, who believe the line is long overdue, and opponents, who instead believe buses remain the solution and also oppose the Jerusalem light rail. I on the contrary think that on the one hand Tel Aviv needs a subway, but on the other hand the current plan has deep flaws, both political and technical, and is learning the wrong lessons from recent first-world greenfield subways.

In some ways, the Tel Aviv subway resembles New York’s Second Avenue Subway. It passes through neighborhoods that are very dense – the line under construction connects some of the densest cities in Israel, albeit poorly. Nobody believes it will be built because of all the false starts. Real incompetence in construction leading to cost overruns has led to speculation about much greater cost overruns.

For nearly a hundred years, the conurbation around Tel Aviv and Jaffa has been the largest metro area in what is now Israel; it is also the largest first-world metro area outside the US that has no urban rail. There were preliminary plans for a Tel Aviv subway in the 1930s, followed by repeated plans since independence, all of which were shelved. A proposal from just after independence for developing coastal Israel around rail and rapid transit trunks was rejected by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion because it conflicted with the political goal of Jewish population dispersal; to further its political goals, the state concentrated on building roads instead. In the late 1950s there was a new integrated national rail plan that was not implemented. Haifa got a six-station, one-line funicular, but Tel Aviv and Jerusalem remained bus-only. In the 1960s a skyscraper in Central Tel Aviv was built with a subway station, but there were no tunnels built; a subsequent 1971 plan was abandoned in 1973 due to the Yom Kippur War. The current subway plan dates to the 1990s, and has suffered from repeated delays, and construction only began recently, with opening expected for 2016.

Unlike in the North American debate, in Israel the left is pro-BRT and anti-rail, due to a long tradition of mistrust in mainstream (center-right to right-wing) politics. The same is true of urban planners who follow the Jacobsian tradition, such as Yoav Lerner Lerman (Heb.). The article I translated two years ago about Jerusalem’s light rail is in that tradition: it attacks genuine problems with cost overruns and a politicized route choice process, but then concludes that BRT is the solution because it’s been implemented in Curitiba and Bogota successfully. The result is that people whose ideas about trade, energy, health care, education, and housing are well to the left of what is considered acceptable in the US end up channeling the Reason Foundation on bus versus rail issues.

In reality, Tel Aviv’s urban form is quite dense. The city itself has 8,000 people per square kilometer, much lower than Paris and Barcelona, but higher than most other European central cities (say, every single German city). Like Los Angeles, its municipal borders do not conform to the informal borders of the inner-urban area, since it contains lower-density modernist neighborhoods north of the Yarkon, while dense Ramat Gan, Giv’atayim, Bnei Brak, and Bat Yam are separate municipalities. The inner ring of suburbs, including the above-named four, has 7,400 people per square kilometer; excluding the more affluent but emptier northern suburbs, this approaches 10,000/km^2.

However, the urban form is quite old, in the sense that the density is fairly constant, without the concentrations of density near nodes that typify modern transit cities. Tel Aviv’s residential high-rise construction is not very dense because it still follows the modernist paradigm of a tower in a park, leading to low lot coverage and a density that’s not much higher than that of the old four-story apartment blocks. The Old North achieves about 15,000 people per square kilometer with a floor area ratio of 2: the setbacks are such that only about half of each lot is buildable, and there are four floors per building. The Akirov Towers complex averages about 2.5.

Although this density pattern favors surface transit rather than rapid transit, Tel Aviv doesn’t have the street network for efficient surface transit. Paris, a poster child for efficient recent construction of light rail (see costs and ridership estimates on The Transport Politic), is a city of wide boulevards. Central Tel Aviv has about two such streets – Ibn Gabirol and Rothschild – and one auto-oriented arterial, Namir Road, which the subway line under construction will go under. The street network is too haphazard to leverage those two for surface BRT or light rail, and the major destinations of the central areas are often on narrower streets, for example Dizengoff. On top of that, light rail speeds in Paris are lower than 20 km/h, whereas newly built subways are much faster, approaching 40 km/h in Vancouver and Copenhagen. Outside Central Tel Aviv, the roads become wider, but not nearly as wide as those used for BRT in Bogota, and there is nothing for surface transit on those streets to connect to on the surface. A surface implementation of Route 66, following Jabotinsky Street (the eastern leg of the subway line under construction) in Ramat Gan, Bnei Brak, and Petah Tikva, wouldn’t be very fast on the surface to begin with, but would come to a crawl once crossing the freeway into Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv also has two more important reasons to imitate Vancouver and Copenhagen, besides speed: religious politics, and economic and demographic comparability. Public transportation in Israel operates six days a week, with few exceptions, to avoid running on the Sabbath. A driverless train, built to be quiet even on elevated sections, with no turnstiles and free fares on the Sabbath, could circumvent religious opposition to seven-days-a-week operation.

Even without the religious question, Copenhagen and especially Vancouver are good models for Tel Aviv to follow, more so than middle-income Curitiba or Bogota. Israel is a high-construction cost country, but Canada is not very cheap, and Vancouver has cut construction costs by making elevated trains more palatable and reducing station lengths. Greater Tel Aviv has 2.5-3.5 million people depending on who you ask, not much higher than the range for Copenhagen and Vancouver. Tel Aviv is about as dense as Copenhagen and Vancouver, though Vancouver’s density is spikier. Tel Aviv expects fast population growth, like Vancouver, though in Tel Aviv’s case it’s a matter of high birth rates whereas in Vancouver it’s only immigration.

One way in which Vancouver is not a good model is the role of regional rail. Israel has no equivalent of Transport Canada or FRA regulations. It even connected Tel Aviv’s northern and southern rail networks and through-routes nearly all commuter and intercity trains. However, the network has real limitations, coming from its poor urban station locations, often in highway medians; the through-running project was completed simultaneously with the construction of the freeway. For example, the Tel Aviv University station is located far downhill from the actual university. As a result, even when there is development near the train stations, it is usually not walkable. This compels new rail service with stations in more central locations as well as east-west service, complementing the north-south mainline.

However, for service to the less dense suburbs, the construction of new lines, and electrification of the entire national network (so far only the Haifa commuter network is scheduled for electrification), should provide the backbone. There is no integrated planning between regional rail and shorter-distance urban rail, the first failing of the current plan.

More broadly, the plan fails not just because of the wrong mode choice – subway-surface rather than driverless metro with a regional rail complement – but also because of how it treats urban geography. The proposed network – on which the red line is under construction and the green line is intended to be the second built – is too sparse in the center, and ignores the older urban centers. The phasing ignores preexisting transportation centers, and often the choice of who to serve and how to serve them is political.

