How Residential Blocks Act As Barriers

Two weeks ago, I found a board game store in Vancouver, and through it a variety of gaming events. The store is located about five blocks from my apartment, and I first saw it from a bus nearly two months after moving to Vancouver. It’s in the same neighborhood; to get from my apartment to the store requires walking on ordinary city streets with sufficient sidewalks and room to cross. However, those streets are residential, and so I have no reason to walk in that direction. It creates a split in what is formally the same neighborhood.

In my section of Vancouver, the two major throughfares are 4th Avenue and Broadway (9th). There is some retail elsewhere (e.g. on Cornwall, which is -1st, and even more so on Granville Island), but it’s not the continuous commercial development on the two major avenues. Even if it’s as big as Granville Island, it requires me to go specifically to it, whereas on 4th I can go until I see something I am interested in. Before I had wi-fi installed in my apartment, which is on 1st but which I got to by taking a 4th Avenue bus, I walked on 4th until I saw a cafe with free wi-fi and sat there.

This continuous retail ends roughly at the cross street I live on. It extends far east: on Broadway it’s to and beyond Cambie, but to the west it ends just west of Arbutus; on 4th, it extends east to about the Granville Bridge. As I said in my first post about Vancouver, the development on Broadway is fairly spiky, with peaks around Cambie, Granville, and Arbutus, but there’s also a base of 1- to 2-story retail. On 4th, the development is just continuous 1- to 2-story retail. The next major street west of Arbutus, Macdonald, has retail clusters at both Broadway and 4th, but on both avenues there’s a two-block residential gap between the Arbutus side and the Macdonald side. Living on the Arbutus side, I learned early that if I walk east there are cafes, stores, and restaurants immediately, and if I walk west there aren’t. The result is that even though in principle Macdonald is in my neighborhood whereas anything more than three blocks east of Arbutus isn’t, I go this far east of Arbutus much more than I go to Macdonald.

The main advantage of grid street networks over the gridless network of e.g. Providence is that they can provide continuous development, making it easy for people to spontaneously walk in all directions. In Providence spontaneity was provided only by the fact that I knew where the various retail clusters on the East Side were; in reality I would almost always go to Thayer rather than Wickenden or Wayland Square. In gridded cities neighborhoods are less formally defined around one center, but instead evolve more organically, since the center can shift over time and the street network doesn’t distinguish it from the boundary with the next neighborhood over.

On a broader level, this spontaneity is a good way to promote more access. If I can walk to interesting retail in more directions, there’s a higher chance I’ll find something that suits my interests, just as the gaming store does. It provides the same benefits as an increase in density or in travel speed, in this case specialization of retail.

Intercity Buses and Trains

In the three countries with the longest and traditionally largest HSR networks – Japan, Germany, and France – there is no large intercity bus network, with government regulations against the development of one. The US and Canada are in somewhat of the opposite situation – intercity buses are legal, but intercity trains are subject to a variety of regulations and operating practices raising operating costs so much that outside the thickest corridors they might as well be illegal. The best situation is in South Korea, which has well-developed networks of both buses and trains; the result is that on the Seoul-Daegu and Seoul-Busan city pairs, buses have 7-8% of the market and trains 67%.

On top of that, the express buses in North America do not get very high mode share. I’ve seen no reliable numbers, but when I looked at Megabus and Bolt schedules on the largest city pairs, the two carriers combined were about even with Amtrak, whose mode share on the entire NEC is 6% according to the Vision.

So why is Cap’n Transit suddenly telling us to love the bus (though he rejects the loaded term “love the bus”) and advocate for more investment into bus stations at various locations around the metro area? Doctrinaire libertarians have the excuse that the kind of regulations they are used to thinking of are the French regulations against domestic competition with rail and not the FRA’s safety rules. But the Cap’n of course knows exactly how pernicious FRA rules are. Since he thinks in terms of activist energy as the primary resource to manage, and not the government’s budget, this could be taken as a desperation at any attempt to reform Amtrak and the FRA.

But more likely, this comes from the fact that many intercity bus supporters fought (and lost) regulations against curbside pickups, which are the way Megabus, Bolt, and others could serve New York without paying for space at Port Authority, imitating the practices of the older Chinatown buses.

The immediate trigger for thinking where to place bus stops then is the impending loss of curbside space. Since buses are in many ways intermediate between cars and trains in terms of capacity and the point-to-point versus hub-and-spoke tradeoff, a bus expansion then has to mean finding more and more places to pick up. A legacy train station will run out of running line capacity long before it runs out of station track capacity, but a curbside bus stop uses valuable urban space and a bus station can and does run out of space.

And this is where buses stop being too useful. Frequency is freedom. Because the bus operators compete with one another, passengers need to be ticketed on a specific company, and that already cuts into frequency. On top of that, unlike trains, buses have a very large stop penalty, since they need to get off the highway and into the city. New York-Washington trains make intermediate stops in Philadelphia; express buses don’t. Even with dominant CBD stations, the frequency on the buses in the Northeast isn’t great: from New York, Bolt offers half-hourly service from to Philadelphia, hourly service to Boston, and less than hourly service to each of Baltimore and Washington, and all four city pairs have one dominant stop pair; Megabus frequency is hourly to Boston and hourly with a half-hourly peak to the other three.

