High-Speed Rail’s Role in Decongesting Airports

One common argument for building HSR is that it will help decongest airports, by displacing high-volume short-distance flights. This can result in a permanent reduction in air travel, reducing environmental impact, or a diversion of capacity to longer-distance flights, or perhaps a combination of both. The question is then how much air travel can be diverted.

The main source I’m using for this is the Office of Aviation Analysis’s master table of all lower-48 origin-and-destination city pairs with at least 10 passengers per day (table 6, 3rd quarter of ’11). The data is less than perfect, because passengers connecting from a domestic flight to an international flight count as O&D passengers, but for our purposes it is good enough.

As a first filter, we can see that out of a million passengers per day, 206,000 are flying distance of up to 500 miles, and 390,000 are flying up to 773, the New York-Chicago distance. Those 39% of travelers constitute a much smaller portion of emissions than 39% but a larger portion of planes. Furthermore, not all can be realistically moved to trains: at the upper end of this range, HSR can compete with air but not decimate service the way it can on shorter trips, and on top of that many city pairs are not located on any realistic HSR corridor.

So as a second filter, let us construct a table, by major city (i.e. the top 7 O&D cities minus Las Vegas), of what the total volume of travel is to HSR-viable markets:

City <2.5h <3h <3.5h <4h <4.5h <5h
New York (153386) 7.4% 10.7% 15.7% 17.6% 20.6% 32.2%
LA Area (132556) 11.6% 26.4% 26.4% 26.4% 26.4% 26.4%
Bay Area (103752) 0% 18.1% 18.4% 18.4% 30.5% 33.3%
Chicago (103540) 9.5% 16.5% 16.7% 19.9% 22.8% 34.1%
Was.-Bal. (97234) 5.4% 16.7% 22.5% 23.2% 29% 31.3%
Boston (75329) 8.7% 21.3% 23.3% 26.7% 28.6% 31.8%

Although HSR can get nontrivial mode share against air even if it takes 5 hours, it does not reduce air traffic at this range, but instead induces demand. So although HSR can produce competition for almost a third of the air traffic coming into the largest US cities, it cannot divert as much air traffic. Meaningful diversion occurs at much shorter range, perhaps 3 hours, and even that diversion is incomplete. When the 3-hour Eurostar opened, Paris-London air traffic was permanently halved, from 4.3 million per year before the Chunnel opened to about 2 million after; once the travel time was further reduced to 2:15 with the opening of High Speed 1, it further decreased, to about 1.3 million on the dominant Heathrow/CDG airport pair.

What this means is that for decongesting airports, the meaningful column is the second from the left, for trips up to 3 hours. We immediately see that HSR can only have a small effect on New York, but conversely can do a great deal in Los Angeles. New York is at a further penalty since the hub system ensures it will remain an international gateway, and so traffic between two different cities still needs to pass through.

For New York, the best things that can be done then are to use larger planes on domestic flights, and find relief airports. In Japan, the domestic flights use widebodies, sometimes even 747s, and this has enabled Tokyo-Sapporo to grow to become the world’s highest-capacity air city pair. In the US there are more airlines and the city pairs are less thick, but there is still room for larger planes than 737s and 757s. In the other direction, faster LIRR service could turn Islip into a better relief airport, but it would still have to overcome the stigma of being too far. HSR could also turn Philadelphia into a reasonable option: using the Airport Line and a freight corridor to the west to bypass some of the Wilmington Line’s curves and reduce travel time should be considered as a full build-out option, and would also put PHL about 45 minutes away from New York.

The New York versus Los Angeles difference is not too surprising once we consider where their respective second cities are located. San Francisco is 700 km from Los Angeles, Boston and Washington are 350 km from New York and Philadelphia 150. Elizabeth of CARRD tells me that on LA-SF the current mode split is 50% air, 50% car. The situation in the Northeast is different – making reasonable assumptions on seat occupancy, even on NY-DC and NY-Boston more people take a bus than fly.

Update: Anonymouse in comments brings a good point about the distribution of short-haul travel within airport systems: there is often proportionately more of it at the secondary airports. Providence actually has less short-distance traffic than Boston and Midway is about even with O’Hare, but in California, much more short-distance traffic is at the secondary airports.

The five LA-area airports between them have 27.5% of their domestic traffic within 3-hour radius, but this splits as 21% at LAX, 35% at Long Beach, 37% at Santa Ana, 40% at Ontario, and 63% at Burbank. The three Bay Area airports between them have 19% of their domestic traffic going to LA and a total of 35% within 5-hour train radius, but this splits as 14% and 29% at SFO, 27% and 48% at San Jose, and 35% and 57% at Oakland.

Notes about the table:

1. The transfer penalty is set at 20 minutes, for city pairs that have no reason to ever have a one-seat ride. Both low- and high-speed connecting services are included, including HSR trains running through to the legacy network; I am not proposing new HSR tracks to Green Bay.

2. Instead of making hard alignment decisions, I simply ignored everything that would be controversial. The change in numbers is trivial. For example, neither South Bend nor Fort Wayne is included; both combined have only 2,000 daily air travelers anywhere in the lower 48, and only a handful of dozens to each of the cities in the table.

3. The travel times are full-build, so, for example, the Northeast Corridor is 1:30 Boston-New York and 1:30 New York-Washington, rather than the slightly higher travel times that should be aimed at initially. Average speeds range from 240 to 300 km/h on high-speed lines (higher in the Midwest, South, and flat portions of the West, lower in the Northeast and the Californian mountain crossings), and 100-130 km/h on upgraded legacy lines.

4. For US-Canada travel, we use T-100 data for international flights (data from September 2011). The data quality is poor since small planes are excluded, causing an underestimate in traffic on such markets as New York-Toronto, but conversely many of those flights would be double-counted because international-domestic transfers count twice. We can assume that the two effects (ignoring international flights outside Canada, and counting domestic-international transfers) cancel out, which is equivalent to assuming that exactly half of international travelers connect domestically.

5. The full list of cities included in each entry in the table is:

New York:
-2:30: the Northeast Corridor, Hartford, the Empire Corridor up to Rochester, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Burlington, Montreal.
2:30-3:00: Buffalo, Raleigh, Portland.
3:00-3:30: Toronto, Ottawa, Cleveland, Norfolk, Greensboro.
3:30-4:00: Charlotte, Toledo, Fayetteville, Lynchburg.
4:00-4:30: Greenville (SC), Greenville (NC), Columbus, Detroit, Roanoke, Nantucket, Columbia (SC).
4:30-5:00: Atlanta, Chicago, Dayton, Cincinnati, Wilmington (NC), Savannah.

Los Angeles:
-2:30: Las Vegas, Phoenix, Sacramento.
2:30-3:00: San Francisco, Tucson.
(This is where my exclusion of unrealistic corridors has the most effect. HSR could connect Los Angeles with Portland and Denver in 5 hours, Salt Lake City in 3:30, and El Paso and Albuquerque in 4:30. But the population is too sparse for the overlapping short trips that make comparably long corridors in the eastern half of the US semi-reasonable.)