The worst political decision concerns Jaffa, the old core of the metro area. (Tel Aviv was founded as a nominally independent city, but really as a Jewish suburb of Jaffa.) The most activity is in the Old City and the Flea Market, going down along Yefet Street to Ajami, since 1948 the only majority-Arabic speaking neighborhood in the municipality, and the only neighborhood that is completely unplanned. The streets are narrow, favoring a subway, and the residents are poor and have low car ownership rates. Instead, the route through Jaffa is on the surface and follows Jerusalem Boulevard, a less busy road built by the city’s then-mayor out of envy of then-separate Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. This serves the more gentrified Jewish parts. Ajami is gentrifying – it’s close to Central Tel Aviv, is right next to the coast, and has stunning architecture – but is still majority-Arab.

The other neighborhood that due to ethnic differences is viewed separately from Tel Aviv, Hatikva, is also underserved. In this case, the residents are Jewish, but are predominantly Mizrahi and traditional-to-religious, with high poverty levels. The plan does serve Hatikva, but much later than it should given the neighborhood’s density, intensity of low-end commercial activity, and proximity to Central Tel Aviv. A northwest-southeast line, following Dizengoff and then serving Central Bus Station (a larger transportation center still than any mainline rail station) and Hatikva before continuing east into the inner suburbs, should be a high priority, but isn’t. The Central Bus Station area is also a concentration of refugees, another low-income, low-car ownership population, though since this concentration is more recent than the plans for the subway, the lack of priority service to the bus station is not a result of racism.

It’s not only about class reasons, or racial ones: Tel Aviv had to fight to get the Ministry of Transportation to agree to build the second line underground under Ibn Gabirol, and that’s to an upper middle-class Ashkenazi neighborhoods. The common thread within the city proper is a preference for new modernist luxury towers over serving existing walkable density, even when that density is hardly lower than what the towers are providing. (The towers can be built more densely, with less open space; by the same token, the low-rise buildings could be upzoned from one half the lot and four story to three-quarters and six stories.)

Another example of bad politics is the way military bases are served. The very center of Tel Aviv is home to the Ministry of Defense and the main military headquarters, the Kirya. The inner urban area is ringed with much larger military bases, including Tsrifin to the south, Glilot to the north, and the Bakum to the east. But the officer corps is concentrated in the Kirya, while Tsrifin is a more general base, Bakum is dedicated to new draftees so that they can be told what unit they’re to be sent to, and Glilot is somewhat higher-end than Tsrifin due to its role in military intelligence but still lacks the Kirya’s concentration of high-ranking officers. Since draftees almost never own cars and often ride buses for hours, the three outlying bases are all natural outer anchors for lines, and Glilot and Tsrifin both lie on easy spurs from the mainline rail network. Despite this, there are no plans for regular service, while the Kirya is part of the subway line under construction and is the intersection point with the second line to be built.

Even on pure geography, the plan makes critical mistakes. The eastern leg of the line under construction is much better than its southern leg: it goes straight from the train station through Ramat Gan and Bnei Brak to a secondary anchor in Petah Tikva. And yet, the station spacing in Bnei Brak, the densest city in Israel, is the widest, even though higher density allows shorter station spacing. In contrast, the surface segment in less dense Petah Tikva is intended to have denser stop spacing. Moreover, despite the advantages subway-surface operation has in terms of branching, the branching is meant to be really a short-turn, with half of all trains going straight to the depot still in the underground section and half continuing to Petah Tikva. Central Petah Tikva is well to the south of the line, which is intended to terminate at Petah Tikva’s peripherally located central bus station, but there is no branch serving that center, despite high intended frequencies (3 minutes on the surface, 1.5 minutes underground).

I believe that in addition to an electrified mainline rail trunk, Tel Aviv needs a driverless subway network that looks roughly like an E: one or two north-south lines (west of the freeway if one, one on each side if two), three east-west lines intersecting the mainline rail at the three main Tel Aviv stations. The east-west lines should be anchored at the eastern ends at Petah Tikva, Bar Ilan University, and the Bakum or Kiryat Ono; the north-south lines should go about as far north and south as required to serve the center, letting mainline rail take care of destinations roughly from Glilot or Herzliya north and from Tsrifin south. Such a network would not serve political goals of making Tel Aviv a luxury city; it would just serve the transportation goals of the urban area’s residents.

Quick Note: Why Quinn is Unfit to be Mayor

The Triboro RX plan calls for using preexisting freight rail rights-of-way with minimal freight traffic to build a circumferential subway line through the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. It was mentioned as a possible project by then-MTA head Lee Sander and more recently by Scott Stringer and on The Atlantic Cities by Eric Jaffe. Despite not having nearly as much ridership potential as Second Avenue Subway or a future Utica subway, the presumed low cost of reactivating the right-of-way makes it a promising project.

According to Capital New York, leading mayoral contender Christine Quinn has just made up a price tag of $25 billion for Triboro, while claiming that paving portions of the right-of-way for buses will cost only $25 million. This is on the heels of city council member Brad Lander’s proposal for more investment in bus service. The difference is that Lander proposed using buses for what buses do well, that is service along city streets, and his plan includes bus lanes on major street and what appears to be systemwide off-board fare collection. In contrast, Quinn is just channeling the “buses are always cheaper than rail” mantra and proposing to expand bus service at the expense of a future subway line.

There is no support offered for either of the two cost figures Quinn is using, and plenty of contradictory evidence. Paving over rail lines for bus service is expensive; a recent example from Hartford and a proposal from Staten Island both point to about $40 million per km in the US. The map in the Capital New York article suggests significant detours away from the right-of-way, including on-street turns making the bus as slow as the existing circumferential B35 route, but also several kilometers on the railroad in Queens. Conversely, reusing rail lines for rail service is not nearly as expensive as building a subway. The MTA’s own biased study says a combined on-street and existing-right-of-way North Shore service would cost 65% more if it were light rail than if it were a busway; since the Triboro right-of-way is intact, the cost of service is in the light rail range, rather than the $25 billion for 35 km Quinn says.

But the reason Quinn is unfit for office rather than just wrong is the trust factor coming from this. She isn’t just sandbagging a project she thinks is too hard; the MTA is doing that on its own already. She appears to be brazenly making up outlandish numbers in support of a mantra about bus and rail construction costs. Nor has anyone else proposed a Triboro busway – she made the logical leap herself, despite not having any background in transit advocacy. Politicians who want to succeed need to know which advocates’ ideas to channel, and Quinn is failing at that on the transit front. If I can’t trust anything she says about transit, how can I trust anything she says about the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk, or about housing affordability, or about the consequences of labor regulations?

Update: Stephen Smith asked Quinn’s spokesperson, who cited a $21 billion figure for a far larger RPA plan including Second Avenue Subway and commuter rail through-running with new lines through Manhattan. I am not holding my breath for a retraction of the bus paving plan from the Quinn campaign.