Adding more stops means diluting this less-than-great frequency even further. It would work if bus stops were consolidated and people could buy one ticket good on any company, but the business model that has reduced ticket prices is probably not compatible with such cooperation. It would also work if the market share were 67%, but it isn’t and never will be.

The other problem is that people have not just origins but also destinations – and those destinations cluster in the CBDs, and the more the passenger is willing to pay, the likelier it is they’ll be traveling to the CBD. A train run from Woodside or Newark to New York will be full in one direction and empty in the other; the reason those trains can make money (they don’t in New York, but do in Tokyo, which is as CBD-dominant) is that they’re so full in the peak direction it makes up for lower reverse-peak occupancy. For intercity travel, this is harder. High-speed rail can make a profit on these asymmetric intercity runs because it’s so fast that it can cut costs that depend on travel time and not distance, such as operator wages, dispatcher wages, and some train maintenance. Buses don’t have that luxury, and need to be full in both directions, which favors CBD-to-CBD runs, or runs between neighborhoods that are likely to be destinations as well as origins (such as Chinatown-to-Chinatown runs).

Trains are unique among common-carrier transportation modes in that service uses corridors and not points. They are similar to cars this way: I-95 and the Northeast Corridor serve many overlapping city pairs. Bus services do not have this advantage, because the nature of an expressway network is such that they have to deviate to make a station stop, and in the largest cities this deviation is considerable; it can take an hour for a bus to navigate New York’s streets. This makes them more point-to-point, like planes, and on a corridor with four large cities on one line, this is much less efficient.

In general, I think a lot of the pro-bus attitude among liberals and general transit activists (as opposed to libertarians, who I will address in a future post) amounts to defeatism. We will never be able to improve government to the point that trains have high mode share, so let’s downgrade service. We will never be like France or Germany or Switzerland or Japan, so let’s import practices from China and Scotland.

Transit activists for the most part have not only political but also personal preferences for travel by transit. When I visited Buffalo, I took the Empire Service instead of flying. This creates a skewed impression for what’s good; to me, the Empire Service is a semi-useful service, even as to the average traveler it might as well not be there. If the existing service is straightforwardly a worse version of good service – such as a commuter train that should run faster and more frequently, or an intercity train that should be HSR – this is not a problem. But if it is different – such as a bus where a train is more appropriate, a light rail or dedicated subway line where an S-Bahn is appropriate, or even a rapid transit line in the wrong type of neighborhood – then the activism can be in a wrong direction.

The problem is that the 80-90% of travelers who drive are not currently agitating for the mode of transit most likely to get them to switch. Like transit users, they have at least to some extent made their peace with their current mode’s deficiency, and if anything they will demand more highway expansions even on corridors where transit is much more useful for the same cost. But we can take a step back and look at case studies from peer first-world countries and see that buses have mode shares in the single digits while trains can dominate corridors in the Northeast Corridor distance range.

Relative Costs of Transit Construction

The relative costs of different technologies of transit are not fixed. Although there are some rules of thumb for the ratio of tunneling cost to above-ground transit cost, the actual ratio depends on the city and project, and this would favor the mode that’s relatively cheaper. Likewise, the ratio of operating to capital costs is not always fixed, and of course long-term real interest rates vary between countries, and this could again favor some modes: more expensive construction and cheaper operations favor buses, the opposite situations favor rail.

In general, els cost 2-2.5 times as much as at-grade light rail, subways 4-6 times as much, according to Table 6 in this Flyvbjerg paper; Table 5, sourced to a different previous paper, estimates per-km costs, and has ratios of 1.8 and 4.5 respectively.

However, specifically in Vancouver, the premiums of elevated and underground construction appear much lower. The cost estimates for rail transit to UBC are $2.9 billion for an almost entirely underground extension of SkyTrain and $1.1 billion for at-grade light rail along Broadway, both about 12 km. Elevated construction is in the middle, though closer to the light rail end: the estimates for the two all-elevated SkyTrain extension alternatives into Surrey are $900 million for 6 km for rapid transit alternative 3 and $1.95 billion for 15.5 km for alternative 1. The under-construction Evergreen Line, which is 11 km long of which about 2 are in tunnel, is $1.4 billion.

In the rest of Canada, this seems to be true as well, though the evidence is more equivocal since the projects that are considered above-ground are often elevated rather than at-grade. The Canadian above-ground projects that Rob Ford’s Eglinton subway is compared with are not wholly above ground. Calgary’s West LRT, which with the latest cost overrun is $1.4 billion (a multiple of the preexisting three-line system) for 8 km, includes a 1.5 km tunnel, a short trench, and some elevated segments. Edmonton’s North LRT is $750 million for 3.3 km, of which about 1 km is in tunnel and the rest at-grade. But while it’s hard to find the exact ratio because of those mixed projects, the costs are not consistent with the ratios found in Flyvbjerg’s sources.

Outside Canada, those ratios seem to hold up better. American above-ground transit projects, such as the Portland Milwaukie extension and the Washington Silver Line, are as expensive as Calgary and Edmonton’s light rail, but American subways are much more expensive than Toronto’s Eglinton subway ($325 million/km, 77% underground and the rest elevated): Manhattan tunneling is more difficult, so its $1.3-1.7 billion/km cost may not be representative, but conversely, BART to San Jose’s $4 billion for about 8 km of tunnel is for tunneling partially under a wide railroad right-of-way, with no crossings of older subway infrastructure as is the case for Eglinton at Yonge.