Bay Area:
-2:30: the entire Central Valley.
2:30-3:00: Los Angeles.
3:00-3:30: Palm Springs.
3:30-4:00: —
4:00-4:30: San Diego, Las Vegas (assuming a Grapevine and Cajon alignment, which is the worst assumption; if the connector is between Victorville and Palmdale, as officially planned, then it’s about 4:00, and if it’s between Mojave and Barstow, it’s 3:45).
4:30-5:00: Phoenix.

Chicago:
-2:30: the corridors to Minneapolis, Detroit/Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis; Grand Rapids, Louisville, Dayton, Green Bay, Columbus.
2:30-3:00: Nashville, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Kansas City, Toronto.
3:00-3:30: Chattanooga, Rochester.
3:30-4:00: Atlanta, Harrisburg, Syracuse.
4:00-4:30: Ottawa, Philadelphia.
4:30-5:00: Montreal, Albany, New York.

Washington-Baltimore:
-2:30: the Northeast Corridor up to New York, the Southeast Corridor down to Charlotte, Fayetteville, Norfolk, Lynchburg.
2:30-3:00: Boston, Hartford, Albany, Pittsburgh, Greenville (SC), Greenville (NC), Roanoke, Columbia (SC).
3:00-3:30: Atlanta, Wilmington (NC), Burlington, Cleveland, Savannah.
3:30-4:00: Montreal, Syracuse, Toledo.
4:00-4:30: Charleston, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Detroit, Columbus, Rochester, Chattanooga, Asheville, Portland.
4:30-5:00: Dayton, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Daytona, Ottawa. (Orlando is very close and some alignments put it just under 5 hours, but not all do.)

Boston:
-2:30: the Northeast Corridor down to Philadelphia, the Empire Corridor up to Rochester, Burlington, Montreal, Hartford, Portland.
2:30-3:00: Washington, Buffalo, Harrisburg.
3:00-3:30: Toronto, Ottawa, Erie, Atlantic City.
3:30-4:00: Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Richmond.
4:00-4:30: Raleigh, Toledo.
4:30-5:00: Norfolk, Greensboro, Detroit, Columbus, Dayton.

Vancouver’s Busiest Buses

Translink has a list of performance metrics per bus route here. Those include ridership, boardings per revenue-hour, crowding measured as a percentage of available seats, and operating cost per unlinked trip. Since the numbers are only given per route, without a single table or chart as one could find for Providence or New Haven, here are the busiest routes, per weekday:

1. 99 – 54,350
2. 20 – 27,900
3. 9 – 25,300
4. 41 – 24,800
5. 16 – 21,250
6. 8 – 20,150
7. 3 – 19,950
8. 49 – 19,700
9. 135 – 19,600
10. 25 – 19,300

The full sanitized data for daily and annual ridership, excluding minibuses and night buses, can be found here. I’ve verified that excluding minibuses and night buses doesn’t change the rankings in the top 50 routes.

Although Vancouver’s buses more or less run on a grid, the grid isn’t very clean. Some lines, like the 9 (Broadway), 99 (Broadway), 3 (Main), and 41 (41st), run more or less straight north-south or east-west, bending only at the ends, but many others do not. The 16 follows a broad U-shaped route, serving Arbutus on the West Side, feeding into downtown, and then going east on Hastings and then south on Renfrew. Multiple routes use Broadway for just a few blocks, to orient themselves to the correct north-south street. Others are L-shaped.

This makes it hard to figure out what the busiest corridors are (Vancouver has enough ridership that the 15-minute frequent network extends too far down to give us the busiest routes). Broadway is clearly the single busiest – if 99 and 9 are considered express and local versions of the same route, then Broadway has nearly 80,000 weekday bus riders, compared with 55,000 on 1st and 2nd Avenues in Manhattan, without counting buses that serve small segments of Broadway along their trip. Not counting buses that zigzag, the next busiest are 41st Avenue (41), Hastings (135, 160), Main, and 49th (49).

But this partial interlining does exist. So how busy is Hastings, anyway? If we add the buses that go on inner Hastings – 14, 16, 20, 135, and 160 – we get 90,000 weekday riders. But the 14 and 16 have half their route on the West Side, and the 20 turns south on Commercial; those are not just Hastings buses. The same problem happens on Main (the 8 partially runs on it), and 4th (west of Granville it interlines the 4, 7, and 84, and west of Macdonald also the 44, totaling 40,000 riders).

This doesn’t mean Hastings has more people riding the bus on it than there are taking the Millennium Line. I doubt it’s even close – the 16 and 20 have long north-south legs with connections to the Expo and Millennium Lines, so people from Fraserview and most of the Renfrew corridor are probably not traveling anywhere on Hastings. But most likely, whatever fraction of 90,000 Hastings has, it is probably the second busiest corridor, or maybe the third after 4th.

The obvious problem here is for SkyTrain development. Broadway is almost certainly getting rail, and judging by how far lesser-used corridors are getting SkyTrain extensions, Hastings should get one too. 4th is half a kilometer north of Broadway, but Hastings is 2 km north of the Millennium Line. Hastings’ distance to the West Coast Express is shorter, but it is an active freight line, with active port industry to its north, and often parks separating it from the street grid to the south. Frequent, frequent-stop commuter rail is still possible, but half the station radius is wasted on water, and the freight traffic is such that it might require too much multi-tracking to be cost-effective for the potential ridership.

HSR Routes: Triangles and Ys

This post partially responds to “The Altamont of X” comments made by Adirondacker, though it is far more general than that.

Whenever a route has to connect three non-collinear cities, compromises must be made between cost and directness. The two basic configurations are a triangle and a Y or T; a triangle is more direct but requires more infrastructure, whereas a Y is the opposite. The purest example of this issue is in Texas; the Interstates connecting Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio form a triangle, but with future high-speed rail, either configuration and many compromises in between are possible. Since not even in Texas is there a pure triangle with equal vertices and nothing in between, each site has its own questions regarding phasing, constructibility, intermediate cities, and relative importance of the triangle’s three sides.

In California, the Altamont vs. Pacheco debate is at least in part a Y vs. triangle debate. Here, the three nodes are Southern California, the Bay Area, and Sacramento. The LA-Sacramento leg is the simplest, because the line would just run straight up the Central Valley. The question is then what to do with the other two. The Pacheco alternative is essentially a triangle: San Francisco-Sacramento service gets an Altamont overlay, or maybe a heavily upgraded Capitol Corridor, and there is wide separation between the Central Valley-Bay Area connection used by trains heading to Los Angeles and ones heading to Sacramento. Altamont is a Y whose branch point is Manteca, with tracks going west to the Bay Area, north to Sacramento, or south to Los Angeles.

The particular case of California, however, favors the Y over the triangle. LA-SF and SF-Sacramento are both important corridors, so being able to serve both more easily is an advantage. Although Pacheco is shorter in distance than Altamont, it is not shorter in time to San Francisco, because more of Altamont is in the Central Valley and less is on the Caltrain corridor; for the same reason, the two options are about even on the cost of LA-SF alone. Altamont is actually a bit cheaper according to the original alternatives analysis, and the recent cost overrun is disproportionately in areas used only by Pacheco, such as the pass itself and the San Jose Diridon complex. Although Altamont has to cross water, a water tunnel parallel to the potential crossing site is currently under construction and so the geology and environment are well-understood. Pacheco’s advantage is just about San Jose: it offers it a faster connection to Los Angeles, and also the prestige of being on the main line rather than on a spur that would have gotten canceled as soon as costs ran over.