Update 2: Quinn admitted the mistake on the rail plan, and revised the estimate of the cost down to $1 billion, but sticks to the bus plan and its $25 million estimate.

Quick Note: More on Urban Absolutism

In previous posts, I brought up the theory that American cities are run in a feudal fashion, despite the nominally democratic system, and that the failings of feudalism are leading proponents of livable streets and public transit to demand elected absolute monarchs instead. The recent 125th Street bus debacle, and the online livable streets community’s response to it, represent another example of this trend.

To recap: New York City’s Department of Transportation proposed a bundle of bus upgrades along 125th Street: dedicated bus lanes on most of the street for the use of all four bus routes running along 125th, and Select Bus Service on the M60, which connects Morningside Heights with Astoria and LaGuardia. The M60 is by a small margin the top route for boardings along 125th (not necessarily for boardings elsewhere for trips ending on 125th), but it’s third in overall ridership among the four routes. Because of its Morningside Heights bend at the west end and its LaGuardia service it’s perceived as a whiter route than the other three routes: the Bx15, connecting to Third Avenue in the Bronx; the M100, connecting to Washington Heights and Inwood; and the M101, connecting to Washington Heights at one end and going along Third and Lexington at the other. Harlem politicians were livid that DOT were only giving SBS upgrades to the whiter route. State Senator Bill Perkins opposed the plan’s ban on double parking and got the bus lanes truncated from Central and West Harlem to just Central Harlem; he and City Councillor Robert Jackson continued to oppose the plan, Jackson doing so explicitly on the grounds of privileging the M60, and DOT just dropped it.

It is not my intention here to rehash my argument for why Jackson was right and DOT should have proposed SBS upgrades for all four routes, or if it had to pick one then the M101. I have said this on Streetsblog and Second Avenue Sagas in comments. Rather, I bring this up because while many commenters said “we lost, let’s try again” or “we lost, let’s defeat Perkins and Jackson for opposing our interests,” other responded with fantasies of absolute power: fantasies of the city cutting bus routes to West Harlem to punish Jackson and Perkins, fantasies of the city making the Harlem communities beg for any further livable streets improvements (as already happens with bike lanes in East Harlem), fantasies of a Robert Moses for livable streets, fantasies of Bloomberg buying election campaigns to defeat all livable streets opponents.

An absolute ruler is not going to do anything positive. He doesn’t have to – either his rule is secure and he doesn’t need to care, or it’s not and he needs to spend his effort shoring it up with patronage and attacks on opponents. A city government strong enough to do things over the objections of black politicians who are concerned with racial inequality, or over those of pro-car NIMBYs, will also be strong enough to do things over the objections of the livable streets community. Robert Moses’s problem wasn’t just that he was pro-car; it’s that he was authoritarian and didn’t need to care too much about what people thought, so that his own biases for segregation could become city policy.

Are Express Trains Worth It?

So, you have your urban rail line. It’s mostly above ground, so constructing new express overtakes is feasible. It has decent frequency, and carries trains to destinations at a variety of distances from city center. But it’s not an overcrowded subway line that brushes up against line capacity, requiring all trains to run at the same speed. Do you run express trains?

I’m going to focus on regional rail in this post, since with two Tokyo-area exceptions, proper subways are incapable of running express trains without dedicated express tracks due to their high frequency. On a line with a train every 10 minutes it’s feasible to mix trains of different speeds with timed overtakes; on a line with a train every 2 minutes, it’s not. I’m going to use the LIRR and Caltrain as examples, and then apply the derived general principles to other cases in the US, including future regional rail schemes.

The basic tradeoff of express service is that it provides faster service to the express stations at the cost of frequency at the local ones. This can be done in two ways: expresses that stop once every few stations, and local-then-express patterns. Jarrett Walker calls this limited versus express, based on bus service patterns; with trains, both types are called express. The subway in New York, the Chuo Rapid Line, Seoul Subway Line 1, and Caltrain baby bullets are examples of the first kind; the Caltrain limited-stop trains and the peak-hour trains on some LIRR lines are examples of the second kind.

Express trains of either kind but especially the first reduce line capacity, even with very long overtake segments. If train X overtakes train L, then there needs to be an available slot ahead of train L, and after the overtake there’s a slot opening up behind L. The Chuo Rapid Line runs a mixture of local (“rapid”) and express (“special rapid”) trains for most of the day, but at rush hour, there are only local trains, peaking at 28 trains per hour; on the shoulders of rush hour, there are some express trains, with total traffic of about 20 tph. The LIRR runs 23 tph on the Main Line at the peak, so this is an issue, which the LIRR unsatisfyingly resolves by running trains one-way at rush hour. It’s less an issue on Caltrain given constructable overtake locations, but right now the overtake locations are inconvenient and the trains are pulled by diesel locomotives, increasing the stop penalty and reducing the capacity of a mixed local-express line.

The second kind of express service is bad industry practice and should not be used. It avoids the capacity problems of the first kind at low traffic levels, but at high traffic levels the speed difference is still too large. It is used when the trains are a special CBD shuttle and makes it impossible to serve passengers who are cheap to serve, i.e. those getting off short of city center. Caltrain’s limited-stop trains do this because of capacity problems during rush hour, when they need to get out of the baby bullets’ way. The LIRR does this because of a cultural belief that trains exist only to shuttle people from Long Island to Manhattan and back; due to the same belief, it runs trains one-way at rush hour rather than giving up on rush hour express runs as JR East does.

The first kind of express service may or may not be warranted. It depends on the following questions:

1. What is the line’s expected traffic level? Low traffic, up to about 4 tph for a regional line, favors an all-local configuration to prevent cutting local stations’ frequency unacceptably. Very high traffic favors all-local configuration for capacity reasons, or else investment into long overtakes or even full four-tracking. Intermediate traffic, in the 6-12 tph range, is the best zone for express trains.

2. Have local trains already been sped up by use of good industry practices? Level boarding, high-acceleration EMUs, better track maintenance allowing higher speeds between stations, good timetable adherence allowing less schedule padding, and infrastructure preventing delays on one train from cascading to others allowing even less padding can all significantly reduce the speed difference between local and express trains. In some extreme cases, a local train can end up not much slower than an express train hauled by a diesel locomotive.

3. How long is the line, and how many stations does it have? Longer lines and shorter interstations both favor express trains, all else being equal. Intercity rail, which also has higher stop penalties because of the higher line speed, deserves more than one stopping pattern even at low frequencies.

4. How big is the difference between minor and major stations? It is crucial not to confuse current ridership with ridership potential, since lines with express service often pick winners and losers, after which the better-served express stations steal riders who live closer to bypassed minor stops. This is common on Caltrain, where some but not all express stops are major job centers.