Conversely, French tunneling costs are comparable to or lower than Canadian ones, but at-grade light rail is far less expensive than in North America. The RER E extension was at least as of 2009 budgeted at €1.58-2.18 billion for 8 km of tunnel (see PDF-page 79 here; this excludes €620 million in improvements to the existing commuter lines the tunnel will be linked with) – somewhere between the per-km costs of Vancouver and Toronto subways, but in a much denser environment with more infrastructure to cross. But the cost range for Parisian trams is much lower, about €30-50 million per km, in line with the subway:tram cost ratio of 4-6; the cost range in other French cities tends to be a little lower.

What this means is that in Canada in general, and in Vancouver in particular, questions about what mode to build should have higher-end answers than elsewhere. It doesn’t mean that the Eglinton subway is justified, but it does bias suburban rail lines in Vancouver toward elevated SkyTrain extensions rather than light rail, and inner extensions toward SkyTrain subways. For the same cost of building a subway under Broadway, Translink couldn’t build too much additional light rail; it could build two lines, say on Broadway and 41st, or maybe three if both non-Broadway routes are short, but certainly nothing like the entire network that SkyTrain opponents believe is the alternative, citing European tramway construction costs.

Immigration Choice

Houston booster and blogger Tory Gattis has a theory of what he calls opportunity urbanism, i.e. a focus on upward mobility as the primary goal of urban policy. Responding to a post of his on The Urbanophile, in which the comment thread veered to a comparison of Houston and Vancouver, I noted that the US is actually much less upwardly mobile than Canada (follow links to studies here, e.g. this, with the father-son income elasticity on PDF-page 34), and that the Joel Kotkin report about opportunity urbanism that Tory contributed to does not, in fact, bring up any upward mobility facts arguing that Houston is at all better than the rest of the US.

The response, from both Tory and Aaron, was a series of platitudes that immigrants choose to come to the US, so it must have a lot of upward mobility: “Houston is revealed preference in action,” “America is still the brightest beacon for immigrants all over the world,” “given the huge preference for the US that international migrants show, it’s tough to believe they are all so dumb about their future prospects,” “America is such the promised land that millions risk everything to come here illegally.”

The first step in failing to combat any social problem is failing to recognize one exists. The US loves to congratulate itself about its acceptance of immigrants and to compare itself favorably with Europe’s racism; somehow, the facts that hate crimes happen on both sides of the border and that in the last few years Al Qaida has successfully recruited American-born Muslims do not count. Even the lack of visas for unskilled workers in the US, and the stingy visas for skilled ones, turn into an America-is-great argument, which is exceptionally inconsistent from someone who, on issues of domestic migration, trumpets Houston’s lack of zoning and blasts the restrictions on development on the coasts (which can be thought of as immigration restrictions, only space is auctioned by market pricing and not by quotas for immigrants). To reiterate what I said last year, good policy for integration is to treat immigrants as people rather than as either a problem or a solution to a problem.

As for what international migrants prefer, what they (we) consider when choosing where to move to is not just what the intergenerational income coefficient is. Although I did know the US was much less socially mobile than most European countries even before applying to grad school there, I had enough other reasons to want to move there. With the caveat that what I know comes from direct experience, which definitely skews toward white and Chinese professionals entering via the student route, here is a laundry list of factors that matter:

– Where we speak the language. The entire Anglosphere is a top destination for intercontinental migration, just as France is a top destination for West Africans. Observe this table of immigrant population by OECD country. A key clue that language matters is the difference between the various Scandinavian countries, which are quite similar to each other. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have very similar languages, arguably just dialects of one language, and on top of that, Finns learn Swedish in school (Finland is the top source of immigrants to Sweden). Finland has a different language, which at least locally is considered very difficult to learn; it also has a much lower foreign-born percentage than the others.

– Where our skills match up with the local business clusters. The US happens to be strong in academics and fields that come out of it, like biotech, and those tend to be very porous to international migration everywhere.

– How easily we can elbow our way into the local social networks. This is not the same as domestic mobility. For example, my experience with Ivy social networks is uniformly positive; even when I’m the only non-American in the room, which is frequently the case at the gaming groups I’m involved in, I’m treated like a human being and not like a freakshow. It’s very easy to assimilate to the educated New York subculture if one wants to. But this is not true for domestic migrants: my It’s Complicated, a Kansan Harvard student of middle-middle-class background, does not feel as welcome in this subculture as I do, and tells me that at Harvard people treat her like a Real American, i.e. not a real Bostonian or New Yorker. The correlation between social mobility for immigrants and social mobility for the native-born is far from perfect.

– The presence of a preexisting community of immigrants from the same culture (not terribly relevant to me, but critical to others). This favors large cities and traditional gateways, like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Miami. I’ve read a few case studies and stories of Brazilians in the Boston area; once the first few come in, news of their success spreads to their hometown, and more people come in to the same area. One good reference is God Needs No Passport; there are others I no longer remember. Likewise, Turks prefer Germany, and former Yugoslavians prefer Germany or the rest of Germanic Europe.