The fact that Altamont is no worse than Pacheco at connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, as opposed to San Jose, is the key here. Altamont has other advantages, but since the biggest advantage of triangles here is reduced to connecting a secondary city better, there’s every reason to prefer the Y.

The same is not true elsewhere. Let us consider three cases: New York and New England, Texas, and the eastern part of the Midwest.

In the Midwest, this is the easiest. The question is how to connect Chicago to Detroit, the options being the I-94 corridor through Michigan, and the I-90 corridor through Indiana and Toledo, which would be shared with a connection to Cleveland. In this case the savings due to picking a Y rather than a triangle are much greater, while, again, the Y does not compromise Chicago-Detroit, but only reduces Chicago’s connectivity to small cities on I-94 in Michigan. Unsurprisingly, there is no longer a debate I am aware of; the SNCF proposal and the Siemens proposal both connect Detroit to Chicago via Toledo.

In the other regions, it is harder. When one leg of the triangle is obviously more important than the other two, it can be useful to have a T, which is like a Y except that one leg is straight and the other two are lengthened slightly more. If Houston and San Antonio swapped locations, it would be obvious that it should be a T. But given that they are where they are, the strongest leg, Dallas-Houston, has nothing significant in between, while Dallas-San Antonio has two intermediate cities in addition to Austin, complicating that kind of T. The Texas T-Bone alignment keeps straight Dallas-San Antonio, the second strongest leg; on this rudimentary list of possible alignments on Keep Houston Houston, a T with Dallas-Houston straight does not even appear. SNCF’s proposal starts with Dallas-San Antonio and is agnostic on whether to extend to Houston as a triangle or a T.

Practically any solution but a triangle would make the weakest leg, Houston-San Antonio, more circuitous, but various compromises that keep it at least competitive are incompatible with making both Dallas-San Antonio and Dallas-Houston straight. The presence of Austin also makes an exact triangle infeasible. Houston-San Antonio on I-10 is 321 km; via Austin, it is 389; via the T-Bone, it is 500; via Dallas, it is over 800, making it completely uncompetitive with driving. The Interstates had an easier time – cars can get from Houston to Austin, Temple-Killeen, and Waco on state roads, and because 1960s’ Texas was empty between the three Triangle cities, construction costs were low.

In the Northeast, there is also an opportunity for a triangle versus Y argument, in the New York-Boston-Albany triangle, but this time the Y is weaker. The problem is that New York-Boston is by far the strongest leg and the first that should be constructed. For that leg alone, the advantage of a shore route through Providence over an inland route through Hartford and I-84 is not overwhelming, but it requires less construction (New Haven-Kingston vs. New Haven-Boston). On top of that, the pure Y would not use I-84 but require New York-Boston trains to go through Springfield, lengthening the trip, and even that would only make the extra construction required even with the triangle. On a high-value, relatively short corridor where every minute matters, this is a problem. The only leg that works either way, Boston-Albany, is by far the weakest.

Meanwhile, the second leg, New York-Albany, would greatly suffer from any such detour. New York-Albany direct is about 230 km. Via New Haven and Springfield, it’s 330, and the average speed is also lower because of unfixable curves between New York and New Haven and several forced station stops. On top of that, although less overall construction would be required at the end, New York-Albany direct requires less tunneling than going through the Berkshires, even with the Hudson Highlands, and also less urban construction through Hartford and Springfield. (Without the Y, New Haven-Hartford-Springfield would be an upgraded legacy corridor, rather than a dedicated HSR line, which would provide similar local functionality but be insufficient for an intercity through-route to Boston or Upstate New York.)

What this means is that just because a Y is preferable to a triangle in one location does not mean Ys are always better. It depends on how it impacts the stronger legs, on phasing, and on very dry constructibility questions. “The Altamont of X” is incomplete; the Altamont Y is special in that the strongest leg is indifferent to Altamont vs. Pacheco, making the benefits (as opposed to costs) a matter of 10 or 20 extra minutes on secondary markets.

Connecting New Jersey to Manhattan, Redux

This post responds to arguments made by Brian in comments regarding how to connect New Jersey regional trains to Manhattan, in addition to the present tunnels to Penn Station; Brian argues for leveraging the Staten Island Railway, including the North Shore Branch, since a Staten Island-Manhattan tunnel should be built anyway.

In my post about the various options for connecting New Jersey to Lower Manhattan, all four alternatives I looked at featured a tunnel across the Hudson from the Hudson County waterfront to Manhattan, differing only in the location of the portals and the route used to get to the New Jersey portal. There are in principle other options, and I’d like to explain why they’re less feasible, and conversely why a connection along the lines I suggested should be one of the top two priority trans-Hudson projects, together with an additional tunnel pair to Penn Station.

First, because Lower Manhattan is the second most important business district in the region, as well as a subway hub, it deserves some connection. More than that, it deserves a connection from as many directions as possible, same as Midtown, and it deserves a connection earlier rather than later. The longer it takes to build a direct commuter rail line to it, the more it will decline in favor of other business districts, which with the exception of Midtown are much harder to serve with transit. It’s likely that if the LIRR, the Pennyslvania, the Lackawanna, the Erie, and the New York Central had all managed to build commuter lines to Lower Manhattan, instead of relying on the subway and the Hudson Tubes for the final connection, Lower Manhattan would not have lost out to Midtown so readily; Midtown would remain more convenient for commuters from Uptown Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens, but not for commuters from Long Island or New Jersey.

Because of those principles, we get that a connection from the Erie lines to Lower Manhattan is critical. Once we accept that the major New Jersey lines, or groups of lines, need to be connected to both Manhattan job centers, it becomes best to gear the Lower Manhattan connection to the Erie lines, which are the northernmost in New Jersey and therefore wouldn’t intersect a Lower Manhattan connection to another line. The ARC solution of looping trains around Secaucus and connecting them to Penn Station is a fine first step but is inadequate afterward: a Lower Manhattan connection from the Erie lines would intersect the other lines at Secaucus, allowing a transfer, but a connection from any other direction would not allow a transfer from the Erie lines to Lower Manhattan.

On top of this, the cost involved in building such a connection, along any of the four alignments I proposed, is a tunnel across the Hudson, some extra tunneling on the Manhattan or Jersey City side (the farther south the alignment, the more Jersey City and the less Manhattan tunneling is needed), and of course a station in Lower Manhattan. This is quite bare-bones in the sense that any other connection to Lower Manhattan has to incur the same costs of a tunnel across water, and a Manhattan station. Concretely, this means it’s easier to tunnel from Jersey City or Hoboken to Manhattan than from Staten Island to Manhattan, and as such this would be built first, becoming the initial connection from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan.

I waver on whether this should be done before or after four-tracking the North River Tunnels. The tunnels are still extraordinarily busy at rush hour, and even state of the art signaling will only buy a few years before traffic matches the new capacity; moreover, Lower Manhattan-bound commuters can already transfer to PATH at Newark Penn cross-platform or at Hoboken, either of which is more convenient than transferring at Penn Station. On the other hand, people can also get to the southern edge of Midtown on PATH, and direct Lower Manhattan service can justify diverting some Morris and Essex trains from the mainline. It buys at most a few more years of breathing room, but it adds more destinations that can be reached by train, whereas a Midtown solution just adds capacity to an existing destination.

