The Urban Geography of Park-and-Rides

The urban geography of transit cities and of car cities is relatively well-understood. In a transit city, there will be a strong CBD surrounded by residences with spiky secondary centers, all quite small geographically but dense, centered around train stations and junctions; because density is high throughout, minor trips are done on foot. In a car city, all trips are done by car, the core is weak, and most employment is in suburban edge cities and edgeless cities.

What I haven’t seen is an explanation of how urban geography works in mixed metro areas: there are those in which short trips are done on foot and long ones in cars, such as new urbanist developments, and those in which short trips are done by car and long ones on transit, such as park-and-ride-oriented commuter suburbs. It is the latter that I want to address in this post.

The first feature of park-and-rides is that of all combinations of modes of transportation, they are the fastest and enable suburbs to sprout the farthest from the center. This is because the segment of the trip done in a car is uncongested and so driving is faster than transit, while the segment done on a train parallels a congested road, and conversely makes few stops so that average speeds are high.

On top of this, because intra-suburban trips are done by car, the density in the suburbs is very low, comparable to proper car cities (see the lower end of the density profiles of the New York, Chicago, and Boston metro areas), and this forces sprawl to go outward. New York is the world’s most sprawling city measured in total built-up area; the only other city of comparable size that’s not a transit city or a bus/jitney city is Los Angeles, which is forced to have denser suburbs because of the mountains. Of course Houston and Dallas sprawl even more relative to size, but because they lack New York’s transit-oriented core, there’s an inherent limit to their size.

The other feature is that there’s a definite socioeconomic history to the development of the auto-oriented commuter suburbs of transit cities. First, people move to the suburbs and commute into the city, almost always by train due to road congestion (or, as in the earliest New York suburbs, because mass motorization hasn’t arrived yet). The mass exodus into these suburbs comes from cars rather than commuter rail, and so the local services for people living in those suburbs are built at automobile scale, rather than at the walkable town center scale of 1910.

In North America there’s also a definite class element here – the early movers are the rich rather than the poor. Historically this was partly because poor people couldn’t afford regular train fare, and partly because the impetus for suburbanization was idyllic country homes with access to urban jobs rather than cheap housing for the poor. If I’m not mistaken, this wasn’t the case in Australian cities’ suburbanization, leading to a more urban transit-style mode of running mainline rail. The result of this class distinction is that North American commuter rail styles itself as for the rich: agencies make an effort to ensure everyone has a seat and downplay comfortable standing space, and the expectation is that transit is a last-ditch mode of transportation for when cars just don’t have the capacity to get people downtown, and so nobody needs to take the trains in the off-peak or take a bus to the train.

The result is that the park-and-ride city will still have a strong core with high-capacity transportation, and the primary CBD will maintain its supremacy for high-income jobs. Establishing edge cities in the direction of the favored quarter can happen, but there’s still a congested city nearby, and so from many directions it’s impossible to drive, and taking transit is impossible. Thus jobs in White Plains and Stamford are not nearly as high-paying as jobs in Manhattan.

There can even be secondary CBDs, if the inner part of the metro area, where people take transit more regularly than the suburban commuters do, is large enough. But those secondary CBDs are frequently quite auto-oriented. Brooklyn’s mode share for jobs is only 42-39 in favor of transit (for residents, it’s 60-25), and all other counties in the New York region except Manhattan have more workers driving than taking transit, a situation that is not true if one looks at residents. Those secondary CBDs then have mixed characteristics: they are dense and fairly walkable, as can be expected based on their history and location, but also have plentiful parking and a large share of drivers demanding even more. They can accommodate multiple modes of transportation, but driving is more convenient, and from the suburbs the commuter rail system isn’t always geared to serve them.

Core Connectors and In-Between Neighborhoods

In some American cities, new or proposed transit lines are either core connectors, i.e. city-center circulator streetcars built for development purposes, or far-flung commuter rail extensions with few urban stops. Both are present in Providence, with the South County extension of the MBTA and the Core Connector, but worse circulators than in Providence are proposed elsewhere (for example, in New Haven), and exurb-focused commuter rail with parking lot stations is the standard in most Sunbelt cities and also in Massachusetts. At first I thought my opposition to both was just a matter of wonky support of a specific stop distance and service pattern that falls in between those two extremes, but recently, after attending Providence urbanist blogger meetings and also rereading old threads about New Haven, I realized there’s a political and social dimension to all this.

Recall that old American cities have a donut-shaped income distribution: gentrified in the center, poor in most other urban neighborhoods and inner suburbs, and middle-class to rich in most suburbs. Those two forms of bad transit are specifically built to cater to the rich parts of the metro area, and ignore the poor parts. The problem, of course, is that the poor parts are precisely where transit ridership is concentrated. People in the gentrified cores of smaller cities can walk; people in the suburbs own cars, and those cities have too many roads and too much parking for buses to be an even semi-reasonable alternative.

In Providence, as I recently brought up, the busiest buses follow Broad and North Main, and serve working-class and poor populations. The same is true in New Haven: the busiest line by far runs on Dixwell, connecting the Yale student ghetto, the in-between poor neighborhoods, and the strip malls in middle-class Hamden. So what service addition does a study by the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCORAG) propose? Naturally, a circulator connecting Union Station with the New Haven Green. You could chalk this up to a belief in systemwide upgrades over building a few high-performance lines, but many outlying bus stops have no shelter, and the study says nothing about that.

When Peter Brassard first pitched the idea of a local rail shuttle service in Providence and its inner suburbs to us privately, the observation one of us made (I think it was Jef Nickerson, but I’m not sure) is that it would invert the usual relationship between infrastructure investment and income. This is mostly accidental – the mainline serves Olneyville and Pawtucket but not the East Side. But something like this is more likely than not when the focus is on serving reasonably dense neighborhoods and perhaps inner-suburban malls outside walking range.

The same is true of what I believe to be the most promising rail shuttle service in New Haven – namely, a service using the Farmington Canal Trail, which runs about 200 meters east of Dixwell, and could be reused by light rail reaching downtown New Haven on city streets or rapid transit connecting to the mainline with a very short tunnel or trench. With a stop spacing of a little less than a kilometer, modern rolling stock could average 35-40 km/h in service, double the speed of the current bus.