– What’s nearby. The US has a lot of immigration, but a huge fraction of it is Mexicans (right on the border), Puerto Ricans (can come in without restriction), Central Americans (close and can speak the language as many other immigrants), and non-Hispanic Anglophone Caribbeans. Likewise, in Germany the top sources of immigrants, excluding intra-first world migration, are Turkey, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, and Russia.

– Perceptions of opportunity and wealth, which aren’t exactly the same as opportunity and wealth. The US of the imaginations of Israelis and Singaporeans is not the same as the real US. For example, until I started hanging out in American political forums in 2002, I had no idea the US didn’t have universal health care. It somewhat blurs issues like social network porousness, but those issues have a real impact on whether one can get a job, and this information is somewhat more easily available to outsiders.

– Perceptions of how welcoming the society is. The US, Canada, and Australia are more welcoming than Europe (at least if you’ve gotten a visa – in many categories it’s easier to get into the EU than into the US), and successfully pretend to be even more welcoming than they are. Many year ago, a Pakistani-Canadian commenter expressed the Canadian attitude with the saying “Other people are racist; our minorities really are lazy.”

Take all of the above with a grain of salt. Not that the numbers I bring up are wrong, but my thinking of which numbers are relevant comes from a specific set of experiences, and what someone whose primary social network is Mexican immigrants to California may have a different idea of what’s important. We’re all very confident about our knowledge about things that there’s nobody around to correct us (and I’m saying this very self-consciously).

That said, I do know these issues a lot better than the average native-born American. To me, the question of where to live was nontrivial. For political reasons, circa the height of the Iraq War, I wanted to go to Canada, but I also knew that the US had better grad schools, and now to the extent that I have control over where I live, my social network is Northeastern.

The most troubling part of the entire exchange above was the invocation of “Revealed preference.” Ordinarily, this is a matter of technical questions about people’s mode choice in real-world situation, and is great at predicting how people will behave if the transportation network changes (e.g. a new transit line is built). It’s an awful way of trying to divine, based on migration flows, whether a country offers more opportunities to people who were born poor in it. Too many intervening variables, too many things most native-born people don’t really see. For that matter, even narrowly, with transportation, it doesn’t answer the question of “What people want?” because it’s much broader than the question of how many people will actually ride a new rail link assuming no change in broader transportation and urban policy.

There’s a serious problem with a discourse about anyone who is not part of the discourse. Transit managers’ discourse about riders is at least tempered by the need to build projects that meet ridership projections. With more social and demographic questions, this is not true, because Americans can bully their way into telling themselves they are doing better than immigrants think they are; if the literature on the subject suggests otherwise, they can abuse terminology and cry “Revealed preference.”

Nobody Likes Riding North American Commuter Rail

In New York, two neighborhoods at the edge of the city have both subway and commuter rail service: Wakefield and Far Rockaway. Wakefield has 392 inbound weekday Metro-North boardings, and 4,955 weekday subway boardings. Far Rockaway has 158 riders (an average of boardings and alightings) and 4,750 subway boardings. Although both Wakefield and Far Rockaway are served by the 2 and A, which run express in Manhattan, those trains make many local stops farther out – in fact the 2 and A are the top two routes in New York for total number of stations – and are much slower than commuter rail: the 2 takes 50 minutes to get to Times Square while Metro-North gets to Grand Central within 25-30 minutes; the A takes about 1:05 to get to Penn Station, the LIRR about 55 minutes.

Vancouver, whose commuter rail service runs 5 daily roundtrips, all peak-hour, peak-direction, has a weekday ridership of 10,500. The Evergreen Line, duplicating the inner parts of the commuter rail service, is expected to get 70,000.

Caltrain, a service of intermediate quality between Vancouver’s peak-only trains and New York’s semi-frequent off-peak electrified service, has an intermodal station at Millbrae, which is now BART’s southern terminal. Millbrae has 5,970 BART exits per weekday versus 2,880 Caltrain boardings. And BART takes a circuitous route around the San Bruno Mountain and only serves San Francisco and the East Bay, while Caltrain takes a direct route to just outside the San Francisco CBD and serves Silicon Valley in the other direction.

The MBTA provides both subway and commuter rail service, with several intermodal stations: Forest Hills, Quincy Center, Braintree, Porter Square, Malden, JFK-UMass. In all cases, ridership levels on the subway are at least 30 times as high as on commuter rail. Rapid transit and commuter rail stations are close together at the edge of the Green Line’s D line, a former commuter line; the line’s outer terminus, Riverside, gets 2,192 weekday boardings, while the nearest commuter rail station, Auburndale, gets 301.

Across those systems and several more, such as Chicago’s Metra and Toronto’s GO Transit (no link, it’s private data), the commuter rail stations located within city limits, even ones not directly adjacent to a rapid transit station, usually get little ridership (there are some exceptions, such as Ravenswood on Chicago’s UP-N Line). The suburban stations beyond reasonable urban transit commute range are much busier.

Of course, this is just a North American problem. In Japan, where commuter rail and urban rapid transit are seamlessly integrated, people ride commuter rail even when the subway is an option. Consult this table of ridership by line and station for JR East lines in Tokyo: not only would any investigation of ridership on the main lines (e.g. Tokaido on PDF-page 1, Chuo on PDF-page 8) show that their ridership distribution is much more inner-heavy than in New York and Boston, but also stations with transfers to the subway can have quite a lot of riders. Nakano on the Chuo Line, at the end of Tokyo Metro’s Tozai Line, has 247,934 daily boardings and alightings, comparable to its subway traffic of 133,919 boardings.