But, now, what of a future Staten Island connection? If a Staten Island-Manhattan tunnel is built, along the straightest alignment, bypassing Brooklyn, then it could provide a second connection from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan. This is the brunt of Brian’s comment: it would require using the bridge from Elizabeth to the North Shore Branch, which is active, and for another access point a new bridge from the mainline to Perth Amboy, but even building the latter bridge costs much less than new tunnels. Here is a map of the alignments.

The problem with using this for through-trains from the Jersey Shore and the Raritan Valley Line, the lines that connect best to Staten Island, is speed. The distance to Grand Central through either Staten Island and Lower Manhattan or the Northeast Corridor and Penn Station is about the same; the distance to Lower Manhattan is several kilometers shorter and one transfer fewer than via Secaucus, but once one connection to Lower Manhattan exists, a secondary connection would have to be justified based on demand to all job centers, of which Midtown is the biggest.

But now the Staten Island connection would have a much lower average speed. It is curvier, independently of all other considerations. The tunnel from Staten Island to Manhattan should also be lower-speed, to reduce the required bore diameter and save money. Since there is no good reason for intercity trains to use this connection – the Perth Amboy connection leads to no intercity line, and the North Shore Branch connection would require building a new junction to the Northeast Corridor, which would be both expensive and curvy – there is no reason to optimize for speed, unlike the case for the Northeast Corridor. So the choice is between one line where express commuter trains could do 160 km/h except maybe in the last few kilometers into Manhattan, and one where they’d do 100 or charitably 130.

On top of that, there are more stations in Staten Island, and also more local demand. Part of it is just bad operating practices in New Jersey – there should be more local stops in Elizabeth – but Staten Island has far more local demand, and so dropping local stops to make it easier to run express trains is less justified. As of 2000, the latest year for which the census data is readily available, Staten Island had 53,000 Manhattan-bound commuters. The relevant intermediate cities on the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line – Newark, Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway, Carteret, and Woodbridge – had 10,500 between them. The corresponding numbers of Brooklyn-bound commuters are 29,000 and 1,500, respectively. It makes sense to keep the current stop spacing on the trunk line between Newark and Rahway, or add just one or two stops, but it makes none to not fit a North Shore Branch service with many local stops, which would then slow down longer-distance regional trains.

While the North Shore Branch can’t be widened except with many takings, the Staten Island Railway mainline could conceivably be four-tracked to allow overtakes, and this would make it a more competitive route. But if there is money for that, there is probably money to six-track the remaining four-track gap between Newark Airport and Linden, allowing full separation of local commuter trains, express commuter trains, and intercity trains on the Northeast Corridor except for segments on which the speeds are similar (Newark-New York) or ones where traffic is low enough to fit on existing tracks (south of Rahway).

The problem is really that the North Jersey Coast Line doesn’t have enough traffic to justify two highly separated branches, one through Staten Island and one through the Northeast Corridor. The split I proposed in my regional rail posts is much smaller – trains are only split east of Penn Station, after they begin overlapping with the Morris and Essex Lines, and so it’s possible to time transfers in such a way that people from Long Branch can board any train and be at their destination with just one additional easy transfer. At most this may justify a few peak hour runs; otherwise, even if the Tottenville-Perth Amboy bridge is built, timed transfers at Perth Amboy are almost as good and avoid reducing frequency on each branch too much.

Quick Note: Vancouver’s Transit Revival

I’ve been looking for Canadian mode share numbers that are more recent than 2006; although there was a census in 2011, it apparently did not include such numbers. However, a separate survey regarding commuting was published a year ago, using data from 2010. Mode shares are only included in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, and those are listed separately for the city and the suburbs rather than for the whole metro area, but we can take a weighted average of population; it’s not perfect because the employment rate in the suburbs may be different from in the city, but it’s very close.

The result: Toronto’s transit mode share in 2010 was 22%, Montreal’s was 24%, and Vancouver’s was 21%. The Toronto number is the same as the numbers in 1996, 2001, and 2006. The Montreal number is a bit higher than past-decade numbers. And the Vancouver number compares with 14.3% in 1996 and 16.5% in 2006 (it was 11.5% in 2001, but there was a bus strike when the census was conducted).

Put another way, Vancouver gained 4.5 percentage points of transit mode share between 2006 and 2010. Judging by the opening of the Canada Line and its relatively high ridership, this is indeed plausible and doesn’t have to be a statistical artifact, though I’ll still want to see numbers a few years from now to confirm the new trend. If the trend holds, it’s over 11 percentage points per decade, enough to make Vancouver the metro area with the largest transit mode share by about 2019. It’s a similar rate of increase to what I included in my April Fool’s post for the US at large, intended to be at or beyond the outer limit of what is plausible if everything is done perfectly. Previously, I’d thought 3-5 points per decade were the best possible in Canada and Australia.

This means Translink has made major success with revival, as opposed to merely retaining old mode share by getting people who previously couldn’t afford a car to stick with transit even as they enter the middle class. If instead it is just an artifact of the Canada Line’s opening, then it suggests Vancouver will continue to do well in the next ten years, as the Evergreen Line and hopefully the UBC extension open. The Millennium Line opened in 2002 and so figures into the 1996-2006 increase, but its ridership is 80,000 a day, versus 110,000 on the Canada Line and an estimated 146,000 on the UBC extension and 70,000 on the Evergreen Line.

Low- and Medium-Hanging Fruit

The entire process I try to apply to cost-effective rail construction is to figure out the best places to spend money per unit of time saved. Obviously, this is mainly for intercity traffic – for local traffic it’s more interesting to look at cost per rider – but it’s intercity traffic that benefits most from this kind of optimization anyway.

With the Northeast Corridor, there are definitively low-hanging fruit, such as new (non-FRA-compliant) rolling stock, raising superelevation, improving platform access within present infrastructure, and adding constant tension catenary south of New York. Those are so useful, in terms of cost per benefit to travelers, that they should all be pursued immediately. The more interesting question is what to do afterward. I’ve proposed a few things before, in various posts, but it’s more useful to talk about the general process of determining where to build, i.e. which fruit are medium-hanging and which are high-hanging. I think traditionally this boils down to two parameters:

1. Cost per minute saved, including by improving reliability. This is of course adjusted for demand: New York-Philadelphia minutes are the most important, then Philadelphia-Washington, then New York-Boston, and finally other corridors.

2. Reduction in operating cost. If the rest of the network is based on hourly trains, and you need to squeeze five additional minutes to reduce your travel time including turnaround to an integer number of hours, it’s worth spending the money on it to avoid needing extra trains, or a schedule that doesn’t match up with the rest of the network. (And the same is true if the network repeats every 52 minutes – there’s nothing magical about 60 here.)

However, three additional, less obvious parameters are important:

3. Usefulness to local transit, in terms of speed, reliability, etc. This essentially reduces the cost imputed to intercity trains per minute saved.