I suspect part of the bias against such service comes from the belief that building ten kilometers of light rail is expensive. Because there’s an implicit hierarchy in planners’ mind between services, they think a downgrade is an automatic cost saver, even when it’s not – for instance, when a bus on an abandoned railroad costs far more than most rail reactivation projects do. One of these mantras is that commuter rail infill is less expensive (and then they build infill stations at $100 million apiece, strategically located away from the intersection with the main bus corridor). As a rule of thumb, each of these downgrades just raises unit costs because of various overbuilding schemes until total cost is the same as if they’d built regular urban rail, but the benefits are much lower.

But it’s more than a technical bias; it’s also political bias. The Core Connector is explicitly a development project. It may even be a successful one, if it convinces local power broker Colin Kane to drop plans for building 7,000 parking spaces in the Jewelry District, as described in a recent paywalled article in Next American City. Development projects like this never go to extant low-income neighborhoods, unless there’s an explicit effort at gentrification, and usually locals protest against the displacement; neglect is much easier and less controversial than redevelopment.

The technical and political biases merge in one of the less challenged cost-effectiveness metrics, the cost per new rider. Although it’s presented in neutral terms – the cost is compared to the predicted total transit ridership if the project is built minus the predicted total if it is not – the results privilege adding choice riders (that is, those who already own a car and drive to work) over retaining existing riders. Although transit revivals happen, most of the world’s transit cities built out their systems before most people got cars, and people simply kept using transit instead of buying cars even as they moved into the middle class. Portland may have about the same metro area transit mode share as before it built light rail, but other cities of similar age lost ground and have even lower transit use.

It’s tricks like ignoring retention that lead Boston to downrate replacing the southern half of the Silver Line with light rail on its list of possible projects even though it would be very cheap by US standards per rider, and rate new commuter rail branches well beyond the continuous built-up area as more cost-effective. The rail bias factor implied by the computation for new riders is less than 0.5%: 130 new riders against 34,000 existing ones. A Transportation Research Board analysis finds the rail bias is in the 34-43% range. I suspect that if the Silver Line served richer areas than Roxbury, Boston would use a more reasonable rail bias than 130/34,000, bringing down costs per new rider by two orders of magnitude. New York went ahead with Second Avenue Subway; it is undoubtedly the most important subway project in the region, but the next best corridors, e.g. Utica, serving less chic neighborhoods than the Upper East Side, are ignored.

The technical reason to build urban rail a certain way – own-right-of-way, stops roughly every kilometer within the city, etc. – is of course separate. Technical characteristics do not tell you which neighborhoods to serve, not without first looking into existing demand patterns. It is just fortunate that New Haven has a right-of-way closely paralleling Dixwell, and unfortunate that Providence has none paralleling Broad. But the income donuts, and more generally the connection between density and old industrial development that is usually working-class (since gentrification in such cities is within walking distance of the core rather than within transit distance), have certain social implications. The most annoying to the planner and the government official is that they must invest in poor neighborhoods as they are, and do not have a special reason to try to foist change upon them.

Or they can just build core connectors for the cities and park-and-ride extensions for the suburbs. The FTA will fund these no matter what; its cost-effectiveness metrics are biased that way to avoid having to send every penny it has available to a few expensive but high-ridership lines such as Second Avenue Subway. The developers will like them, because of real or imagined property value benefits. The state will like them – state governments are dominated by suburbanites and urban developers and view transit as pork rather than as useful spending based on ridership metrics; Rhode Island is much likelier to find support for development in the Jewelry District than for boring rail lines in already-developed Providence neighborhoods. It’s a win-win for everyone except the riders, and they don’t count.

Pedestrian Observations from New Haven

I don’t normally pedestrian-observe cities that I’ve been to so many times, and New Haven is the US city I’ve spent the most time in other than the two I’ve lived in. But my last visit, in which I looked at the closing time of each store and found it compares more favorably with Providence than I’d thought, led me to think why I have such a visceral response to New Haven’s urbanism.

The parking. It hurts. Providence’s Downcity has parking garages and surface lots, but it has nothing on New Haven there. New Haven’s Route 34 stubway is only an actual road for two and a half blocks west of State Street – 800 meters of actual freeway. Beyond that the full width of the block is occupied by a multistory parking deck for 250 meters, passing over York Street and making walking between downtown or most of Yale and Yale-New Haven Hospital unpleasant. Farther out there are two full blocks, or 600 linear meters, of surface lots. On both sides, the parts of Route 34 used for moving cars are also flanked by surface lots.

Although Union Station is located outside city center, and the area immediately to its east is either empty or low-value, the station’s overflow parking lots are located between the station and downtown, on the downtown side of Route 34. There are special shuttles between the train station and the parking lots, and other shuttles between the train station and Yale. It makes Providence Station and Providence Place look like models of megaproject-city integration. To solve that particular problem, New Haven is proposing a circulator streetcar with practically no use other than a parking lot shuttle on rails.

Even inhabited buildings are often surrounded by immense amounts of surface parking. Immediately north of the elevated parking garage over York, there are several towers in parking lots. Even lower-rise housing is frequently surrounded by continuous parking; this is true of most blocks flanking State Street within walking distance of the State Street train station. What’s jarring is not just the percentage of space devoted to parking, but also the size of continuous parking lots; the more intact residential neighborhoods of both New Haven and Providence have small lots behind or between houses, rather than multiple continuous hectares of parking. It’s this preponderance of unlit parking that gives the city a post-apocalyptic feel.

Discounting the parking, the city is surprisingly monocentric. Most of the university and the secondary urban destinations cluster near downtown. Generally they’re west of the office towers – just far enough to avoid creating a true mixed-use neighborhood anywhere – but they’re theoretically within walking distance of everything. It’s not like the multiple cores of Providence and Cambridge. The upside is that Chapel Street doesn’t depopulate at 7 pm the way Downcity does; the downside is that it’s still nowhere as nice as Thayer or Wickenden Street and completely lacks their small cosiness.

It’s too bad, because there is a lot of usable space in New Haven that would make for great development, and also make the rest of the city more livable if built up. The individual buildings that aren’t recent urban renewal projects are fine; there just need to be more of them. Some, though by no means all or even most, of the pedestrian-hostility will go if Route 34 is removed as planned. But the current plans call for the first block removed to be 50% replaced with a parking garage. Moreover, there do not seem to be plans to tear the elevated parking garage over York, even though it’s York and not the streets intersecting the freeway proper that connects to the hospital.