Although my various posts about commuter rail industry practices focus partially on operating costs, this is not directly what makes people choose a slower subway over a faster commuter train. Rather, it’s a combination of the following problems:

1. Poor service to microdestinations. Rapid transit gets you anywhere; North American commuter rail gets you to the CBD. For people in Wakefield who are going anywhere but the immediate Grand Central or East 125th Street area, Metro-North is not an option. Station spacing is too wide, which means the choice of destinations even from a station that isn’t closed is more limited, and trains usually make just one CBD stop.

2. Poor transfers to other lines. The transfers usually require paying an extra fare and walking long distances from one set of platforms to another.

3. High fares. In the German-speaking world, and in Paris proper, fares are mode-neutral. It costs the same to ride the RER as the Metro, except for a handful of recent Metro extensions to the suburbs that postdate the RER, such as to La Defense. In Japan, JR East fares are comparable to subway fares, though there are no free transfers. In North America this is usually not the case: it costs much more to ride commuter rail than to ride a parallel subway or light rail line.

4. Low frequency. This is partly a result of low ridership based on the previous factors, partly a tradition that was never reformed, and partly a matter of very high operating costs. With low enough off-peak frequency (Wakefield and Far Rockaway are served hourly midday), commuter rail can achieve cost recovery similar to that of subways, and in some cities even surpass it. People who have no other options will ride hourly trains.

None of those problems is endemic to mainline rail. They’re endemic to North American mainline rail culture, and in some cases to labor practices. It’s all organization – it’s not a problem of either electronics or concrete, which means that the cost to the taxpayers of fixing it, as opposed to the political cost to the manager who tries to change the culture, is low.

The electronics and concrete do matter when it comes to building extensions – and this is where the ARC Alt G vs. Alt P debate comes from, among many others – but even commuter rail systems that do not need such extensions underperform. For example, Toronto does not need a single meter of commuter rail tunnel. Philadelphia, which already got most of the concrete it needs and partially fixed the microdestination problem, gets somewhat more commuter rail ridership in areas where people have alternatives, but frequency on the branches is still pitiful and inner-city stop spacing outside Center City is still too wide, leading to disappointing ridership.

Another way to think about it is that infrastructure should be used for everything, and not segregated into local transit and railroad super-highways that aren’t very accessible to locals. There are eight tracks connecting Manhattan directly with Jamaica, but the four used by the subway are far busier than the four used almost exclusively by suburbanites. Something similar is true of the Metro-North trunk, and some MBTA and Metra lines – the commuter rail infrastructure is redundant with rapid transit and gives very high nominal capacity, but in reality much of it is wasted. In this way, the mainline rapid transit concept including the Paris RER, the Germanic S-Bahn, and the Japanese commuter rail network, far outperforms, because it mixes local and regional traffic, creating service that everyone can use.

Capital-Centric Countries and Regions

Here is a table of various developed countries, as well as some regions of the US, based on how dominated they are by their largest respective cities. The table includes the percentage of the population in the top metro area, and the ratio of the top metro area’s population to that of metro areas 2-4. Different countries have data from different years, but within each row, the data is from the same year. Of course the definitions of metro areas are not consistent from country to country, but I’ve tried to use the more expansive definitions where they are available.

Area Pop’n 1st % 1st/2nd 1st/3rd 1st/4th
South Korea 48.8m 48% 6.45 9.34 16.26
California 37.7m 48% 2.36 5.76 7.46*
US Northeast** 65.8m 34% 2.55 2.92 3.39
Japan 127.8m 28% 1.9 4 6.38
Texas 25.7m 27% 1.11 3.14 3.77
UK 59m 23% 3.72 5.36 5.96
France 61.4m 20% 5.71 6.79 9.56
Germany 82.3m 14% 1.93 2.08 2.17
Spain 45.6m 13.5% 1.35 2.67 4.51

* Sacramento excludes the one county it has in Nevada.
** The Northeast includes Washington, the states to its north and east, and its suburbs in Virginia and West Virginia.

I could not find data for Switzerland, but the Canton of Zurich is 17% of national population; including the neighboring cantons of Schaffhausen, Zug, and Schwyz (all with Zurich S-Bahn service) raises this to 22%; including also Aargau, also with Zurich S-Bahn service, raises this to 29%.

The takeaway from this table is that our usual notions of which regions are more capital-centric (France, UK, Japan, South Korea) and which are less (Germany, most regions of the US) are more than just about the capital’s share of the population. Germany’s difference with France is not just the largest metro area’s share of the population; it’s also the difference between political centralization around Paris and the polycentric economy of Germany, and this is seen in the second-city shares. (And on top of this, the Rhine-Ruhr region is itself highly polycentric, and the stricter definitions of metro area break it into three.)

In the Northeastern US and California, we see huge largest-cities, but also strong second cities. This is true both demographically and politically, and this is why we can expect travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco or between New York and Washington to be much more symmetric than in France or the UK.

Sanity Checks on HSR Ridership

If you multiply the populations of the metro areas served as a proxy for HSR ridership, then by comparison to Shinkansen lines as well as the AVE, New York-Washington traffic should be about 15-20 million passengers per year. It’s even higher if we include Madrid-Seville, an overperformer with more ridership than Madrid-Barcelona. This is just between the two metro areas, excluding additional passengers to Philadelphia. This raises two questions: what does the data suggest about modifying product-of-populations as a proxy, perhaps to account for distance? And, more importantly, is such ridership realistic for the Northeast Corridor?

