Spreading Population Around

There was a series of hate marches and anti-immigrant riots in Israel last week, continuing intermittently to today; at heart was incitement against Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, who the government labels infiltrators and work migrants. Politicians from the center rightward have variably said the country belongs to white men, the refugees are cancer, and leftists should be thrown into prison camps.

I am not going to discuss the violence or the moral bankruptcy of the center and the right, not because it’s not important, but because I have nothing to add that the team on 972Mag hasn’t. What I am going to talk about is the saddening reaction of the left and center-left, which are reproducing all the urban renewal mistakes the patrician elite made in American cities.

First, some background: in both Eritrea (which Israel maintains diplomatic ties with and has sold weapons to) and Sudan, state terror has produced large numbers of refugees, of whom some fled to Israel. They do not have legal status in Israel, which categorically refuses to even check who is entitled to refugee protections, and instead labels them illegal work migrants, and occasionally deports them. The magnet neighborhood for refugees is Shapira/Levinsky, in working-class South Tel Aviv. The hate marches are not based in Shapira, but rather in Hatikva, a socially conservative working-class neighborhood separated from Shapira (and the rest of the city) by a freeway and a secondary neighborhood for the refugees. In one such march, the police did not protect black people within Hatikva, but did block the overpasses to prevent rioters from going to where the immigrants are.

Shortly after a major hate march in South Tel Aviv, leftist Meretz reacted with its own five-point program proposal for solving the crisis. It included general social programs, including social spending to alleviate poverty, and giving the refugees legal status and letting them take the jobs that currently go to temporary guest workers. This is par for the course on the left.

But the third point of the program was to spread the refugees around. It’s not fair that they all cluster in one or two neighborhoods, say both some longtime neighborhood residents and people who do not live anywhere nearby but sympathize selectively. The call for spreading the refugees around was echoed in some left-wing blogs and comments, for example in an article by Larry Derfner, who grew up in the US and should know better.

If we strip away the recent violence and the refugee versus economic migrant question, we can piece together the following story: people from the third-world moved to a developed country, mostly to a relatively low-rent urban neighborhood. They start their own businesses there (reports from the riot note broken windows at Eritrean stores). Crime rates are lower than the national average as the police indicates when pressed, but the media and leading politicians pretend the opposite is true and sensationalize real and imagined crimes. There are some clashes with older residents, but the worst comes from people who do live elsewhere: MK Michael Ben Ari, who started the first recent hate march, lives in a settlement 46 km from the city. The patrician elites then decide that the immigrants are a problem and propose to force them out of the neighborhood they have settled in and scatter them around the country.

It’s been done with poor Jewish immigrants before, for both anti-urbanist and nationalistic reasons of settling the periphery, where Arabs or Bedouins used to be the majority. (Even today, the center receives far fewer national housing funds than its proportion of the population.) Some of the towns those immigrants were settled in are now infamous for their poverty, and the rest are hardly any better. The only things that changed from the previous situation were that the physical stock of housing improved, and that those immigrants were put out of sight and out of mind.

It’s a story that’s played itself time and time again, in cities all over the world. When the patricians fail to uproot the newcomers, the newcomers often thrive and become upwardly mobile. Sometimes this is in perfect integration with patrician ideals, as was eventually the case for Jews and Italians in the US; sometimes it’s in neighborhoods that resist formal assimilation, such as the Brazilian favelas. When the patricians succeed, the newcomers remain segregated, even if they’re physically close to other groups. Singapore has racial quotas in HDB blocks, to prevent the formation of ethnic enclaves; despite this, segregation remains social fact, and the Malays and Indians remain poorer than the Chinese.

Although in most cases the patricians have won at least partial victory, in many it was a Pyrrhic one. In American cities, beginning in the 1930s, redlining pushed Italians and Jews out of their neighborhoods and into the suburbs, accelerating in the 1950s and 60s. Urban renewal programs destroyed what was left. Italian East Harlem exists only in a few landmarks serving people from outside the neighborhood. But by then ethnic whites had already attained middle-class status; they suburbanized because they had enough money to buy houses, and the role of redlining was to make sure they bought in the suburbs and not in the neighborhoods they grew up in.