4. How low-hanging the fruit becomes if combined with another. The issue is that eliminating two adjacent slow zones in an otherwise fast run saves more than double the time of eliminating just one of the two; another way to think about it is that eliminating the second slow zone saves more time than eliminating the first. This can result in counterintuitive phasing in a constrained funding environment.

5. How high-hanging the fruit becomes if it is delayed. If there is significant disruption to service coming from construction, then it’s better to do it earlier than would be warranted based on pure cost-per-minute-saved calculation.

#3 features prominently in Amtrak’s preexisting planning – in fact, too prominently, with its emphasis on Gateway. It’s a matter of agency imperialism more than anything, but it can lead to good results elsewhere. It’s really points #4-5 that aren’t optimized – either the costs are out of whack, or they are ignored. Washington Union Station‘s remodeling is an example of overemphasizing #5 without considering the cost or the ability to use existing infrastructure more cheaply; Transbay Terminal‘s poor column placement is an example of ignoring #5 entirely.

The reason I push concrete-heavy improvements between New Rochelle and Stamford, but not between Stamford and New Haven, comes essentially from those three points. The Cos Cob Bridge replacement is good because of points #1, #3, and #5; an I-95 bypass of Port Chester and Greenwich then interacts with it positively because of point #4, and also provides a suitable passing segment between high-speed and express commuter trains. In contrast, the projects east of Stamford don’t interact so positively: they involve constructing various bypasses, at high cost per minute saved, in separate locations so that the same increasing returns do not exist, and generally it’d not difficult to connect the bypasses to existing tracks so that the disruption effect of #5 is not in place.

Troll Rail Projects

In lieu of a real post, I want to discuss a few possible rail projects that are not completely thought-out. By this I mean rail projects that probably have critical constructibility and cost problems, but not obvious ones. They lie somewhere between true trolling – say, transcontinental HSR from New York to Los Angeles – and projects that are difficult and not yet proposed but need to be seriously considered, such as new train tunnels to Lower Manhattan or a Geary subway.

The projects are roughly ordered from most serious to most frivolous. The projects for the Northeast may well be feasible and should be at least considered, and the first was probably originally not done due to agency turf issues. The rolling stock projects are the most speculative – they suggest things to be done by competent rolling stock manufacturers that probably would’ve done them already if they could. The non-Northeastern infrastructure projects are somewhere in between. Make of this what you will. Just, please, do not use any of this as the basis for any alternative proposal, and do not link with a description like “Why have transit agencies not thought of this?” unless you know what you’re doing.

Northeast

ARC-North: the proposals for cross-Hudson tunnels that connect to Penn Station, including ARC Alt G and now Amtrak’s Gateway, would have the new tunnels connecting to the south of the main intercity through-tracks: ARC goes to the southern tracks, currently used by New Jersey, and Amtrak eventually wants to add tracks to the south. I propose that when they eventually build such a project, they build the new tunnels to the north, connecting to the existing northern pair of East River Tunnels; a connection to Grand Central could then be built from one of the two East River tunnel pairs, the one not used by intercity trains.

Right now, the northernmost tracks have the most access points and the southernmost tracks the fewest. The system would take advantage of the reduction in demand to Penn Station after East Side Access opens. In case the present-day North River Tunnel diameter is too narrow to allow for higher speeds, the new tunnel could then be used (also) by intercity trains at 200 km/h while letting commuter trains go to Grand Central without reducing capacity there.

Northeast Corridor to Market East, on the cheap: a short connection between North Philadelphia and North Broad, similar to that proposed for the Chestnut Hill West Line but used for the Northeast Corridor instead, would let intercity trains serve Market East or Suburban Station, in addition to 30th Street Station. Trains continuing down to Washington would probably not want to use such a connection, as it would slow them down because of the sharp turn in the SEPTA tunnel, but trains continuing on the Keystone Corridor would emerge from 30th Street oriented the right way. Right now trains to the Keystone Corridor have to either reverse direction (as they do today) or use a connection that skips 30th Street Station (as the fastest New York-Chicago trains did in the Broadway Limited era). It could be useful for local HSR trains if there ever were HSR from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.

Philadelphia Bypass: also on the subject of HSR from New York to the Keystone Corridor, if express trains skip Philadelphia, it would be useful to build a bypass roughly along existing freight routes and I-276, starting at Trenton and ending somewhere between King of Prussia and Exton. The cost may not justify this in terms of cost per minute saved on New York-Pittsburgh (and New York-Cleveland, and New York-Chicago).

Providence Downcity Station: using the East Side Rail Tunnel, trains could continue west to Downcity, and then connect to the legacy tracks by hopping over I-95 in Federal Hill. For commuter trains, an underground station at Thayer Street is necessary. This is a pick-your-poison project in terms of takings: there are tradeoffs between curve radius, i.e. noise, and takings, and also between both and centrality. One option would be a curved station over City Hall Park, which would become the new Kennedy Plaza, and then what is now Kennedy Plaza would be landscaped and turned into the new City Hall Park. Another would go straight west, cutting through Citizens Plaza, and have a station elevated over Memorial Boulevard.

To troll even further, trains could use abandoned trackage starting from East Providence and then go to Fall River (reconstructing more abandoned trackage) and Newport (building new tracks through Bristol and over the Mount Hope Bridge).

Old Erie Line Revival: New Jersey Transit’s Main Line trains do not use the Erie Main Line south of Paterson, which is abandoned, but instead go along the Lackawanna’s old Boonton Branch. The right-of-way for the original Erie line is still intact, and serves the center of Passaic better. It might be useful to rebuild the tracks, which would require viaducts, and realign the Main Line. Service on all lines would probably require too many outlets – not even a dedicated tunnel to Lower Manhattan, combined, could be used for all lines serving that part of North Jersey, so some would have to be severed and turned over to light rail (maybe the Northern Branch) or the subway. The old Erie line is actually the best candidate for being part of a subway extension, since it serves dense communities and has a natural terminus at Paterson, where it would probably have to go underground.

Steinway Tunnel Widening: the Steinway Tunnel was widened from trolley loading gauge to IRT loading gauge when what is now the 7 was built. Since the rest of the 7 is built to the wider BMT/IND loading gauge, widening the tunnel is a useful capacity reliever to spend money on. It’s probably supremely expensive – I’m sure the MTA has studied it in the past; it’s also far from the most crowded Queens-Manhattan crossing point. But the cost may compare favorably with other means of providing extra capacity, and it may also be beneficial to let some Flushing Line trains serve Broadway and some Astoria Line trains serve 42nd Street.

West Coast

Subway to Burbank: Los Angeles’s Red Line does not go straight north along Vermont to Burbank, but swerves west to swerve more of Hollywood and serves Universal City and North Hollywood on the Valley side of the mountains. Since Downtown Burbank is a major secondary employment center, soon to be served by HSR, why not extend the city’s transit system in that direction? The Orange Line there should be a no-brainer, but more speculatively, the MTA could find money (another ballot measure, maybe?) and program another a subway branch off the Red Line that serves Burbank, with excessive splitting prevented by a new Vermont subway, or even (to troll further) an entirely new line that follows Western south of the mountains.