First, at least on the Shinkansen and the AVE, in the range of distances up to nearly 4 hours, there’s no effect of distance on ridership, especially if we combine air and rail ridership. (We’re trying to apply this analysis to a city pair on which trains will take not much more than an hour and a half; end-to-end air traffic can be assumed to be zero.) Beyond that, Tokyo-Fukuoka air and rail ridership combined still underperforms shorter-distance links. One explanation is that as distance increases, total travel volume decreases, but rail and then air market share grows at the expense of cars and buses, and in the 1.5-4-hour range, these effects more or less cancel out. At longer distances, there is no longer much highway travel for trains and planes to poach.

With distance ignored, large cities consistently underperform small cities. This is not a surprise based on SNCF’s refined gravity model of ridership, in which travel volume is proportional not to the product of the city populations, but to the product raised to an exponent lower than 1. SNCF uses an empirically derived exponent, between 0.8 and 0.9, and AVE and Shinkansen data is indeed more consistent with that range. Some city pairs still underperform in a way that can’t be explained by population and distance, such as Tokyo-Okayama, but the exponent perfectly explains why Tokyo-Osaka underperforms a model with exponent 1.

So what about the Northeast Corridor? Current Amtrak ridership between New York and Washington is 1.74 million, but that’s just between Penn Station and Union Station. Amtrak provides its top 10 city pairs in the Northeast in its Master Plan, which include New York-Baltimore and New York-BWI, at 650,000 between them. I don’t know the ridership on more minor city pairs, such as those involving Newark or Stamford. I would guess the total including those is about 3-3.5 million; this is based just on extrapolating that of the top-10 markets on the southern half of the line just under half the ridership is between the New York and Washington metro areas, and applying a fudge factor to account for the fact that secondary markets not involving New York-Washington are less likely to make the top 10.

In contrast, based on comparison to the Shinkansen and AVE, we should expect HSR ridership of 15-20 million, about 5 times what I believe the present ridership is. (In fact, based on comparison to the lower-fare KTX, it should be if anything higher.) This is despite the fact that the current trip time is either 2:47 or 3:25 whereas with HSR it would be about 1:35. The importance of this is that we can’t expect induced demand to quintuple ridership out of halving trip time, but instead we need to explain this based on competition with cars and buses.

Part of this competition has to be about fares. Amtrak charges very high fares (see the route performance report) – on average, 28 cents per km on the Regional, and 48 on the Acela. Shinkansen fares average 23 cents per km on Tokaido, 20 on Sanyo, and 24 on the JR East network. That said, the shorter distance of New York-Washington means that absolute fares are not higher, particularly on the cheaper option. However, high fare per km does mean the trip is less competitive with cheap express buses and with driving.

This comes in addition to travel time. The Regional is an hour faster than Megabus; HSR that is three hours faster Megabus, especially if it’s also cheaper than today’s Regional, could make a serious dent in the Megabus network. Express buses already have trouble with secondary markets, because those can’t piggyback on primary markets as intermediate stops the way they can with trains. Better trains could poach the express bus market and reduce it to where it was ten years ago.

At the range of the top-performing city pairs, most people take trains rather than use roads. I do not have data for individual city pairs in Japan (but see here for Korea, where HSR overperforms, perhaps due to lower fares, which are about 15 cents per km before discounts), but at the distance of New York-Washington, 360 km, trains get a little more than half the total mode share and cars get the other half. Amtrak’s 2010 Vision says that the current rail mode share on the entire Northeast Corridor is 6%; it does not say what the share on New York-Washington is, but I’ve seen 14% elsewhere (no reference, sorry), and the Vision says that incremental Master Plan improvements will raise it to 26%. Of course going from 14% to 50% also involves induced demand, and this means the expected rise in ridership is a higher factor, potentially a factor of 5.

I’m not going to try using this method to estimate shorter-distance ridership, because then car ownership, sprawl levels, etc. become a much bigger issue, and quick-and-dirty sanity checks don’t work and are no replacement for serious ridership studies. But we can apply the method to other longer-distance portions of the Northeast Corridor. If we use the lower end of the scale, we get New York-Washington at 15 million annual passengers or a little more, New York-Boston at 15 million or a little less, Boston-Washington at 6 million, Boston-Philadelphia at 5 million.

As a secondary sanity check, the Boston-Washington air market is about 2.5 million, and for HSR to get 2.5 times as much ridership on a formerly air-dominated city pair as the pre-HSR air travel volume is the same performance Eurostar got.

All four metro areas should be interpreted as broadly as possible, to maintain comparability with Japanese metro areas, whose definition is loose and roughly comparable to the American combined statistical area. So there are just four cities on the Northeast Corridor, really. This is still not all the ridership there is – there is still New York-Philadelphia and Philadelphia-Washington, I’m just less comfortable making even an ex-recto estimate. But even without those two potentially high-ridership city pairs, we get high passenger density on all segments of the line.