It’s with blacks that the American patricians attained total victory. Blacks were always more discriminated against than ethnic whites, and so it was easier to destroy their neighborhoods, and suffered more police violence; but they also moved to the industrial cities fifty years later than most ethnic whites, in an era when urban renewal had the full backing of the federal government.

The heart of the problem is that Meretz does not think of the refugees as people it should serve. It doesn’t even think of them as potential future citizens and voters. It thinks of them as a problem to be solved so that it can show that it cares about a working class that persistently thinks it’s an elitist party and votes for the right.

As I keep stressing whenever I write about racial issues, the way to solve them is to treat people as people, and instead treat racism as the problem. This is not done by spreading population around, because that destroys the minority social networks that are crucial for upward mobility. It’s done by enforcing those anti-discrimination laws that are on the books but are never taken seriously. There are rabbis, on municipal payrolls, who issue no-Arab-workers certificates to business owners; they’ve never been prosecuted for this, and pressing the issue would do far more to help anyone in Israel who isn’t Jewish than urban renewal proposals.

Urban policy is marked by a host of government failures. It’s not that government abstractly can’t make cities better, but outside bounded infrastructure issues, with sanitation, transportation, and so on, it hasn’t. Elite planning can’t make functional neighborhoods, even when it employs the best design principles. And current Israeli zoning codes do not employ good design principles. In contrast, haphazard development has produced functional neighborhoods. Shadow Cities mentions a jewelry store owner in Rio who moved her operation from a rich neighborhood to a favela, because the favela was safer.

Meretz’s own history is not very pro-urban. Of the two traditional geographical elites in Israel – the kibbutz movement, and the urban favored quarters (including my own Old North) – Meretz tilts toward the former. That said, the patrician elites of early-20th century New York lived on the Upper East Side and not just in Westchester and Long Island. People in North Tel Aviv keep voting for politicians who engage in destructive urban renewal in Ajami; I doubt that any of the succession of centrist liberal parties that appealed to urban professionals would come up with a less bad program than Meretz.

The problem then is distribution of power. The entire discussion of immigrants in Israel has ignored activism by the immigrants themselves. For all I know, there hasn’t been much of it; the protests against racism were run by Jews, some from within Shapira but most from outside of it. Moreover, just as the Real American stereotype excludes people who live in the big coastal cities or who aren’t white, the stereotype of the ordinary Israeli, as opposed to the elite, is invariably Jewish. As a result, even in the eyes of the mainstream left, the refugees are an Other, a problem to be solved rather than people whose problems the government must solve.

It’s not my role to tell Meretz and other Israeli leftist parties how to conduct their internal affairs or how to construct their ideologies. There are enough people on the Palestinian and international left inching to declare Zionist parties morally bankrupt, and it’s not my intention to do the same here. For what it’s worth, any scenario involving the replacement of Zionist Israel with an Arab state would probably involve large-scale urban destruction in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (due to domestic policy, not war). It’s a problem of relations between political elites and newcomers, and of how people are to be thought of.

The only advice I can give here is that naturalized citizens can vote. Political parties that treat immigrants as future citizens and as a source of votes, as the Democrats do in most of the US and the Republicans do in Florida and Texas, are less racist and also cause more political integration than parties that treat them as a source of problems.

This is initially hard, because the political elite can’t create neighborhood political organization from scratch, and the existing organizations are run for older residents rather than for refugees. The human rights organizations are busy alleviating absolute poverty and protecting refugees’ civil rights; they cannot be expected to create immigrant social networks. However, a Do No Harm approach, focusing on keeping refugees safe from violence and letting them conduct their own affairs in the neighborhood they’ve chosen to stay in, could eventually lead to such organization.