5. Can intercity trains plausible substitute for express service?

It is question 4 that makes the difference in many cases. On the LIRR, the Main Line has a clear distinction between major stops (Mineola, Hicksville) and minor ones (all the rest). The Montauk Line does not. Note the ridership levels of the stations, going eastward from Jamaica to the end of electrification:

Main Line:

Hollis: 114
Queens Village: 791
Floral Park: 1495.5
New Hyde Park: 1725.5
Merillon Avenue: 766.5
Mineola: 5174
Carle Place: 386
Westbury: 1951.5
Hicksville: 8107.5
Syosset: 2748.5
Cold Spring Harbor: 2083
Huntington: 5556.5
Bethpage: 2481.5
Farmingdale: 2312.5
Pinelawn: 25
Wyandach: 1758.5
Deer Park: 2708.5
Brentwood: 1375
Central Islip: 1787
Ronkonkoma: 8639

Montauk Line:

St. Albans: 93.5
Lynbrook: 2738
Rockville Centre: 3425
Baldwin: 3371.5
Freeport: 2514.5
Merrick: 3383.5
Bellmore: 3267.5
Wantagh: 2890.5
Seaford: 1804
Massapequa: 2959.5
Massapequa Park: 1672.5
Amityville: 1542.5
Copiague: 1430.5
Lindenhurst: 1791.5
Babylon: 3293

There are three ends of electrification: Babylon, Huntington, and Ronkonkoma. All have markedly more ridership than nearby stations, especially Ronkonkoma, though in all cases it’s an artifact of their being the ends of electrification, with many people driving in from farther east. Ronkonkoma has nothing nearby that justifies its ridership level, the highest of any suburban LIRR station; it’s a park-and-ride that has a lot of ridership because it’s the end of electrification and has express service.

In contrast, in Mineola and Hicksville, there really is a concentration of activity justifying their status. Both have trivial transit usage as job centers, but there’s enough of a core, especially around Mineola, to justify higher service, and Hicksville is also the junction of the Main Line with the Port Jefferson Branch: see the census bureau’s OnTheMap tool.

But there are no special stations on the Montauk Line. Excluding St. Albans, which is in New York itself and has to compete with cheaper and more frequent if slower bus-to-subway options, the ratio between the busiest and least busy stations is 2.4:1. A similarly flat situation occurs east of Hicksville, excluding the two end-of-electrification stations.

What this means is that the LIRR should only run local trains on the Babylon Branch and east of Hicksville, while maintaining express service on the Main Line west of Hicksville when there’s enough capacity for it. A similar analysis of other lines in the New York area should give the following answers:

Hempstead, West Hempstead, Long Beach, and Far Rockaway Branches: all local due to short length.

Port Washington Branch: probably all local due to short length, but if additional local stations are added in Queens, then some express trains to Great Neck may be warranted.

New Haven Line: very long, sharp distinction between major and minor stops all the way but especially west of Stamford, high frequency, four tracks give enough capacity for everything. The current configuration of nonstop trains to Stamford continuing as local to New Haven and local trains turning at Stamford is fine, except that the express trains should also stop at New Rochelle (a junction with the Hell Gate Line, which deserves service, but also a major stop in and of itself, with the third highest weekday ridership of Metro-North’s suburban stations) and maybe also Greenwich; HSR overtake considerations may require stopping also at Rye and Port Chester.

Harlem Line: generally favors local trains, except that White Plains is a major job center and thus a far more important stop than all others, independently of its better service. There are four tracks south of Wakefield, favoring express trains, but conversely charging subway fares and allowing free transfers to the subway would lead to a ridership spike as people switch from the overcrowded 4 and 5 trains. There’s a big dropoff in ridership north of North White Plains, so the current configuration of locals that turn at North White Plains and expresses that go nonstop south of White Plains is fine, as long as off-peak frequency is raised.

Hudson Line: favors express trains because of length and four-tracking. Although on paper there are more and less important stations, this is an artifact of service patterns. The secondary stations in Yonkers serve higher density than the busier stations in the proper suburbs, and the dense parts near Tarrytown are actually in Sleepy Hollow, about equidistant from the Tarrytown and Philipse Manor stations: see the New York Times’ population density map.

Erie Lines and West Shore Line: probably all local since the population density thins too uniformly going north, with Paterson as the major exception. There are somewhat denser anchors at the outer ends of some lines – Spring Valley and Nyack – but Harlem Line-style nonstops run against a capacity problem, coming from the fact that this part of the network is necessarily highly branched.

Rest of New Jersey Transit: the main lines (Northeast Corridor, Morristown) are very long and have some distinguished suburban job and population centers (Metropark, New Brunswick Morristown) deserving express service, but the branches (North Jersey Coast, Montclair, Gladstone) do not. However, the fare structure and off-peak frequency lead to much less ridership on the inner-urban segments in Newark, Orange, etc., than would be expected based on population density. In addition, the difference between major and minor stops is fairly small on all lines when taking electrification into account, sometimes as small as on the Babylon Branch: see ridership data per line and per station.

Although my initial decision in my regional rail plan to pair the Erie lines with the Atlantic and Babylon Branches of the LIRR was aesthetic, creating a northwest-to-southeast line, in reality the systems are fairly similar in their characteristics. More or less the same can be said about the Staten Island-Harlem system. There are no direct connections to intercity rail except at Jamaica and in the Metro-North tunnel to Grand Central, the lines pass through urban or dense-suburban areas, the interstations are fairly short, and there’s relatively little distinction between major and minor stops. (White Plains is the major exception, and Paterson is a secondary one.) This makes the Lower Manhattan-based system much more RER-like than the Penn Station-based one, which is longer-distance and practically intercity at places.

Finally, the same set of questions in the other three major Northeastern cities generally lead to the conclusion that no express trains are needed.

In Boston, there’s too little difference between major and minor stops on each line (see PDF-page 70) – somewhat more than on the Babylon Branch, but much less than on the LIRR Main Line. The most prominent major station is Salem, but the low-ridership stations farther in on the Rockport/Newburyport Line are in working-class suburbs; the ridership there is depressed because of fare and schedule issues coming from competition with buses, and good regional rail would get much more additional ridership from Lynn and Chelsea than from Salem and the suburbs farther out.

In Washington, current traffic demand is so low that express service would seriously eat away at the frequency offered to local stations. MARC and VRE ridership is so low that any analysis of travel demand has to start from geographic and demographic information rather than from preexisting ridership; the only major outlying destination on any of the lines is Baltimore, which can be connected to Washington by intercity rail, and which conversely has much less Washington-bound commuter traffic than the Washington suburbs. The closest thing to justifiable express service is that when the commuter lines closely parallel Metro, they should have wider stop spacing.