Update: although I have not found city-to-city ridership data from France, I have found region-to-region numbers from Paris to the southwest. I also have some air traffic volumes from which we can deduce air/rail markets: on Paris-Nice the TGV has a 31% share of the air/rail market; on Paris-Marseille I’ve seen numbers ranging from 60% to 83%, and for this post’s purposes I’m going to assume 70%. We get air/rail traffic numbers from Paris to Marseille (5.2 million, but this grows to 9.2 million if we assume 83% TGV share and declines to 3.9 million if we assume 60%), Nice (4.2 million), Midi-Pyrenees (3.2 million), Aquitaine (5.5 million), and Poitou-Charentes (3.3 million). With the exception of the Midi-Pyrenees number, which represents a fairly long distance, all overperform the Shinkansen. Ignoring distance as always and using an exponent of 0.8, Paris-Marseille overperforms Tokyo-Sendai by a factor of 1.85, Paris-Nice by 2.21, Paris-Midi-Pyrenees by 0.77 (i.e. it underperforms), Paris-Aquitaine by 1.26, and Paris-Poitou-Charentes by 1.22. Per-kilometer fares are much lower than on Shinkansen – indeed SNCF’s total revenue, both high- and low-speed, divided just by TGV passenger-km, is €0.14 – and this can contribute to the higher traffic.

Paris-Nice can be explained as a major leisure corridor, similar to the unusually high passenger traffic to Florida or Las Vegas. But bear in mind that Nice and Marseille are metro areas and not entire regions, and under any assumption that Bordeaux and Toulouse get a greater share of the travel to Paris than the rural areas in their respective regions, they will overperform by a substantial margin. Although French metro areas are defined less loosely than Japanese ones, which can skew the Marseille and Nice numbers, the Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrenees numbers are if anything defined too loosely due to the inclusion of outright rural departments.

Carolyn Maloney’s International HSR Proposal

Carolyn Maloney, the Congresswoman representing Manhattan’s East Side, gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which she called for high-speed rail between New York and Canadian cities. She did not specify which cities, but presumably those are Montreal and Toronto. The article quoted Andrew Cuomo as saying that connecting New York to Montreal and Toronto would be “transformative,” though it did not mention that Cuomo killed plans for HSR from New York to Buffalo. It is unclear to me whether Maloney is serious, or merely as serious as Cuomo; for the purposes of this post, let us assume that she is serious. Is it justifiable to build HSR from New York to Montreal and Toronto?

Long-time readers will know that I am skeptical of international HSR lines. But let me explain why I think New York-Toronto could be successful, while New York-Montreal could not.

First, perhaps because of the common language, the travel markets from the US to Montreal underperform those to Toronto. According to Statscan data, Toronto has about three times as many travelers to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and the other top metro areas in the US as Montreal does. The two cities’ metro area population ratio is only about 1.5:1; this is indeed the ratio of their travel markets to leisure destinations such as Las Vegas and Miami. US data generally points to higher numbers, sometimes by a substantial margin; it also points to a ratio of about 2.5-3:1 between Toronto and Montreal travel, this time even to Las Vegas and Miami. (US data excludes planes with up to 60 seats, but these are only about 20% of New York-Toronto departures, and of course a smaller proportion of seats.)

In addition, New York-Toronto may be in a similar situation to New York-London, in which the two cities’ common industry (finance) leads to more business travel. For some evidence of this effect, the Canadian data shows that Calgary and Houston, the two countries’ respective oil capitals, are each other’s top air market on the other side of the border. The same is of course true of financial capitals New York and Toronto, though as the largest cities in their respective countries, this is less surprising. But we should not overinterpret this effect: the New York-Toronto air market is still just 900,000 people a year (according to Canada) or 1.5 million (according to the US), though it far beats New York-Montreal’s 300,000 or 600,000.

Even 1.5 million times an induced demand factor is not enough to build HSR by itself. We could add existing travel volumes from New York to Niagara Falls and from Toronto to Buffalo, but most likely they are not enough by themselves.

The main reason New York-Toronto could be defensible is that a large majority of the New York-Toronto construction would not be done just for New York-Toronto travel. HSR on the Empire Corridor, up to Buffalo, is justifiable entirely based on domestic traffic. At the other end, the Lakeshore West corridor, which already can sustain medium speeds (GO’s top speed is 150 km/h), should be electrified and retrofitted with passing sidings based entirely on local commuter traffic. There are about 100 km between Buffalo and Hamilton, and 160 between Buffalo and Toronto, compared with 850 between New York and Toronto. Since HSR fares and operating profits roughly scale with distance traveled, the operating revenue of the lower-trafficked 100 km between Buffalo and Hamilton should really be multiplied by 8.5. If New York-Toronto traffic is about 3.5 million a year, a similar multiple of preexisting air traffic as Eurostar, then we can expect the construction of the 100 km to add about 3 billion passenger-km a year; 30 million passenger-km of revenue per km of route to be constructed is very good, comparable to the Sanyo Shinkansen. If we need to use New York-Toronto traffic to justify even Toronto-Hamilton upgrades, then we’ll have 18.5 million passenger-km of revenue per km of construction, comparable to the JR East Shinkansen network.