The problem, I believe, comes from viewing freeway removal as yet another urban renewal program, on a par with one-way streetcar loops, sterile cultural centers, and other universal failures. It’s a preference for the iconic over the mundane that leads New Haven to spurn the idea of removing the freeway and the garage, not mandating any parking, and selling the land in small lots to allow for independent businesses.

Big things almost invariably present a blank street wall. It’s not impossible for big entities to coexist with reasonable urbanism – Brown’s own buildings aren’t the best, but they don’t prevent Thayer Street from more or less working – but big buildings in low-traffic areas do not. A skyscraper in a downtown area with enough demand for it will work – it can have retail in its first floor facing the street, as the Empire State Building does, and the adjacent blocks will also be able to supply urban amenities. A skyscraper surrounded by nothing will not. Neither, for that matter, will a four-story facility occupying half a block; those need to be somewhere, but New Haven has enough space for them already and has no reason to prefer them to blocks with multiple separate buildings owned by different entities.

The end result is that New Haven is likely to stay bad. The suburbanites think it has a shortage of parking; thus, the city builds more for them, instead of realizing that a city will always have a shortage of parking and if it is accused of something it might as well do it and cater to people who it can satisfy. It’s great for cars – even more of the region will be open to them to the exclusion of anyone who uses other modes of transportation. It’s just bad for people.

Commuter Rail Ridership Distribution

As a followup to my claim that the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey had a more outer-suburban ridership than the Morris and Essex lines, I decided to tabulate the ridership distribution of various commuter lines. This tells you what percent of the ridership originates within some distance of the city center. All lines in New York are included, though some are grouped together because of branching.

Explanation: the ridership numbers for New Jersey Transit come from the New York Times, and those for the LIRR and Metro-North come from files published by the MTA. To maintain comparability with the Metro-North and NJT numbers, ridership in city terminal areas is ignored for calculation purposes; thus, X% really means X% of beyond-city ridership. This means stations from Jamaica west, from Newark Penn east, and from Harlem south are not counted. All km points are calculated from Penn Station or Grand Central, even for lines that do not run through to those stations. Finally, some lines are lumped together, when they share stations beyond the excluded city terminal zone.

Line\km 20 30 40 50 60 80 100
NJ NEC/NJC (66,997) 4 14.2 31.3 44.6 59.6 78.2 98.7
R. Val. (10,639) 0 13.8 51.7 74.3 84.4 98.5 100
M&E/MB (35,183) 5.6 36.3 64.7 81 91.8 98.9 100
Erie Main/BC (13,249) 16 35.6 60.7 73.9 81.2 89 92.9
P. Val. (3,674) 5.5 39 70.3 97.3 100 100 100
Hudson (25,442) 5.3 16.7 30.8 52.6 66.7 76.2 88.8
Harlem (45,117) 4.7 27 68.8 73.9 82 91.3 98.1
NH + NC/D/W (61,973) 0.1 13.6 31.4 42.7 60.8 77 90.2
Port W. (23,404) 14.1 80.8 100 100 100 100 100
LIRR Main (65,104) 0 8.5 29.1 51.7 69.2 83.7 99.9
Mont. + Atl. (58,835) 0 10 52.9 80 88 96.3 99.3

Note that the data isn’t completely reliable. The NJT and Metro-North data sets paper this over by counting just one direction, but the LIRR counts both, and there are discrepancies, for example at Huntington. So the numbers above have a fair margin of error around them.

Observe that the ridership of the Northeast Corridor is so skewed outward that despite having twice the ridership of the Morris and Essex lines in New Jersey, the Morris and Essex lines actually beat it on ridership within 40 km of Penn Station. Similarly, the Harlem Line beats the New Haven Line up to 50 km.

Similar data exists in Boston, and, in harder to search form even if you speak the language, Tokyo (better data for Tokyo can be found here, but for most lines the numbers include only inner and middle segments, up to about 50 km outside Tokyo Station). It’s also quite easy in both cities to set a boundary of the excluded city zone, and with Boston this could allow constructing the same table.

The implication of the difference between various lines is that some lines are more local and some are practically intercity. This relates to the service decisions within each line – more stops or fewer stops – but there aren’t a horde of people in Elizabeth and South Newark who are clamoring to ride rush hour trains into Penn Station and would in large numbers if only stop spacing were narrower, or a horde of people in Sussex County who’d ride if only there were fewer stops between Dover and Penn Station.

That said, the more local lines do have potential for local service on trips that American commuter rail doesn’t serve. There’s an untapped market of people commuting from New Jersey to Jamaica and Brooklyn, or from Long Island to Newark and Jersey City, and this market necessarily needs to be served with more local trains, because most people in it live closer to the city.

Providence: Busy Versus Frequent Buses

While trying to come up with a good proposal for upgraded buses or streetcars in Providence, I tried to base route decisions on RIPTA’s most frequent buses. But as it turns out, there’s a substantial difference between the most frequent and the busiest routes, and existing policies toward investment do not reward high ridership at all.

By far the two busiest lines in the state are routes 11 (Broad Street), with 6,500 weekday riders, and 99 (North Main to Pawtucket), with 5,200. Those are also the two most frequent, with 10-minute peak and midday service, and are usually interlined. This is the only case in which frequency matches traffic: of the next batch of busiest routes – 20, 22, 56, and 60, each with about 3,000 weekday riders – only the 56 has 15-minute off-peak service, the rest ranging from 22 to 35, with the 20 and 22 having 22-23-minute frequency even at the peak. Several less busy lines have 20-minute all-day service, and the frequent network, which uses a 20-minute weekday off-peak standard, looks different from the highest-traffic network.

However, previous and proposed development-oriented transit, including the fake trolleys and now the streetcar, avoid even the 11 and 99. The fake trolleys are distinguished in branding, 20-minute frequency even on weekends and in the evenings, and consistent interlining across Kennedy Plaza. The 92 fake trolley runs from the East Side to Federal Hill without changing its number, but regular buses, including the 11 and 99, change their route number at Kennedy Plaza, and that’s if there’s a consistent route they interline with at all. (When Jef Nickerson pressed RIPTA on this issue, RIPTA said it wants to preserve flexibility.) Likewise, the streetcar is a city-center circulator, and ideas for where to extend it afterward avoid Broad Street and North Main; local transit activists I have talked to believe the preference is for Broadway, a wide street hosting two routes (27, 28) that have 4,500 weekday riders between them, still less than Broad. (The alternative route in the same direction, Westminster, has 3,500 on its two buses, but the difference comes from the routes’ respective tails west of Olneyville Square, and the segments along Westminster and Broadway look about even.)