San Jose – Almaden Street Station: San Jose has a medium-sized CBD, roughly comparable to Providence or Burbank, but Diridon Station is separated from it by a freeway. Since there’s already a plan to spend large amounts of money of turning it into a multi-level train station, which the local technical activists have dubbed Diridon Intergalactic (or Pangalactic), why not also move the station? Trains could go on an alignment like this, elevated over Almaden, on a viaduct dedicated to Caltrain and HSR so that only four tracks would be needed. It would also bypass the current reverse curve between Tamien and Diridon, obviating the need for an iconic bridge. In a realistic, cost-conscious blended plan this is too expensive, but they should at least compare the cost with both a blended plan and the proposed full-fat business plan before rejecting it.

San Francisco – Embarcadero Station: with Transbay Terminal facing every planning and constructibility problem known to humanity, and the current terminal at 4th and King too far from the CBD, why not extend the trains under King Street and then the Embarcadero and build a station near the Ferry Building? Building this close to water is a nightmare, and the curve from King to the Embarcadero may be too sharp, but at least this connects to BART directly and has no station length constraints. On the third hand, the Embarcadero is wide but possibly not wide enough for three platforms and six tracks.

Rolling Stock

Tilting HSR: tilting HSR trains are either relatively low-speed (the Pendolino is limited to 250 km/h, with a few derivatives capable of a bit more) or relatively low-tilt (Talgos are capable of 180 mm of cant deficiency, and the latest Shinkansen trains have active suspension allowing up to about the same for the E5 Series. However, trains capable of 250 mm cant deficiency and 360 km/h are feasible; this is the main subject of Martin Lindahl’s thesis, which I (and others) have been quoting as a ready source of HSR track standards around the world. That said, probably the only place in the world that needs such trains is the Northeast Corridor, due to its unique combination of long straight stretches, on which very high speeds are possible or could be with minor infrastructure upgrades, and long curvy stretches, on which even major upgrades could not bring up to full HSR standards.

Catenary-free HSR: there’s new technology for catenary-free light rail, which is intended for use in historic city centers with aesthetic opposition to trolleywire. The contactless power supply is buried under the tracks, with each segment activated only when a train is completely above it. Although the technology is still low-speed, it could be useful for HSR. Pantographs generate disproportionate noise at high speeds, and Japan specifically has been squeezing every possible decibel out of low-noise pantographs. Being able to eliminate the pantograph would carry this to its logical conclusion. On the margins, it would also permit narrower rights-of-way, since no space for catenary poles would be needed.

Washington Union Station

Amtrak’s announcement that it needs $7 billion to improve Union Station, in a way that is tangential to train or passenger capacity, has gotten some deserved flak already on other blogs. What I want to discuss instead is a pair of issues relating to capacity: passenger circulation, and track capacity. Especially on the latter, Union Station does have some problems, not at current traffic, but enough that future traffic increases may require difficult at-grade merges. The core of the problem is that the terminal tracks are located to the west of the through-tracks, with an at-grade junction, rather than between them.

Fortunately, the passenger circulation capacity issue is easier. Although Amtrak claims 100,000 passengers use the station every day, in reality the number is beefed up with Metro riders, similarly to Penn Station’s 600,000 daily passengers statistic, of which nearly half is subway ridership. Total ridership on MARC and VRE is 53,000 per weekday, and Amtrak has a total of 13,000 boardings and alightings per day there (not per weekday, but intercity traffic does not have the weekday peak of commuter traffic). This is 66,000 boardings and alightings, assuming every MARC and VRE trip begins or ends at Union Station. In contrast, on just two tracks with ordinary subway platforms, Metro has 34,000 boardings at the station; page 13 of Amtrak’s announcement shows the relative scale of Metro and mainline infrastructure. The mainline half of the station’s ridership is passengers who are likelier to be carrying luggage or not be local, but the main difference between it and the Metro half is that the Metro half is using Metro turf and the mainline half is using the station above which Amtrak’s headquarters is located.

If there is a problem, it comes from Amtrak’s practice of corralling riders at waiting points, instead of letting them filter onto the platforms or the stations whenever they like, as is done every day on trains in France and Germany, or on the less busy stations of the Northeast Corridor. Stephen Smith tells me that unlike in New York or Boston, where the waiting areas are at least adjacent to the platform and the problem is one of having just one access point (or just one official access point in New York), in Washington there is another antechamber between the passengers and the train. An extra 100 meters of walking adds about a minute of travel time in a congested space, and perhaps 45 seconds in a clear one; Amtrak’s current practice adds multiple minutes to door-to-door travel time, and also forces pedestrian congestion once it clears passengers to access the platform.

Adding access points is also a good thing, but that does not cost $7 billion, and does not require redoing the entire main concourse. But possibly the most important thing to do in the near term is making all platforms high, also nowhere near a $7 billion project; the diagrams on Amtrak’s announcement suggest all terminal tracks and most through-tracks will be high-platform, but one through-platform will remain low.

Now, track capacity is where things get more interesting, because potentially there is a problem, coming from terminal layout. A not very clear, but public, diagram can be found here: look for Washington Union Terminal, and within it, Interlockings C (the outer station throat and a nearby yard), K (the inner throat and the actual tracks), and A (the connection from the through-tracks to First Street Tunnel). Note that terminating tracks 7-20 are to the west of through-tracks 22-29, and the junction is at grade, which represents a problem for easy cookie-cutter planning.

The operationally simplest but most expensive to deal with this is to build a grade separation. If it’s anything like Harold, expect a $300 million price tag. At present and expected levels of traffic, this is overkill.

I claim that if MARC and VRE trains continue to terminate at Union Station, no special work is needed: Brunswick and Camden Line traffic can be segregated on tracks 7-9 (and the turnaround capacity, easily about 12 tph for 3 tracks, is more than those lines will need between them), VRE traffic can be segregated on tracks 24-25, and Penn Line traffic can use the same tracks as the terminating intercity trains.

The only at-grade conflict would be between northbound trains originating at Washington, and southbound ones continuing through to Virginia, and even high possible traffic levels (say, 12 tph terminating including the Penn Line sprawled across 11 tracks of which 3 already have long platforms and arguably 3 more can be lengthened, 2 tph through across 4 tracks) can be scheduled in a similar manner to all-terminating stations, treating the through-trains as terminating trains that have to use specific tracks and have no limit on dwell time.

Specifically, because Penn Line (or local HSR) trains would leave immediately after express HSR trains to reduce the number of required overtakes, at worst we’d have trains originating at :00 and :02, repeating every 10 minutes, and then there’s an 8-minute window within which to schedule southbound through-trains.

So instead let us assume commuter trains run through, in which case we may as well assume they have good reliability so that they can be scheduled with 2-minute headways. Current peak traffic is 3 tph Brunswick, 2 tph Camden, 3 tph Penn, and lower combined traffic on the Virginia side. Assume that peak traffic will grow to 3 tph Brunswick and Camden and 6 tph combined Penn and through-HSR; in fact the most potential for growth is off-peak, and because multiple platforms are very long, long trains may be used if there are capacity problems.

We now have 6 tph terminating HSR, 6 tph through-traffic on the Penn Line (including HSR), and 6 tph through-commuter traffic on the Camden and Brunswick Lines; Camden and Brunswick are physically to the west of the Northeast Corridor, and so in addition to conflicts between terminating and through trains, we have conflicts between through-Camden/Brunswick and southbound through-Penn/HSR.