In Philadelphia, on most lines, express service eats away at frequency too much. The one exception is the PRR Main Line, with the SEPTA Main Line a possibility. Many lines have sharp differences between local and express stations: for example, Cornwells Heights on the Trenton Line is much busier than the rest. But a combination of low frequency and lack of easy overtakes (on the Trenton Line, the inner tracks should be mainly used by intercity trains, with only the occasional regional rail overtake if required) makes this not useful. The PRR Main Line actually has less difference between major and minor stops than many others, but it is longer and has short interstations and higher frequency. The SEPTA Main Line has the frequency to support multiple stopping patterns, though the population density near the minor stations is high and the problem, as in other Northeastern cities, is high fares and lack of integration with urban transit.

Large-Diameter TBMs

Deep-level subway tunnels are usually built with tunnel-boring machines (TBMs), which can dig and create their own lining even under other infrastructure, such as older intersecting tunnels. But then deep-level stations require larger caverns, which are expensive to dig from the surface. Three-quarters of the cost of Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 is the three stations. As commenters Jim and Anon256 noted a year and a half ago, to avoid this problem, such cities as Barcelona pioneered the use of large-diameter TBMs, which have enough space to accommodate tracks together with platforms by their sides. This is especially useful for construction in dense city centers, where surface disruption must be minimized and demolitions of buildings that are in the way are expensive. I claim that this is the optimal construction method for both regional rail to Lower Manhattan and the North-South Rail Link in Boston.

In Barcelona, the internal diameter of the TBM used for Line 9, 11.7 meters, is enough to have both directions of a two-track line use one tunnel. With an internal horizontal slab, trains can be stacked so that each direction gets one track and one platform at a station, which looks about 4.5 meters wide in diagrams. Between stations, there is enough space for each of the two levels to have two tracks, allowing crossovers. The only required construction outside the tunnel is access points, which can be drilled straight down for elevators or at an angle for escalators.

While the cost of Barcelona Metro Line 9 is about $170 million per kilometer, more than three times the original budget, compared with $40-60 million per kilometer for most Spanish tunneling projects, it is still much lower than the cost of comparable projects tunneling under preexisting subway systems that have stations built by blasting caverns or cut-and-cover construction. In addition, the standards are relatively easy to adapt to the standards of American mainline construction, since the Line 9 trains are powered by catenary and are only ten centimeters shorter than the LIRR’s M-7s. Mainline catenary is energized at 25 kV and requires more clearance than low-voltage rapid transit catenary, but this adds only about half a meter to the total diameter: German standards call for 27 centimeters of clearance from 25 kV.

To allow two lines to meet at cross-platform transfers, there are two possibilities, both used by narrower-diameter TBMs (or older tunneling shields). One, used by the London Underground’s tube lines, is to have two parallel circular tunnels with numerous passages drilled between them. Another, used by some subway lines in Shanghai and Tokyo as well as by the Harlem River tunnels of New York’s Lexington Avenue Line, is to overlap the two circular tunnels, using a tunneling shield with a double-O tube (DOT) design. The DOT design is more complex and would also require any access point to either obstruct the platforms or go at the platform edges, but would create a wider platform allowing easier cross-platform circulation.

In Boston, regardless of which design is used, the North-South Rail Link involves three central stations in which two tubes (one feeding the Worcester and Providence Lines, one feeding the Fairmount and Old Colony Lines) meet: South Station, Aquarium, and North Station. Each should have a cross-platform transfer, in the style of the Hong Kong MTR: at Aquarium northbound Providence and Worcester trains should face northbound Fairmount and Old Colony trains and likewise for southbound trains, whereas at South and North Stations, northbound trains should face southbound trains. This way, people transferring between two points south of the link could transfer cross-platform at South Station, and people transferring between two points north of the link could transfer cross-platform at North Station.

A large-diameter TBM has enough space not only for crossovers, but for trains to switch what levels they’re on. With a design speed of 100 km/h, a curve radius of 500 meters, and a superelevation ramp lasting 2 seconds, it takes about half a kilometer for the track on the lower level to swerve sideways so as to no longer be directly under the upper-level track, climb to the upper level while the upper-level track descends, and then swerve sideways again so that both tracks are on the correct side of the tunnel to allow a cross-platfom transfer. There is space to do this between both pairs of successive stations. The portals could be constructed where convenient on the approaches to South Station and immediately north of the Charles, and the infrastructure for pairing lines at the north end with the two tubes could be done above or below ground, based on local tradeoffs between disruption and cost.

In Lower Manhattan, the problem is capacity. The system would involve a line from Atlantic Terminal to Jersey City or Hoboken intersecting a line from Grand Central to Staten Island. There is room for only one station, and some configurations, notably any in which the New Jersey end is at Exchange Place, require a cruciform station, without cross-platform transfers. Moreover, this station is at a site with much more intensive development than Downtown Boston, and close attention must be paid to capacity. This is why I bring up DOTs in the first place: London-style passages may not allow sufficient circulation of transferring passengers. The platforms would be obstructed with many escalators between the upper and lower levels since there is no room for Hong Kong’s three-station cross-platform transfers, and peak demand for egress to both street level and intersecting subways is also likely to be very high.

The optimal solution seems to be to have no real Lower Manhattan station beyond the platforms and access points. Most ticket-vending machines should be placed at street level next to the escalator and elevator banks, and the blocks above the station should be pedestrianized to allow for access from the middle of the street, avoiding the need for a mezzanine. The width and pedestrian volume of Lower Manhattan streets are such that it would be at good human scale.

The remaining capacity issue is sufficient space for escalators. There are four tracks in total, each of which is inbound from some direction, and at the peak there could be a 12-car, 300-meter long train with 2,000 passengers every 2 minutes per track. If all passengers are discharged and the trains leave the station empty in the morning peak, then the required capacity is 240,000 people per hour. This is in fact quite unlikely, even though there is only one Lower Manhattan stop: many Staten Islanders work in Brooklyn or Midtown, people from points north of Grand Central are more likely to get off the train at Grand Central than to stay on until Lower Manhattan, and there is a substantial volume of commuters between Brooklyn and points west or north of Manhattan, who would benefit the most from through running.

Factsheets by Kone and ThyssenKrupp suggest each meter-wide escalator has a practical capacity of 6,000-7,000 passengers per hour. If we assume half of a full train capacity’s worth of passengers get off at the station, not including passengers who transfer, then we need 120,000 passengers per hour, i.e. seventeen to twenty escalators. This can be done quite easily with two parallel circular bores, at the cost of restricted capacity for connecting passengers. With a DOT design with 8-meter wide platforms, it’s still possible to have an escalator bank at each end of each platform; the large separation between the upper and lower levels, about 6 meters, allows independent escalators at the end, though not anywhere else. The widest standard escalator is a meter wide at the step and requires a 1.6-meter wide pit (see above ThyssenKrupp link as well as brochures by Kone and Otis), enough for a three-and-one or three-and-two escalator bank at each end, giving twelve peak-direction escalators. Eight additional escalator banks in a one-and-one configuration (or perhaps four in a two-and-one configuration, which is a wider platform obstruction) can be placed roughly evenly along the upper-level platform, along with elevator shafts, escalators that only connect the two platforms, and access points to intersecting subway lines.