This is not to say that the state spurns the busiest routes. After the previous Governor vetoed it six times, Governor Chafee recently signed a bill to provide bus signal priority on the busiest lines. The brand for this is called rapid bus. At best, this shows the state thinks that rich people on the East Side and the Federal Hill gentrifiers, and soon the Jewelry District gentrifiers, prefer to ride a service that’s not called a bus, even if it is one. At worst, it points to skewed priorities: the streetcar is explicitly a development tool, and much more expensive than clearly posting schedules at the top end of the bus tunnel and rearranging schedules to provide constant headways within it.

A related issue is the ability to railstitute bus routes. Among all the busy routes, route 11 is among the hardest to replace with commuter rail. Peter Brassard’s urban shuttle proposal and my Woonsocket regional rail proposal use existing railroad lines. Arguably, this could take over the longer-distance functions of the 99, whose demand primarily comes from Pawtucket rather than North Main in Providence. However, the 11 is not paralleled by any rail line. This makes it the most important corridor for any upgrade. Alternative routes, such as continuing the existing streetcar proposal farther south, do not capture the local demand on Broad, which is of moderate intensity everywhere along the corridor. The distribution of demand on Broad is linear, which is less the case for other routes, which connect various anchors spaced farther apart.

It’s not normal for the relationship between traffic and frequency to be so weak. (In New York, busy routes that aren’t frequent by a 10-minute standard are the exception, and are very close to making the cut, e.g. the B8 and Bx39 run sometimes every 10 minutes midday and sometimes every 12). RIPTA needs to be asking itself why some routes are overserved and others are underserved.

But more importantly, the city and the state need to ask themselves why they’re building special branding as not-a-regular-bus around routes that aren’t even the ones that most need it. The fake trolleys get emphasized and specially colored on the map. It’s RIPTA’s fault that the interlined buses aren’t consistently signed, but all of the investment decisions are on the city and the state. Even if it’s necessary to build a streetcar to the Jewelry District and the hospital, why not say that pending additional funds the city will extend it toward and then along Broad? The alignment wouldn’t be any more awkward than that already proposed, and it would only miss a relatively short segment of Broad.

Regional Rail for New York: What Can Be Done Now

MTA Chairman Joe Lhota recently proposed to through-route commuter rail lines in the New York area, as was proposed in the past by the RPA, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, and more recently myself. Lhota proposed other, less flashy ideas for integration, including better track sharing at Penn Station and lengthening platforms to accommodate 10-car trains. Although a network that looks like my proposal should still be the goal for the next 20 years, there are several things that can be done in the very short run. None is do-it-tomorrow immediate, but neither does any require very difficult modification of equipment or organization or significant infrastructure investment. Most should not require extensive studies.

Note that this is not a wishlist of the most important commuter rail reorganization projects in the region. Many of those reorganizations do not have anything to do with interagency integration, and are therefore not included. Only projects that are very cheap and would come from or benefit integration are on this list.

1. Integrated ticket machines at Penn Station. This requires the physical tickets on New Jersey Transit to look like those on the LIRR and Metro-North (and thus some modifications to the fare barriers at Secaucus and Newark Airport), and some reprogramming of ticket machines, but no change otherwise. Ideally a ticket from (say) Hicksville to Newark should cost less than the sum of tickets from Hicksville to New York and New York to Newark, to encourage reverse-peak traffic, but strictly speaking the discount is not needed. Amtrak and commuter rail machines should also be integrated, though the physical tickets can still be different if switching over is too hard.

2. Integrated concourses at Penn Station. This means treating the upper and lower concourses as belonging to all three railroads. This requires Amtrak to give up its single-file queuing and accept that people already can walk around and get to its trains from other railroads’ turfs. Trains should be announced on all concourses, and all access points to a platform should be clearly signed with the next train’s type and schedule.

3. Timed transfers. Although a clean integrated timetable is impossible, because trains interline on some inner segments to increase capacity, a partial version is still possible. What this means is that, with hourly off-peak service on each branch, Morris and Essex trains should arrive at Penn Station just before the hour, as should one of the several hourly trains on the New Jersey side of the Northeast Corridor, and then two or three branches going to the east (say, to New Haven and Port Washington, and on one additional LIRR line for service to Jamaica) should leave just after the hour, with the tightest connection done cross-platform. This would make trips from New Jersey to JFK and from Long Island to Newark easier, and the choice of services to participate in the system should be consistent with even spacing on interlined trunks.

4. Modification of rolling stock. Metro-North’s M8s can run under 60 Hz catenary and third rail, but unfortunately not 25 Hz catenary; as lower frequency requires a larger transformer, modifying the trains to run on the New Jersey side of the Northeast Corridor may be too hard in the very short term (though not in the medium and long terms). However, NJT’s ALP-46 locomotives and Arrow EMUs can run on 12 kV 25 Hz and 25 kV 60 Hz catenary, and thus modifying them to run on Metro-North’s 12 kV 60 Hz catenary is easy, allowing them to run from the NJT network to the New Haven Line. Unfortunately, because locomotives accelerate more slowly than EMUs and the Arrows are quite old, they do not have very good performance for short-stop service, for which through-running is the most useful.

5. Voltage change on the Northeast Corridor’s New Jersey side to 25 kV 60 Hz. This voltage change was done to the Morris and Essex lines and much of the North Jersey Coast Line. It is somewhere on Amtrak’s wishlist of projects, but I do not know how high it is. This allows M8s to run through, ensuring the better rolling stock is available for the service that needs it the most. It may possibly be bundled with Amtrak’s installation of constant tension catenary south of New Brunswick to reduce costs. Since this eliminates the need for 25 Hz transformers in the future, this meas future NJT rolling stock would be lighter.

6. Depending on 4-5, rolling stock sharing along interlined services. In practice this means M8s on local Northeast Corridor services, which would also allow adding and serving infill stations in New Jersey (for example, more regular service to North Elizabeth, and perhaps a station at South Street in Newark), and Arrows and locomotives on express services from Penn Station and New Jersey to New Haven.