Of course these passenger densities, and hence returns on investment, are not available to the full line; they’re only available to this last link completing New York-Toronto. To enjoy such favorable ratio the preexisting routes must already be in place. We cannot use the 30 million passenger-km/km figure to justify building New York-Buffalo as a first step toward New York-Toronto. If Maloney intends to do that, then she is setting the line up for failure; 3.5 million passenger-km/km is too little. Amtrak has about the same on the Northeast Corridor, from which it squeezes operating profits, but the capital construction was paid by private railroads between 1831 and 1917; building a greenfield line for this performance is unwarranted. At most, we can use it to add to domestic traffic in case the merits of a domestic line are close to good enough but not quite.

New York-Montreal does not have the same advantage as New York-Toronto. Not only is the travel volume much smaller to being with, but also it would require building about 360 km of route, in the rolling hills of Vermont, to create a link of 590 km. Very little of that 360 km is a reasonable commuter rail route by itself – on the line I sketched to measure distance, only 30. So at best this is 330 out of 590. If we attempt the same calculation as for New York-Toronto, we obtain just 2.7 million passenger-km/km. Moreover, the intermediate markets are much weaker than US-Niagara Falls or Buffalo-Toronto. For now, HSR between New York and Montreal should remain an unfulfilled dream of Montreal boosters.

Of course, it’s possible that Maloney just emphasized the possible connections to Canada, and her actual drive is going to be Empire Corridor HSR, which is a welcome change from Cuomo’s opposition. Canadians do not vote in US elections. In that case, a link to Toronto would become stronger, because of the piggybacking on preexisting New York-Buffalo HSR. The line would hinge entirely on constructibility over the river and border control issues then. International links underperform, but sometimes they are short enough relative to the possibility to be worth it.

Quick Note: Are Freeways Safer?

Freeways are, in principle, much safer than roads with at-grade crossings. With postwar design standards, they eliminate the frictions that are responsible to a vast majority of accidents: grade crossings, left turns, opposite traffic (since they have medians by design), and so on. They also maintain higher design speeds and capacity than less safe local streets. But a more interesting question for policy purposes than “are freeways safer?” is “does the construction of freeways increase road safety?”

For some evidence that the answer is no, see PDF-page 3 of a John Adams paper from 1987 arguing for the continued primacy of Smeed’s Law. Traffic deaths per unit of vehicle distance driven had declined in both the US and UK at a rate following a multi-decade log-linear trend: 3.3% per year in the US, 4.7% in the UK. Regardless of whether Adams’ theory is correct, we can compare actual death rates to the trendline to see what happened. In the US, where the data goes farther back, the greatest period of freeway construction started in the mid-1950s and ended in about 1970; this was also a period in which traffic deaths increased, even more than the trendline based on the explosive growth in driving predicts. Of course the Interstate system also led to traffic growth on at-grade arterials, but the greatest construction growth was in freeways, and on top of this suburban sprawl meant more people would be driving on both the new freeways and the older parkways.

The Smeed’s Law explanation of this is as follows: drivers compensate for the greater safety of freeways by driving more carelessly, on both the freeways and the connecting local roads. The freeways are still safer, but the presence of any safety-improving technology will translate entirely to higher speed and capacity (i.e. drivers keep less distance than they would otherwise), and more careless driving.

There may be other explanations out there – for example, the construction of more roads will cause more dangerous vehicles to start circulating that would not otherwise. These include heavy trucks, and also cars piloted by poor drivers who would not have driven if the construction of an expansive highway had redirected development in such a way that more driving would be needed.

But in either case, what this means is that even though a freeway upgrade of a notoriously unsafe road will make it safer, it will not make the overall road network safer. To argue by analogy with congestion pricing, it is possible that the only way to bend the curve and accelerate the downward trend of vehicle deaths, beyond reducing driving, is to make it more expensive to drive unsafely. For example, insurance requirements could be raised from $25,000 to the rough insurance value of human life in the US, which is in the millions. (The same should be true of any transportation system, but buses and trains are much safer for their passengers than cars.)

Are Forecasts Improving?

In response to my takedown of Reason, specifically my puzzlement at the estimates of inaccuracy in traffic forecasts, alert reader Morten Skou Nicolaisen sent me several papers on the subject. While there is past research about traffic shortfalls, for example this paper by Flyvbjerg (hosted on a site opposing the Honolulu rapid transit project), Flyvbjerg’s references are papers from twenty years ago, describing mostly subway projects in developing countries, but also rapid transit and light rail projects in the US built in the 1970s and 80s. Unlike Flyvbjerg, who posits that planners are lying, the authors of the papers he references have other theories: currency exchange rate swings, the challenges of underground construction, inaccurate forecasts of future economic growth, outdated traffic models based on postwar road traffic models. See section 6 of Walmsley and Pickett, and sections 3.3 and 4.2 of Fouracre, Allport, and Thomson (see also the range of costs for underground construction in developing countries in section 3.3).

The question is then whether things have improved since 1990. Since the first study to point out to cost overruns and ridership shortfalls in the US was by Pickrell, the question is whether post-Pickrell lines have the same problems, or whether there are better outcomes now, called a Pickrell effect.

The answer, as far as ridership is concerned, is very clearly that ridership shortfalls are no longer a major problem. See recent analysis by Hardy, Doh, Yuan, Zhou, and Button; see specifically figure 1. Cost overruns also seem to be in decline and are no longer big, although a multiple regression analysis finds no Pickrell effect for cost, just for ridership.

In particular, there is no comparison between projects from 30 years ago, most of which are underground, and present-day developed-world high-speed and urban rail lines.