The advantage in both New York and Boston is that there’s no need to construct a station beyond those shafts and bores. The station mezzanine in this configuration is a street, most likely Broadway in Lower Manhattan and (according to prior North-South Rail Link plans) the greenway above the Central Artery tunnel in Boston. The station retail is ordinary street retail. Fare control is roving inspectors riding the trains or patrolling the platforms. It’s still a multi-billion dollar undertaking due to all the underwater access tunnels, but the cost per kilometer could be held down to normal first-world levels even while crossing the difficult infrastructure of Lower Manhattan and Downtown Boston.

Who are the Opponents of Transportation Alternatives?

Streetsblog has traditionally lashed at multiple factions that oppose bicycle and transit infrastructure, but reserved the harshest criticism for entrenched community groups and NIMBYs, and their representatives including most of the high-profile Democratic mayoral candidates in New York. Early community board opposition to some of Janette Sadik-Khan’s bike lanes and pedestrian plazas turned into full-fledged attacks by the livable streets community on NIMBYs, of which some were justified but some were cases without any evidence of community opposition.

But now the Wall Street Journal has run an editorial video calling New York’s new bikeshare totalitarian, adding to a Front Page article from a month ago saying that bikeshare was a failure in Paris and Montreal and that Sadik-Khan’s grandfather was a Nazi. Paul Krugman chimed in with an explanation relating the opposition to upper-class politics, New York Magazine tried to explain how bikeshare goes against conservative ideology more broadly, and suddenly there’s supposed to be a partisan realignment on the matter. When I reminded Robert Cruickshank on Twitter that Charles Schumer and Anthony Weiner were against bike infrastructure, he responded, “no, that’s not driven by values or ideology but by a search for votes.”

There’s a real danger in reducing the world to a struggle between Us and Them, in which the bad aspects on the Us side show that people on the Us side need to be nudged in the right direction while the bad aspects on the Them side show that people on that side need to be defeated. People who spend too much time in national or even state-level partisan politics think in those terms even in places where they are completely inappropriate, such as local blue-city transportation matters. Streetsblog has occasionally engaged in this as well, with the factions being pro- and anti-Bloomberg: it has let the city’s DOT off the hook for the truncation of the 125th Street dedicated bus lanes, though in past years it did attack the city for not extending 1st and 2nd Avenue’s bike lanes into Harlem despite community support.

What both of those sides – Krugman and the Streetsblog crowd – miss is that there’s considerably diversity of opinion in both the Us camp and the Them camp. Although there is something like an Us camp comprising supporters of rail, urban density, and livable streets, there are still sharp internal disagreements that shouldn’t be papered over. On the Them side there isn’t even a recognizable camp: what do Michele Bachmann, Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo, Charles Schumer, and Anthony Weiner have in common except their opposition to bikes or transit? Instead of a binary Manichean view it’s important to understand that politics, especially urban politics, has multiple factions, of which none can obtain a persistent majority, requiring some measures of negotiation and consensus.

First, the Them sides. The easiest segment to explain is right-wing populism: as a movement, it tends to be anti-urban and pro-road, even in Switzerland, whose Swiss People’s Party opposes rail investment and supports roads. The support base of right-wing populism is rarely urban, because as a movement it tends to be against what it views as cultural deviance of (mainly urban) immigrants; since transit ridership tends to be concentrated in the cities, populists have less reason to support it.

Non-populist conservatives sometimes borrow from right-wing populism and sometimes do not. Christie canceled ARC and transferred the state money for it toward roads, but he is quite influenced by populism in style even if his actual politics is mainline conservative. But the British Tories support high-speed rail, as did the Sarkozy administration. Contrary to popular belief, Thatcher never said that bus riders over the age of 30 are failures in life; the quote comes from a writer who, far from being a Thatcherist, worked for The New Statesman. However, with exceptions such as Sarkozy’s support for Arc Express, conservatives and right-wing liberals tend to be less supportive of urban transit and of taxing cars on environmental grounds. For examples, the Skyscraper Page posters believe the BC Liberal election victory is likely to make it harder to find money for SkyTrain extensions, Boris Johnson canceled proposals to extend London’s congestion charge to other parts of the city, and the Swedish right-wing parties originally opposed Stockholm’s congestion charge and eventually implemented it but with a caveat that the proceeds go to roads only.

Among centrist liberals, opinions are more split. Bloomberg is unabashedly neo-liberal; he’s also spent $2 billion of city money on a subway extension and championed congestion pricing and bike lanes. Andrew Cuomo is less explicitly neo-liberal but ran on such a platform; he’s championed the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, opposed including transit on the new bridge, and spent money that was supposed to go to the MTA on other things. The opposition to transit and livable streets that exists in this group is less a matter of hating what cities stand for and more a matter of fiscal conservatism that views roads as normal service used by the upper middle class and transit as wasteful and serving the poor. Charles Schumer’s opposition to bike lanes in his neighborhood should be placed in the same category, as should Richard Brodsky’s claim that congestion pricing is unfair while he represented a rich Westchester district. It’s here that the faction Krugman describes belongs, but it includes board swaths of the upper middle class rather than the top 0.5% of the population that Krugman argues is pro-road because they’re chauffeured around Manhattan.

The community boards who oppose transit and livable streets, for examples in Washington Heights and Sheepshead Bay, are a more mixed bunch. I believe Weiner falls in this category too: instead of congestion pricing he proposed a commuter tax, which would not fall on his outer-urban district, a proposal that more recently the other mayoral hopefuls supported. In the forums I spent time in, mainly The Straphangers forums, the opposition seemed to be from the left and not just from the right. It’s probably best understood as a general populism as well as personal dislike for Bloomberg; while this populism may not be leftist, it is not really right-wing either, and often comes from minorities, which right-wing populists almost universally spurn. I believe it’s Cap’n Transit who noted the disconnect between the elite even in poor neighborhoods and the average residents, who rarely own cars, leading to a kind of populism in leftist areas that is not by itself really leftist.

Now, the Us side. There is, in fact, a coherent movement that calls for more investment in rail for intercity transportation, proposes local transit and bike and pedestrian projects, and supports taxes on driving when they are politically feasible. The arguments between various factions, such as more left-wing versus more right-wing transit supporters or supporters of restoration of pre-WW2 streetcars and interurbans versus supporters of more modern technologies like light rail and high-speed rail, really are internal to a movement.