7. Platform raising on the North Jersey Coast Line and the Morris and Essex lines, if service using M8s rather than Arrows is desired. Because of the voltage, it’s actually easier for M8s to serve the Morristown Line other than their inability to serve low platforms: it would only require 8-21 km of reelectrification rather than 88-101. The Morris and Essex lines also have a more inner-suburban distribution of ridership than the Northeast Corridor Line, which gets most of its ridership from more distant stations, and this makes them in one sense better-suited for through-service. (In another sense, the Northeast Corridor is better, since it serves downtown Newark, a secondary CBD that draws some commuters from suburbs and boroughs east of Manhattan.)

It is my belief that all of the above, possibly except #5 and #7, are feasible within months or at worst a very small number of years, and would not require additional environmental work. Even #5 and #7, which are more expensive, are still close to two orders of magnitude cheaper than a full through-running plan with new tunnels serving Lower Manhattan.

The medium term is more expensive – perhaps an order of magnitude less than the full program rather than two – and would include further modernization, allowing full through-service on every line and more efficient equipment utilization. It can also assume friendlier regulations, which a snap integration cannot, and this in particular means better rolling stock in the future and higher speeds even with existing rolling stock. Clockface schedules and frequent off-peak service would allow planning infrastructure repairs and upgrades around specific schedules. For example, the current local Stamford-Grand Central schedule is 1:06, but an express train I recently took from New Haven came to Grand Central more than 10 minutes ahead of schedule, suggesting excessive padding; minor upgrades should allow an M8 to do Stamford-New York in an hour minus turnaround time making local stops, and more ambitiously New York-New Brunswick in 45 minutes minus turnaround time.

Lhota can’t do much in the long term, because this requires an enormous investment into concrete, a political decision and a longer-term one than Lhota’s term as MTA chair. However, he can both implement the above seven points within his term, and also set in motion various work rule reforms and small-scale capital project planning and apply for the requisite FRA waivers to permit the medium-term reforms to succeed.

Followup on the Providence Regional Rail Shuttle

Peter Brassard’s proposal for a very frequent-stop mainline train in Rhode Island received comments both here and on Greater City, dealing with issues from rolling stock to station choice to scheduling. Some are fairly trivial, some aren’t. The upshot is that the project is technically feasible, but requires political head-bashing, especially with regards to scheduling.

First, the easy part: if the line is only to run between Central Falls and Warwick, then the rolling stock should be electric; this both improves performance and eliminates a political bottleneck, because the EMU market is larger than the DMU market, and in case FRA regulations do not change and obtaining a waiver is too expensive, there are M8s ready to use. The M8s are heavier than is ideal, but their performance is to my knowledge imperceptibly worse than that of noncompliant trains in the speed range appropriate for the short stop spacing, up to about 100 km/h.

Scheduling is the problem, because there has to be track sharing with something. The line is three-tracked: there are two tracks for Amtrak, also used by the MBTA north of Providence Station, and one track for freight. The line used to be four-tracked, but was reduced to three tracks in the 1990s in order to widen the track centers and allow the Acelas to tilt. Further reduction in track centers is not acceptable: at 4 meters (more precisely 13′) the distance is shorter than the standards for greenfield construction in Europe and even Japan. Track center standards are laxer on lower-speed segments, as the trackage through Providence is, but tilting becomes unsafe for an Acela-wide train. (The Pendolino is 37 cm narrower than the Acela.)

The alternative is to slightly widen the right-of-way at certain overpasses to allow four tracks, for a minimum of 20 meters with 4-meter track centers; some work, including widening, is already required to make room for platforms, and many of the most constrained locations, such as Olneyville at 18 meters, are station stop sites. It’s this construction that would most likely be the bulk of the project cost. At much lower cost, it would also allow electrification of the full corridor, making EMUs a feasible rolling stock choice for the local trains.

With four tracks, the question becomes, what regional rail should share tracks with. The choice is between intercity trains, which are currently slow but could be sped up, and freight trains. Both require political maneuvering, because neither Amtrak nor the Providence and Worcester has operating practices that are compatible with punctual passenger service. (Amtrak is more easily reformable, but an Amtrak that’s been so reformed is an Amtrak that runs trains much faster on the Northeast Corridor, increasing the regional/intercity speed difference).

I contend that it’s actually more correct to share tracks with freight. The sharpest curves are at stations, and so no superelevation is needed, but even if it were, allowing 100 km/h passenger trains could be accommodated with minimal freight train cant excess (about 25 mm at 50 km/h). More importantly, freight and local passenger rail have similar average speeds. The speed profile is different – freight is steady and slow, local passenger rail attains higher speeds but makes frequent stops – but when headways are long enough, this is not a problem.

On page 46 of the Providence Foundation study on a similar passenger line, we see that there aren’t many freight trains, so headways are determined by passenger trains. The freight schedule on page 48 of the same study suggests that freight and passenger train speeds would be very similar. It has trains doing Pawtucket-Warwick in 23 minutes; modern EMUs with a top speed of 100 km/h (losing 45 seconds to each station stop) and making the proposed stops would do the same in 25 minutes, with 7% padding. The local passenger train is a hair faster than the freight train on the Providence-Pawtucket and Cranston-Warwick segments, in both cases by less than a minute, and a bit slower on the Providence-Cranston segment, where station spacing is denser. This is close enough that I believe that 15-minute passenger train frequency is no barrier to track sharing. Potentially even 10-minute frequency can be accommodated. It requires freight trains to be somewhat timetabled, but they’d have a window of several minutes to enter between each pair of successive passenger trains, and missing their window would not delay them by more than 15 minutes. There is, then, no technical barrier to sharing tracks with freight.

The alternative, sharing tracks with intercity trains, is more dubious. Although less construction is required, the speed difference is larger. Instead of taking 23 minutes between Pawtucket and the airport, optimized intercity trains would take 8:45, including padding and a station stop at Providence. They can pass local trains at Providence, at the cost of slowing them down by several minutes while they wait to be overtaken, but even between Providence and the airport, travel time would be 5 minutes for intercity trains and 17 for regional trains.

If there’s four-tracking in Warwick, or two stops are dropped, then it’s tight but doable. Otherwise, it’s not; 12 minutes is too long a window for 15-minute service. It would require an extra terminating track at Warwick, but that would be needed anyway. The problem then is that local Rhode Island trains and MBTA trains would interfere with each other at Providence because both would dwell at the station for too long.