In this situation, we can have southbound terminating HSR and through-Penn/HSR trains clearing the throat at :00 and :02 again. Northbound terminating HSR trains have to depart 2 minutes after the arrival of southbound through-Penn/HSR trains, e.g. :04, and then northbound through-Camden/Brunswick trains can depart between :06 and :08; northbound through-Penn/HSR trains are always to the east of everything else and so do not conflict with anything.

Because southbound through-Camden/Brunswick trains conflict with terminating trains, they can be scheduled at the same time as northbound through-trains of some kind, which constrains the symmetry axis we choose but is otherwise workable. For example, if Camden/Brunswick trains both depart and arrive at :07 then with the terminating trains arriving :00 and departing :04, we have a symmetry axis ending in a 2 or a 7 (and through-Penn/HSR trains would arrive and depart at :02). But then the terminating trains also arrive just before the through-Penn/HSR trains and depart just after, implying they are slower or else there would be an overtake just north of the station. We can instead switch the trains – and then terminating trains arrive and depart :02, and through-Penn/HSR arrive southbound :00 and depart northbound :04. Note that there is no conflict between northbound terminating trains and southbound through-trains.

So it is possible to do this without extra infrastructure beside longer and level-boarding platforms, which are cheap. Let us finish by seeing what extra trains can be scheduled into the above 18 tph schedule. Scheduling 6 tph of terminating trains is easy: trains arriving :04 and departing :00, the opposite of the terminating HSR trains discussed above, will be adequately separated. The problem then is just the need to overtake the :02 through-trains along the tracks; however, at such a level of demand, 18 tph combined HSR and commuter on the Northeast Corridor, full four-tracking there would be necessary anyway.

But no extra through-traffic can be realistically scheduled into the same timetable, because the southbound :04 trains would conflict with the northbound :04 terminating trains. Changing the schedule so that it’s the terminating trains that arrive and depart at the same time is, however, possible: since we’re four-tracking the entire Baltimore-Washington line at this stage, we can have terminating trains arrive and depart :02, Camden/Brunswick trains do the same :07, and through-Penn/HSR trains arrive and depart :00 and :04. That said, this means it’s impossible to schedule more than 6 terminating tph into Union Station; I believe it’ll be easier to fill all those extra intercity trains into Washington than fill 18 tph going from Washington toward Virginia, both intercity and commuter.

Of course, the traffic levels discussed here are all very high, especially for HSR. An HSR system that fills even 6 tph is one that can pay for future capacity increases out of operating profits. The importance should be getting a starter system with reasonable capacity for the next few years and then build capacity projects as required, with immediate construction done only on the most critical segments or those that would be hard to reconstruct with more future traffic.

So we’re back to the question of what needs to be done with Union Station, and the answer is hardly anything. It’s not even Moynihan Station, which is also sold as a bigger transportation benefit than it is, but is at least billed as a grand station to be named after a politician more than anything (and is only about $1.5 billion). It’s even worse than Gateway and the Market East station, which would have positive transportation value, and are just very cost-ineffective. It’s not solving any problem for the foreseeable future; it’s just using big numbers about current traffic and growth to scare people into thinking more capacity is needed, and mostly it’s using small increases in track capacity to justify throwing billions of dollars on beautifying Amtrak’s headquarters.

Pedestrian Observations from Vancouver: Street Width and Building Height

I moved to Vancouver last weekend. The slow pace of posting will probably continue for another week, but I do have multiple posts in the pipeline. I am currently at a downtown hotel, commuting to Kitsilano to look at apartments and to UBC to deal with early paperwork.

My appreciation of Translink dropped within a day, after I discovered that discounted books of multiple tickets and monthly passes are only available at 7-11 and other convenience stores, rather than at stations. (The ticket machines offer what appeared to be multiple-ride tickets but turned out to be single-ride tickets, perhaps usable by multiple people at once.) I still think it’s better-run than the other transit agencies of North America, but it has a lot to learn from New York regarding how to make fare media usable by passengers.

The most surprising pedestrian experience I’ve had is about the street width. The streets are wide, which is what I expected, based on Jarrett’s paean to the grid at Human Transit (which is necessarily wide in North America). What I did not expect was that the buildings would be so short away from downtown. Jarrett’s description of Central Broadway, around the Canada Line stop, as the second downtown, made me think Broadway was a continuous corridor of high-intensity development. It is not; it feels more like a secondary retail strip. The commercial buildings are usually one- or two-story, with some clusters of higher density at major street intersections, especially Cambie but also Granville, MacDonald, and others. This development is more spiky than linear, as if there’s already rapid transit on the route, rather than just interlined high-frequency buses.

Away from Broadway, Kitsilano feels very suburban – at least, the part of 11th Avenue I walked on does. The density looks higher than in Providence because a few of the buildings are tall, but most of the buildings have ornamental front lawns, and the sidewalks are narrow paths through the grass, more like a suburb than like the very old New England neighborhoods I had gotten used to over the past year.

There’s a point I made early on in this blog – I can’t remember where – about the relationship between street width and building height. To be pedestrian-friendly, a street needs to have a certain proportion between the height of the street wall – for example, the height of the buildings flanking it if they do not taper toward the top – and the width of the street. The ratio I initially proposed is 1:1, with a favorable range of 1:2 to 2:1; nowadays I’d propose higher ratios – Providence’s East Side’s 1:2 feels a bit too low, while the 2:1-3:1 on old streets in Boston and Providence feels fine – but the principle is similar.

Downtown Vancouver has what feels to me like correct proportions. With the setbacks and the tapering buildings, the height-to-width ratio is kept to average levels, with modernist skyscrapers balancing wide streets. Because there is high density in the core, the streets do not feel desolate, and the major streets are flush with ground-level retail. Buildings that look very similar to Akirov Towers do not make me feel the same revulsion toward their design; Akirov Towers are built like any housing project, but the towers of Downtown Vancouver feel like New York’s towers on a base. Although many of those buildings do not actually have any street wall, enough of them do that I feel like I’m walking in a human city.

Broadway does not have the same feel. From the bus, the trees frame the street, making it feel less like a highway. On foot, it’s different, and it feels more open and less dense. It works well enough for transit – the bus lines on it have extremely high traffic, much of it due to the pull of UBC – but the pedestrian experience is less than perfect. The street is 30 meters wide, the same as a Manhattan avenue or two-way street, and it needs to be framed by buildings about that tall.

UBC is the worst. Granted, it is summertime, so it’s more deserted than it is during the year. But Harvard Square, Kendall Square, College Hill, Morningside Heights, and even Yale are teeming with people at all times of year. UBC clearly has people – they fill the buses to the rest of the city – but the campus is so spread out there aren’t that many of them at one spot (or if there are, I haven’t found it). There is one cluster of restaurants at University Village, and a few cafes and other retail outlets sporadically located elsewhere, but nothing truly mixed-use the way any of the aforementioned Northeastern college neighborhoods are. There is a grid of major campus boulevards, built with landscaped lawns, but they end up feeling like a large urban renewal project. Columbia has some of those, but they have more people using them; the only Northeastern school I know that has similarly lonely throughfares is MIT, but MIT has its livelier parts at the main administration building and near its subway stop.