However, there really are problems, coming from the cores of the movement in supporting more spending and in having leaders who are quite neo-liberal and indifferent to issues of racism and disinvestment. New York really did take its time to extend bike lanes into East Harlem despite community support; the same neighborhood is now not getting a 125th Street dedicated bus lane. While the first five bus routes to receive Select Bus Service upgrades were chosen as one per borough for trial, the newer lines so chosen, first on 34th Street and now the M60 to LaGuardia, are not very high-ridership; the M60 in particular is at least in perception the highest-income and whitest among the buses that use 125th Street while its ridership rank is third out of four routes on the corridor.

Likewise, the transit investment decisions made not only in New York but also in cities ranging from Boston and Providence to San Francisco are development-oriented and tend to serve residents of rich suburbs and inner-urban gentrification projects at the expense of high-productivity transit routes in low-income neighborhoods in between. Bloomberg spent $2 billion of city money on a subway extension, but it was the wrong one, a development-oriented project to Hudson Yards rather than an extension of Second Avenue Subway or a new subway line following Utica, which is currently in a near-tie with First and Second Avenues for highest bus ridership in the city.

While neo-liberalism as an ideology also supports efficient government and reducing red tape, the built-in bias for prestige projects makes it hard to support vanilla improvements in efficiency. This combines with a particular leftist opposition to anything that sounds like reduced spending; the fact that it’s Christie who began the wave of cancellations adds a partisan dimension. As a result, the people who are most sensitive to costs tend to be far outside political power: Stephen Smith is not a major libertarian pundit, Aaron Renn occasionally talks to city leaders but has no real power, I am a mathematician who writes about transit and urban issues. The (neo-)liberal centrists who’d be best placed to implement a program that would reduce transit construction costs are the ones with the least political incentive to do so.

That said, despite the above essentially multi-partisan and multi-factional picture, it could be that the Wall Street Journal’s video and Krugman’s response will lead to partisan realignment. High-speed rail used not to be a partisan issue either: in 2009, Newt Gingrich said he envisioned medium-speed rail together with maglev. But after Christie canceled ARC, canceling rail projects became a test of right-wing bona fides, and conversely, defending infrastructure spending became a test of left-wing bona fides even when infrastructure was a small component of the stimulus. It is possible that the American political world will soon become bipolar on matters of local transit and livable streets issues. It’s just not there now.

Comparative Subway Construction Costs, Revised

Here is a list of subway projects in the last 15-20 years, in both developed and developing countries. It’s in addition to my initial lists for developed and developing countries, but includes projects mentioned in past blog posts not on those two lists. This is still not an exhaustive list, due to some cities for which I couldn’t find any information (Moscow), cities for which the information from different sources contradicts itself (Bucharest), and cities for which I couldn’t source numbers beyond Wikipedia (Osaka). My rule is that Wikipedia is an acceptable source for construction timelines and route length but not cost.

While the list is meant to be for urban subways, urban rail projects that are predominantly elevated are also included. As far as possible I have tried using PPP dollars adjusted for inflation to give 2010 dollars (2010 and not 2013, because when I started comparing costs that’s what I used). For core developed countries, because inflation rates are similar, I use American inflation rates, using the CPI (not GDP deflator: the two measures have disagreed for a while, and the CPI points to higher inflation). For other ones, I’ve tried focusing on more recent projects, including even some that are under construction, but I use actual inflation rates.

Bear in mind the data is only as accurate as my sources for it and my PPP conversions. Errors of 10-20% in each direction are to be expected: sources disagree on conversion rates, sometimes the years of construction are not made clear so deflating to the midpoint is not reliable, etc. Even larger errors sometimes crop up, for example if old cost figures are not updated after a cost overrun.

Explicitly, the rates I use today are C$1.25 = S$1 = US$1 = 3.8 yuan = 100 yen = 800 won; £1 = $1.50; €1 = $1.25; CHF1 = $1.65.

Singapore Thomson MRT Line: not yet under construction, expected to open 2019-21, S$18 billion for 30 km. This is $600 million/km, all underground. Included only as a lower bound of costs; costs can rise beyond budget but rarely come significantly under it.

Hong Kong Sha Tin to Central Link: a 1-km segment underground (not underwater) is £270 million, under construction with opening expected in 2018. After converting to PPP using Hong Kong’s conversion rate this is $586 million/km.

Singapore Downtown MRT Line: under construction since around 2008, to be completed in 2017; S$20.7 billion for 42 km: $493 million/km. This line is fully underground. This represents a 70% cost overrun already, announced after I previously reported the original budget of S$12 billion.

Budapest Metro Line 4: under construction since 2006, completion expected in 2014, 400 billion forint for 7.4 km. This is $358 million per km. The line is fully underground.

Fukuoka, Nanakuma Line extension to Hakata: construction expected to begin 2014 with line opening expected in 2020, ¥45 billion for 1.4 km: $321 million/km. I do not know for certain that the extension is fully underground, but this is likely, as the preexisting line is underground and the extension follows busy CBD streets.

Cairo Metro Line 3, Phase 1: opened 2012 with construction since 2006, LE4.2 billion for 4.3 km. This is $310 million/km. The phase is fully underground.

Kawasaki Subway: under construction, opening expected in 2018, ¥433.6 billion for 16.7 km: $260 million/km. The line is fully underground. Update: people in comments explain that the line was actually canceled; the link in this paragraph is just a plan.

Stockholm City Line: to open in 2017, 16.8 billion kronor (2007 prices) for 6 km of tunnel and 1.4 km of bridge: $259 million/km.

Sao Paulo Metro Line 6: construction due to begin in 2014; 7.8 billion reais for 15.9 km: $250 million/km. The line is 84% underground.

Sao Paulo Metro Line 4: construction began in 2004, first phase opened in 2010, completion expected in 2014; 5.6 billion reais for 12.8 km: $223 million/km. The line is fully underground.

Dnipropetrovsk Metro extension: under construction since about 2008, opening expected in 2015, €367 million for 4 km. After PPP conversion this is $214 million/km. It appears to be fully underground.

Malmö City Tunnel: built 2005-10, 9 billion kronor for 4.65 km: $212 million/km. This is a fully underground project.

Bangalore Metro Phase 2: to be opened by 2017, 264 billion rupees for 72.1 km. This is $164 million/km. I do not know what proportion of the project is underground; it does not seem to be large, as the extension of the phase 1 lines are all outbound, and only line 4 seems to have significant tunneling, about 14 km by pure Wikipedia eyeballing.