Interlining the two services and having MBTA trains make local stops in Providence is possible, and in conjunction with the two-overtake schedule for Boston-Providence naturally yields a three-overtake schedule. The problem is that the more overtakes there are the more reliability suffers. If an hourly freight train misses a window and needs to be delayed 15 minutes, it’s no big deal; if the goods couldn’t take a 15-minute delay, the train would be sufficiently punctual to make the window. If a passenger train misses a window, it requires the train behind it to slow down and this is not recoverable if the schedule is so tight.

When it’s unavoidable it’s best to just invest in running trains on schedule, but in this case a three-overtake schedule is avoidable. Thus track-sharing with freight is the correct option, leaving intercity trains to have a track that’s entirely theirs south of Providence, as this shuttle concept would almost certainly take over Wickford Junction service if necessary. It conveniently also allows higher regional rail frequency should the need ever arise, and because the scheduling is loose makes it easier to shoehorn another line into this system.

Netroots Nation and How the 99% Talk Hurts Consensus

For the first time since 2006, I went to Netroots Nation, as it’s held in Providence. There was one panel about public transportation, entitled “Saving Public Transportation,” whose speakers included Larry Hanley, who dominated the discussion; a moderator; and three political activists: including a local union leader, a Sierra Club representative, and a state legislative candidate who Greater City is supporting. The discussion focused on preserving bus operations rather than on expansion – in fact Hanley made the point that agencies expand capital while cutting back service because the federal government only pays for capital rather than operating funds.

Since the panel was entirely political, and dealt mostly with funding issues, when it was time for questions I asked about the saddling of transit agencies with highway debt; I specifically mentioned Massachusetts’ putting Big Dig mitigation debt on the MBTA. I wanted to see if the panelists would say anything about mode shifting or about the relative power of highways and transit.

Instead, Hanley, who took the question, ignored what I said about highway debt, and instead answered about refinancing debt at lower interest rates, as issue his union is harping about. In reality, according to his union’s own figures, the MBTA could save $26 million a year by refinancing debt; for comparison, its deficit this year, which it plugged with service cuts and a large fare hike, was $163 million, and its total debt payments in 2006 were $351 million, of which $117 million came from the Big Dig. Although the parts of this debt that are not from the Big Dig come from true transit projects, those were voted on by the state legislature, rather than by the MBTA; transit’s low position in the transportation funding food chain is thus responsible for 13.5 times as much money as could be extracted from the banks.

So at first pass, Hanley was pivoting to an issue he was more comfortable talking about, which happens to involve a fraction of the amount of money in question. But at second pass, something more insidious happened. Instead of answering a question about transportation priorities and getting state governments to assume debt they’d unfairly loaded onto transit agencies, which would require clashing with other departments with their own agendas, Hanley preferred to shift blame onto banks. He did not include figures during the panel and so I could not know he was talking about such a small amount of money; his explanation for focusing on the banks is that the MTA renegotiated deals with contractors to get lower prices, so it should do the same with the banks.

And after thinking about this, I realized how it shows exactly how despite appearances, the “We are the 99%” slogan is the exact opposite of any sort of democratic consensus. It silences any notion that there are different interests among the 99%. The auto workers and Providence’s carless residents are both members of the 99%; they have diametrically different interests when it comes to transportation. But in the Grand Struggle, the 99% must be united, and thus the leaders shift any discussion to the common enemy, no matter the relative proportions of the amounts of money in question.

After Scott Walker’s win, Matt Yglesias wrote that different industries have clashing interests just as much as labor and business do. But even within the framework of fighting big business’s influence, two of the most influential opposing interest groups, the union movement and small business, have different interests and are hostile to each other. Dean Baker wrote in The Conservative Nanny State that small businesses are being coddled because they pay lower wages and benefits on average; in general, the American union movement has not organized small businesses and supports the businesses it has already organized, and is hostile toward new companies, which are usually non-union. Small business in turn is hostile toward regulations on wages, starting a business, and so on.

The 99% framing papers over all of that. The voices that dominate the protests believe themselves to be the true representatives of 99% of the population, and by implication their own issues to be the most important. Other issues are subsidiary, or outright distractions from the primary needs. Any movement that claims to represent everyone is not consensual but nationalistic, and just as nationalism requires the elites to declare a certain archetype to be Real Americans (or Britons, or French) and everyone else to be one of many negative stereotypes, so does this 99% framing require movement leaders to coopt or downplay other groups’ issues.

Consensus comes from clashing points of view. The Swiss Socialists are farther left than what is considered serious liberal opinion in the US, and the Swiss People’s Party is about as far right as the Tea Party; they and the centrist parties are more or less in a grand coalition. The consensus comes from the realization that no single faction will ever dominate, and thus the best it can do is distill how it can advance its stated goals (poverty reduction, smaller government, greater national cohesion, etc., depending on the party). The Occupy protesters have very high supermajority requirements at their general assemblies, but they do not have this clash, this diversity in either viewpoints or demographics. They have procedural near-unanimity but not actual consensus governance, leading to a system that excludes most interest groups that comprise the 99%; unsurprisingly, the movement has severe problems with race, since its center is white and thinks it speaks for everyone.

Of course, within the union movement something similar is happening, with the dominant group being the older members. This is what New York-area transit commenter Larry Littlefield calls Generation Greed, spanning people of all political classes.

The end result is that no matter how much rhetoric is thrown around about new politics, forward-looking progressives, and so on, what ends up is a repetition of an old hierarchy, one with Real Working People and with fake ones. It has to; when it has no capability of dealing with tensions between transit users and other groups, or between whites and blacks, or between labor and small business, it cannot project any unity of the 99% otherwise. And without unity, it’s a movement without any clear policy agenda.

Commuter Rail, Urban Infill Stations, and Shuttle Train Rapid Transit

This is a proposal by Peter Brassard, who comments here and on Greater City: Providence. It was published on Greater City first, and is mirrored here as the site is experiencing server problems.

Rhode Island’s commuter rail service as currently conceived may not be conducive to encouraging ridership. Distances between existing and proposed stations are too far. Much of the focus has been on extending the system further into low-density suburbs. For Rhode Island commuter rail to succeed, more needs to be done to take advantage of existing walkable urban neighborhoods that have a high potential for passengers. Some of these areas have large amounts of commercial/industrial space or development opportunities. Due to Downtown Providence expansion, the rail system will be challenged, as long as there’s no internal downtown high-frequency transit, such as the proposed Core Connector, to directly link rail passengers to the far reaches of downtown.