Somewhat away from the grid is UBC’s bus loop terminal. My first experience at UBC was stepping off the 99-B express bus to a terminal with a few bays for buses, surrounded by parking, and landscaped lawns that are far prettier from a moving vehicle than on foot. According to a presentation about the proposed subway under Broadway, UBC’s mode split among non-Vancouver residents is 71-27 in favor of cars. (Central Broadway’s is 77-21, which surprised me since it looks not particularly dense but not really auto-oriented the way UBC is). For Downtown, the comparable figure is 49-49.

Despite all this, Vancouver is by North American standards a reasonably successful transit city. Its transit usage is okay, and unlike in most North American cities, it is growing, if not as fast as I’d like. Translink believes that a Broadway subway would get 146,000 daily riders, up from 60,000 on the 99-B plus about 50,000 on local buses today; intuitively this feels low to me, though achieving high enough transit mode share to UBC and Central Broadway would probably require more fundamental changes to their urban design than is politically acceptable. For one, local activists would have to stop referring to the few mid-rises amidst the two-story retail at Broadway and Cambie as high-rise or high-intensity development. It’s nothing upzoning won’t fix, but upzoning this intense is unlikely. It’s really too bad, because walking on Broadway I feel insufficient height is the only problem on the street.

The Value of New York-Boston

This post mainly responds to an argument made by Jim in comments that the core portion of the Northeast Corridor is New York-Washington, and New York-Boston is more expensive and less useful.

The Northeast Corridor has two halves: New York-Philadelphia-Washington and New York-Boston. The southern half is the more important one: according to PDF-page 41 of the Master Plan it carries 70% of the traffic, and the top city pairs are New York-Washington and New York-Philadelphia, both substantially larger than New York-Boston. Although the corridor is always treated as a single line, it is worth checking the value of upgrades separately, especially because the southern half is straighter and would take less investment to bring up to full high-speed rail standards.

However, even with such a disaggregation, New York-Boston is a valuable route, with more potential benefits than any other in the US except New York-Washington. For a first filter, we can look at city populations. New York’s size is such that even much smaller cities can be fruitfully connected to it by greenfield HSR. Seoul, of comparable size to New York, is connected to Busan, which is slightly smaller than Boston and slightly farther apart from Seoul than Boston is from New York; the intermediate cities, Daejeon and Daegu, are somewhat larger than New Haven and Providence. Total ridership on the Seoul-Busan segment of the KTX is about 30 million per year, and Korail appears to be making profits on the line, despite very high construction costs coming from heavy tunneling (about 40% of the route).

The first filter alone warrants further investigation of the route, even independently of New York-Washington. The costs of New York-Boston, while higher than those of New York-Washington, are not very high. We can put much of the New Haven Line in the “too hard” basket initially, but instead focus on high speeds between New York and Stamford and between New Haven and Boston and somewhat higher speeds between Stamford and New Haven than today. The average speed that can be squeezed with such investment is comparable to that of the KTX today, before the high-speed segments through two intermediate cities have been completed; those segments can then be compared to tackling Stamford-New Haven.

Of course, while adequate, is still nowhere nearly as good as what can be done on New York-Washington. It’s not just that this segment connects New York to two different cities the size of Greater Boston. Although today New York-Philadelphia has higher ridership than New York-Boston, this may well be reversed in the presence of full-fat HSR, since cutting a 1:05 trip to 0:38 does not provide the same competitive boost as cutting a 3:30 trip to 2:00, and Amtrak’s primary competition is highways rather than planes.

Rather, the benefits of New York-Washington are more in the distribution of the secondary centers. The biggest satellite metro area of Washington is Baltimore, on the line. Of Boston’s satellite metro areas – Providence, Worcester, and Nashua-Manchester – at most one can be served by any semi-reasonable HSR alignment. Philadelphia-Washington provides an additional market to be served. Washington’s population growth is much faster than that of the rest of the Northeast, and is comparable to that of the Sunbelt.

At the same time, there are benefits to building both lines; since under a phased program that built one first and then the other New York-Washington would be first, those benefits should be counted as benefits of New York-Boston. The biggest one is service through New York. Boston-Washington is a major air market: the O&D passenger volume between the Boston and Washington areas is 3.1 million a year; this is more than Boston-New York and New York-Washington combined, and Boston-Washington is both Boston and Washington’s busiest air city pair. In general, Boston-Washington and Boston-Philadelphia are located at more favorable ranges for HSR’s competitiveness than New York-Boston and New York-Washington, on which the trip time advantage versus cars and buses is smaller.

If we take Boston-Philadelphia and Boston-Washington and slightly more than double the size of today’s air market – the same ratio of present-day HSR traffic to pre-HSR air traffic between London and Paris – we get an additional 9 million passengers a year, small compared to the possibilities of the other city pairs but non-negligible.

The other issue is rolling stock and operating plan. Because the Northeast Corridor runs as one route, and there is no point in separating its two halves operationally, the same rolling stock that runs south of New York also has to run north of New York. In particular, we obtain the following situation:

– Traffic purely south of New York justifies rolling stock that could in principle achieve much higher speeds north of New York.

– Because of certain capacity problems, both real and imagined, a few strategic bypasses and (near Boston) commuter rail modernization can have outsized intercity trip time benefit relative to the cost. A high-speed train that gets stuck behind commuter trains pulled by diesel locomotives does Boston-Providence in about 35 minutes. One that shares tracks with punctual modern EMUs can do the same in 20.

– At low levels of infrastructure investment, the cost of new rolling stock can be sizable compared to the cost of infrastructure. Half-hourly service with 16-car trains, one possible initial service plan, costs $250 million times the one-way Boston-Washington trip time in hours including turnaround time, plus spare ratio. 15-minute service requires double that cost, naturally. None of the New York-Boston projects, not even “buy the MBTA better trains,” flips to negative cost this way, but some have lower cost as a result.

– Shared-track HSR requires very good punctuality. Coming south from Boston, trains have no reason to be off-schedule in New York – Metro-North is reasonably punctual (though not enough for HSR) and both between the Rhode Island/Massachusetts state line and New Haven and between New Rochelle and New York Amtrak owns the tracks and runs the most trains – but the bypass and junction separation will help further. Coming north from Virginia there are much bigger problems, but trains can dwell arbitrarily long in Washington for schedule buffer, which they can’t in New York.

What this means is that it’s best to phase Northeast HSR investment throughout the entire corridor. New York-Washington should have the priority because it’s cheaper and has more traffic potential, but unless for some reason there is no money (not even about $4 billion for immediate improvements plus a little more for a bypass), parts of New York-Boston should be in the first phase.

Arguably, even true branches, such as to the Keystone Corridor and Springfield, can get through-service early. Those do not have the ridership potential of the core route, but electrifying New Haven-Springfield to run trains through, and programming extra trains for Keystone, can be done within a few years. The limit perhaps is only rolling stock, or more precisely what to do with the electric locomotives that would become obsolete (they already are, but are a sunk cost, and buying new HSR trainsets now becomes an additional one-time cost).