San Juan Tren Urbano: built 1996-2004, $2.28 billion (2001 figures, see PDF-p. 145) for 17.2 km: $163 million/km. The line is only 7.5% underground by direct inspection on Google Earth.

Lucern Zentralbahn: built 2008-13, CHF250 million for 1.32 km of tunnel: $151 million/km.

Hangzhou: I can’t find any ex post numbers, but in both 2005 and this year (Chinese) officials pegged the cost of future construction as ¥550 million/km: $145 million/km.

Sofia Metro Line 2: built 2008-12, €952 million for 17 km. After PPP conversion, this is $148 million/km. The line appears to be almost fully underground: the numbers here do not fully add up but point to 1.3-2.9 km above ground (7.6-13% of total line length) in one segment while Wikipedia’s line map shows only that segment with above-ground segments.

Thessaloniki: I can’t find any ex post numbers, but in 2005 the budget for the first phase, under construction to be opened in 2016, was €798 million for 9.6 km: $104 million/km. The second phase received bids last year and is expected to open in 2017, with an estimated cost of €518 million for 4.78 km: $135 million/km. Both phases are fully underground.

Vancouver Evergreen Line: under construction since 2012, completion expected 2016; C$1.4 billion for 11 km: $103 million/km. Only 2 km of the system, 18%, is underground, but Vancouver seems to have an unusually low underground construction cost premium.

Dubai Metro (lines 1 and 2): built 2005-11, Dh28 billion ($6.9 billion in PPP2010US$) for 75 km: $92 million/km. Only 13 km of the system, 17%, is underground.

Mexico City Metro Line 12: built 2007-2012, $1.8 billion for 26.4 km. After PPP conversion, this is $90 million/km. From a Google Earth overlay map, this line is 49% underground.

Seoul Sin-Bundang Line: built 2005-11, 1,169 billion won for about 18 km (sources disagree on whether it’s 17.3 or 18.5): $87 million/km. The line is 100% underground according to YouTube videos.

Bangalore Metro, Phase 1: built 2006-11, 8,158 crore rupees for 42.3 km: $93 million/km. Only 8.82 km, or 21% of the project, is underground. See above for Indian construction costs in a heavier-tunneling setting.

Helsinki Westmetro: under construction since 2009 with completion expected in 2015, €714 million for 13.5 kilometers: $66 million/km. The line is fully underground.

Seoul Subway Line 9: opened 2009, 900 billion won for 27 km: $43 million/km. The line is almost fully underground by direct inspection on Google Maps.

Barcelona Sants-La Sagrera tunnel: built 2008-11, €179.3 million for 5.8 km: $39 million/km. This project is intercity but fully underground.

Just from eyeballing the data, spliced together with the two older lists, the biggest correlation of each country’s construction costs is with the construction costs of other lines in the same country. When there is more than one project listed separately in a city – e.g. Seoul, Singapore, Sao Paulo – the projects have similar costs. This persists across different cities in the same country, judging by the similarity between Bangalore Metro’s Phase 2 cost and the Delhi Metro’s cost from a previous list and by the similarity between Hangzhou and Beijing’s costs.

Quick Note: Why the Focus on Penn Station?

Penn Station is in the news again: the Municipal Art Society ran a public competition for a rebuilt station house, involving proposals by four different architectural firms. This does not include any track-level improvements at all: only the concourses and above-ground infrastructure are to be rebuilt, at a cost of $9.5 billion according to one of the four firms. The quotes from the architects and other backers of rebuilding use language like “great train station” and “gateway to the city,” and this is where the subtle hate of the city’s actual residents lies: why the focus on Penn Station? Why not a subway station?

The headline figure for the ridership at Penn Station is 600,000-650,000 a day, but this is a wild exaggeration. First, this includes both entries and exits, so the real number is half that. Second, about half of the number comes from subway riders, who these discussions always ignore. And third, there is a large number of passengers transferring between commuter rail and the subway who are doubled-counted; at subway stations, passengers transferring between lines are not even single-counted, since the subway counts entries at the turnstiles. Taking an average of boardings and alightings when both numbers are given or just boardings otherwise, Penn Station has 100,000 weekday LIRR riders, 80,000 weekday New Jersey Transit riders, and 170,000 weekday subway riders between the two stations. However, people transferring between the subway and commuter rail are double-counted.

In contrast, not counting any connecting passengers, there are 195,000 weekday Times Square subway riders. Without detailed data about transfer volumes at each station we can’t compare the two, but since the proposals for a better Penn Station focus only on the mainline station, the number of passengers served is certainly less than that of Times Square passengers.

Indeed, every single problem that the architects are trying to fix with Penn Station exists at Times Square. Times Square has low ceilings. The corridors between different lines and between the platforms and the exits are as labyrinthine as at Penn Station. In my experience rush hour passenger crowding levels within the station itself are comparable. Most platforms are wider, but nobody is proposing to widen platforms at Penn Station, and the 42nd Street Shuttle platforms are narrow and curvy and have been this way since 1918. The tickets are all integrated because the trains are all run by one operator, but again nobody who proposes to replace Penn Station is talking about the separate LIRR, NJ Transit, and Amtrak fiefs.

There are some legitimate changes that could be done if Penn Station is knocked down and rebuilt: instead of a hack involving paving over platforms to increase their width, the platform level could be rebuilt, two tracks at a time, with six approach tracks in each direction each splitting into two platform tracks, giving twelve tracks on six platforms; the train box appears about 140 meters wide, enough for 15-meter-wide platforms (compare 10 meters on the Chuo Line platform at Tokyo Station, where 28 trains per hour turn on two tracks).

However, the technical issues here are a lot less important than the fact that city leaders, architects, and even transit commentators assume that it is more important for New York to have a great train station used by 200,000 suburban commuters than for it to have a great subway station used by (at least) 200,000 city residents. It speaks to the utter hatred most city leaders have of the people who live in what they consider their fief or perhaps their playground. For most people in the city, there are more important transportation facilities, and even on a metro area level Penn Station isn’t unusually important.

This leaves the argument that Penn Station is a gateway to the city. But if the point is to impress a few thousand tourists, why not spend the same money on improving tourist amenities at Times Square, building more hotels? Or maybe building free housing for tens of thousands of homeless people (both the ones at Penn Station and the ones in the rest of the city) so that they stop being homeless and disturbing the rest of the population? If the point is to have great art, why not spend the money on employing artists to produce more work or to improve the aesthetics of the city’s ordinary spaces?

Of course, none of those options involves city leaders getting together and building important edifices with plaques with their names on them. So at the end the idea is to tax actual city inhabitants $10 billion to build a monument to the vision of city leaders. Large corporations pay their executives hundreds of millions a year in stock options and bonuses; governments cannot pay top political power brokers this way, so instead they spend large quantities of money on monuments that glorify them.