Rhode Island’s commuter rail doesn’t capitalize on density variations and neighborhood assets of the Providence area. If Rhode Island’s commuter rail functioned as a rapid mass-transit system, besides increasing the number of passengers, it would help to revitalize and expand development opportunities for neighborhoods along the rail line. The implementation of medium frequency shuttle train service within the Rhode Island instate rail corridor would offer predictable headway times at regular intervals that could operate in addition to MBTA commuter and Amtrak trains. Air and intercity train travelers, commuters, and the general public would greatly benefit from this level of service.

A variation to a commuter rail or shuttle train is the German S-bahn or French RER or San Francisco’s BART. An S-bahn type system is usually the same as commuter rail in suburban areas, but differs when it’s within the central urban core, where it has characteristics of a subway or metro. Usually stations within the core zone are located close together at quarter- to half-mile subway station distances and schedule headway times typically fall somewhere in the middle of commuter rail and subway schedules. Depending on the city, central core rail infrastructure can be underground or at grade utilizing existing rail corridors. A hybrid of a shuttle train and an S-bahn might best for Rhode Island.

One way to organize Rhode Island’s rail system would be to create different station tiers allowing for various levels of service and investment in station infrastructure. Tier service levels could be thought about as intercity or express (Amtrak), regional or limited (MBTA), and local (RI Shuttle trains). Shuttle trains should be able stop at all stations and MBTA trains should have stops at major commuter and Amtrak stations. The hours of operation of a shuttle train should extend to weekends and late evening at all stations. Because a shuttle train schedule would be frequent and regular, it would relieve the need to increase the number of MBTA commuter trains for Rhode Island transit needs or having to extend MBTA weekend service south of Providence.

Shuttle train stations should require a lower level of investment. Platforms could be adjacent to the freight track. Priority should be given to constructing affordable shuttle train infill stations without automotive accommodations. An infill train station could consist of as little as a single high-level concrete platform with stairs, handicapped ramp, railings, partial canopy, lighting, and signage. Some stations might require an elevator instead of a ramp for ADA access. Without the land acquisition and construction costs for parking, drop-off facilities, station buildings, or pedestrian bridges, the cost range for a barebones single 300-foot long infill platform with modest accessories should cost between $500,000 to $1-million. A typical 900-foot long platform would be roughly $2 to $4-million. Because of increased service frequency, a shuttle train could have fewer cars and utilize shorter platforms that could be extended in the future, reducing the initial infrastructure investment. Shorter trains and platforms would allow the system to develop incrementally as ridership increases.

Infill stations should mostly be located within high-density urban neighborhoods where people can either walk or take existing bus transit to stations with limited or no automotive infrastructure. To optimize use by pedestrian’s stations should be designed so that they would have direct access from sidewalks of major streets with bus routes. Major streets and bus routes can act as siphons to funnel potential passengers from adjacent neighborhoods to stations. Bus routes that intersect the rail line corridor would effectively extend the passenger capture area of a walkable neighborhood. A passenger capture area would be the total population that’s within less than a 12-minute walk and/or a 7-minute bus ride to a train station.

Infill stations could become catalysts to renew employment opportunities in older industrial neighborhoods, reinforcing economic development. Less advantaged people from urban neighborhoods would be able to commute without needing a car. A series of stations served by frequent shuttle train service would create true rapid transit for Rhode Island passengers to quickly reach jobs or homes in adjacent cities or distant neighborhoods, not possible with the bus system. The increased use of commuter/shuttle trains would reduce traffic congestion and lower air pollution. Opportunities to concentrate additional employment and population around stations would help to limit the expansion of suburban sprawl.

There is historic precedence of having closely situated train stations within Providence documented on city maps from 1918.  (Link 1) (Link 2) In addition to Union Station, previous train stations existed at Atwells Avenue, in Olneyville at Westminster Street (northbound) and Dyke Street (southbound), Cranston Street, and in Elmwood. There are likely other forgotten stations outside of Providence. I remember being told as a boy that my great-grandfather would regularly take the train to Providence from Woodlawn in Pawtucket. As late as the 1960s there were the ruins of a wooden stairway leading down to the tracks at Lonsdale and Mineral Spring Avenues.

Currently proposed urban infill stations are 300 Barton Street in Pawtucket, Olneyville, and Park Avenue in Cranston. Other potential infill stations could include Central Falls and in Providence at Reservoir Avenue, Cranston Street, Atwells Avenue, and Charles Street. Also Hunt Street, Mineral Spring Avenue, Branch Avenue, Dean Street, Union and Roger Williams Avenues could be considered. Suburban industrial infill stations could be built toward the northern end of Jefferson Boulevard and Davisville/Quonset though these locations might require additional bus shuttle service. There would be infill station opportunities with the Lincoln and Cumberland villages along the Blackstone River, for when train service would be extended to Woonsocket. A station at Route 116 with elevators and escalators reaching to the Washington Highway bridge deck would allow passengers to access buses to Lincoln and Smithfield’s office region.

For details, see this map, overlaid on a RIPTA bus map. It shows potential shuttle train stops within walkable urban neighborhoods. Distances between stops are generally at half-mile intervals.

Olneyville’s potential for a high number of passengers should be a top priority. The current proposal for Olneyville locates a platform on Harris Avenue, away from the Broadway and Westminster Street bus routes. This location was likely chosen because construction costs would be low. A direct access walkway/ramp to the Harris Avenue platform from Broadway and Westminster should be provided, which could be developed through easements with the abutting commercial property and elderly high-rise south of the proposed platform. From looking at census tract data and existing bus routes the passenger capture area for Olneyville is probably the highest with roughly 28,000 people who could reach the station in less than a 12-minute walk and/or 7-minute bus ride. If only 5% of that population used the train that would equal 1,400 people or up to 2,800 passenger trips per day. Olneyville also has over a million square feet of commercial/industrial space, much of which is vacant or underutilized, plus vacant land for new development within walking distance from the station location.

RIDOT has two alternatives, option “A” and option “B,” for a Pawtucket/Central Falls infill station. Pawtucket officials and RIDOT favor the 300 Barton Street location for a Downtown Pawtucket station. Fewer people would be within walking distance of this station, but bus service would expand its passenger capture area of roughly 13,000 to15,000 people. The lower western quadrant of Central Falls would be walkable to this station. Development opportunities would be great for Downtown Pawtucket. RIDOT/VHB’s proposed 2009 Option “A” plan would be preferable, as both proposed station platforms would have direct access to Dexter Street’s sidewalks and buses without requiring a special drop-off circle for buses within the parking lot.  Option “B” should be rejected as it isolates the station creating a condition favorable to automobiles and access to Dexter Street would be indirect and circuitous for pedestrians, which might limit opportunities for smart growth development in Downtown Pawtucket. The current plans to include a parking lot and vehicle drop-off area, though expensive should probably remain, since Pawtucket is a regional center and would be a major MBTA station. In the future the current proposed parking lot could be upgraded to a multi-level structured facility.

In Central Falls a rail platform located near Sacred Heart Avenue would serve the eastern half of Central Falls and some of Pawtucket north of downtown. Roughly 8,000 people would be within walking distance of this station, which would not have pedestrian overlap with the proposed Barton Street Station in Pawtucket. The adjacent Central Falls neighborhoods that would benefit are among the poorest and highest density communities in the state. This station location should be considered in addition to Barton Street.

Other infill station possibilities include a Cranston Street station, which would have a passenger capture of roughly 13,000 to 15,000 people in Providence and Cranston. The Huntington Industrial Park on Niantic Avenue has about a million square feet of commercial/industrial space, some of which has been converted to offices. Not that it’s necessarily practical to rebuild the entire district, but the Huntington Industrial Park is built-out to a small fraction of what is permitted by current zoning. The Corliss Industrial Park at Charles Street has similarities to the Huntington Industrial Park. A Charles Street station would have an approximate capture area of about 15,000 to 17,000 people. Passengers would be more reliant on arriving by bus from the North End-Charles Street area, Wanskuck, and Elmhurst, since the potential for passengers walking to the station might be more limited.

Reservoir Avenue near Adelaide would have a capture area of about 14,000 to 16,000 people in Elmwood and the Reservoir Triangle extended by bus to parts of Cranston, South Providence, and the West End. An Atwells Avenue station might only have a capture area of 5,000 to 6,000 residents, but a station platform at this location would be a critical link to Atwells Avenue restaurant/retail tourism district, as well as, commercial and industrial space in the Eagle Square vicinity and residential neighborhoods in the Valley area, parts of Federal Hill, Lower Mount Pleasant and Olneyville. A Cranston station located at or near Park Avenue would have a rough capture area of 6,000 people from Cranston, South Elmwood, and Warwick. If a Park Avenue bus route were reinstated for the full length of the avenue, the station’s passenger capture area could be further expanded. This location would likely be a major MBTA commuter station and require automotive access and parking facilities.

To justify the construction costs for the TF Green and Wickford commuter rail stations and parking facilities, there should be as many commuters destined for Providence as for Boston. It is possible for commuters to access distant employment areas within the Boston/Cambridge area because Boston’s subway extends the reach of commuter rail stations. The expanded Downtown Providence area will be handicapped as several of the city’s employment areas are beyond reasonable walking distance and underserved by bus transit. It’s essential to build at least a portion of the Core Connector to make Providence Station viable as a destination commuter rail station.

Maximum interconnectivity to multiple stations with a large potential passenger base is the key to creating a robust rail system. The current blueprint for Rhode Island commuter rail is limited. To revive older neighborhoods and improve the state’s economic base, the rail system should serve more than just Providence and Boston commuters and intercity train travelers. Providing a handful of expensive commuter rail stations, most of which in low-density suburbs, is not enough to substantially increase commuter train ridership and insure the success of the system. It would have to be confirmed, but it’s likely that between Central Falls and Cranston there are 100,000 people that could reach the rail line by a short walk or bus ride.

It may be unconventional to propose constructing inexpensive infill train stations geared toward pedestrians and bus riders without parking, who would be served by shuttle trains, but it would transform Rhode Island’s rail system into rapid mass-transit, as well as, commuter and intercity rail. Besides being economical, urban infill stations could be built quickly. Since platforms are relatively low cost and there’s a present need to improve the regularity of train service between Providence and the airport, rather than spending years on studies, conducting a pilot program where a few or several urban infill stations could be built would be worth testing. All passenger types would benefit with this truly competitive alternative to driving within the core metro area. The passenger base for RIPTA buses would be reinforced and expanded, as would MBTA commuter trains. There may be objections from Amtrak and the MBTA or others regarding close proximity of stations and frequency of service. Since Amtrak schedules are on one- or two-hour intervals and MBTA trains run approximately on the half hour at weekday peak and less frequently at other times, urban infill stations and shuttle train service operating mostly on the freight track shouldn’t interfere with either agency. The advantages of developing a rapid-transit rail spine for Rhode Island’s people and economy would outweigh any objections.

Quick Note: 77 Cents on the Dollar

The headline numbers for how much federal spending each state gets per federal tax dollar it sends to Washington come from the Tax Foundation and are almost a decade out of date. However, using IRS numbers for tax receipts per state, and QuickFacts’ numbers for federal spending per state and county, we can construct the numbers by state as of 2009. The picture is similar to the old numbers – the North subsidizes the South, as one would expect as the North is richer and also has a higher cost of living.

What I didn’t expect is that Rhode Island would get only 77 cents in federal spending per dollar of taxation. More precisely, in 2009 it paid $10.9 billion in taxes (more than richer states of comparable size, such as New Hampshire) and got $11.4 billion in spending; but the country as a whole ran a large deficit, and so if we divide 11.4/10.9 by the ratio of federal spending that actually came from taxes, we get 0.77. This was going on while the state ranked near the top in unemployment, and for a while, early in the recession, led the nation. The other high-unemployment states got much more than 77 cents on the dollar: California got 92 (up from $0.79 in 2004), Nevada $1.06 (up from $0.73), and Michigan $1.20 (up from $0.85); Florida, which was also hit hard, got $1.21, up from $1.02.

I have no explanation for this. Connecticut and Massachusetts, both richer than Rhode Island, do not get this little. I thought it might be because Rhode Island is a large daytime job gainer – it is one of the top states in percentage of workers who commute in from other states because of all the Providence suburbs in Massachusetts – but North Dakota is another such state because of Fargo’s Minnesota suburbs, and it got $1.60 in spending per dollar of revenue.

Update: Quickfacts decided to stop putting out the federal spending statistics. Here are numbers from 2010, which seem to be in a permalinked format. In 2010, Rhode Island got $11.8 billion in spending and paid $10.5 billion in taxes, which works out to 81 cents on the dollar, again after adjusting for the federal deficit. North Dakota got $1.47. See spreadsheet here with numbers for each state.