Destination Centralization

It’s by now a commonplace that jobs are more centralized than residences, in terms of CBD concentration. But what I think is worse-known is that destinations in general are incredibly centralized, both across and within metro areas. In other words, people from out of town, especially out of country, are more likely to visit the more central metro regions, and within those regions are more likely to visit city center.

For good examples, take tourist travel to Britain and France, both conveniently capital-centric for this discussion. London has 15.6 million annual international visitors, slightly more than its metro area population; Paris has 9.7 million, slightly less than its metro area population. Most secondary cities in both Britain and France don’t even come close: the same ratio in Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham ranges from one quarter to one half, and in secondary French cities is even lower, down to one ninth for Marseille. (Nice and Monaco, a specialized tourist region, punch above their weight; so does Edinburgh.) You can peruse the numbers and see that the same observation is true in a number of countries with one well-known global city, excepting those with a different region specializing in tourism.

For business travel specifically, one look at the distribution of four- and five-star hotels in a country and a metro region will show similar centralization. For example, consider the New York hotels shown on Five Star Alliance. Counting separately listed hotels in Connecticut, there are 56 five-star hotels, of which 50 are in Manhattan (mostly in Midtown), four in Fairfield County, and one each in Hoboken and Huntington. On hotels.com, there are 40 four-and-a-half- and five-star hotels; of those I can find information about 37, and of those 36 are in Manhattan and one is in White Plains. In Boston, Five Star Alliance shows 18 hotels, one in Cambridge and the rest in Back Bay and Downtown Boston; hotels.com shows 11, all downtown or in Back Bay. In Philadelphia, Five Star Alliance shows 8 and hotels.com 4 of which I can find information about 3, and in both cases all hotels are in Center City.

Let’s untangle what this means. Of course there’s a concentration of activity in Manhattan, Downtown Boston, and Center City. Just not that much. Manhattan has 22% of the jobs in Greater New York; it doesn’t have 50 in 56 jobs, or even 50 in 56 jobs that require commuting (it has 36% of jobs that involve out-of-county commuting).

I believe this boils down to a specialization of usages that attract visitors from far away. There is tourism in the Hamptons and the Jersey Shore, in the Poconos and the Hudson Highlands, in Vermont and Cape Cod. However, a huge fraction of it is local. I doubt anyone from California has ever visited the Northeast for the primary purpose of skiing in Vermont, unless it involved a corporate retreat with a lot of locals. The things that are special enough to attract people from far away are by definition uncommon. Moreover, unless those are obscure niches, they will be famous enough to have the resources to pay for prime location. They’ll cluster in the CBDs of the largest cities because everything else relevant to them is in the CBDs of the largest cities; the main factor that can break agglomeration economics, high cost, is less relevant to them.

It’s the same reason why CBDs so often host corporate headquarters, major law firms, and similar outfits. Once the cluster has been established, everyone wants to be in it, and as a result of competition, only the richest users, typically the ones with the most global networks (thus, most likely to bring in outside travelers), can afford it.

What this means for an intercity transportation network is that being located downtown has great value, even in very suburbanized metro areas. A station in the San Francisco CBD is more valuable than one in San Jose or Gilroy, and a station in Downtown Los Angeles is more valuable than one in the San Fernando Valley or Palmdale. The same is of course true of the intermediate cities, and this is why there’s a good reason to serve their downtowns rather than skirt them as the LGVs do. (Of course, there are other reasons – cost and noise – to not serve their downtowns. However, ignoring costs, the benefits are on the side of downtown stations, making a value engineering decision to avoid urban areas less obvious.)

This is one primary advantage of high-speed rail over flying: it gets you closer to your destination. To leverage that, operators make sure to locate their stations as close as practically possible to the CBD. In no place that I am aware of did HSR serve a city at a peripheral location, except when necessary for line geometry. Japan National Railways built Shin-Osaka because it was impossible for a through-line to get to Osaka Station above ground, and SNCF builds peripheral stations for small towns to avoid expensive urban construction; in neither case do trains pass by a CBD but stop elsewhere, and in both countries HSR builders make major effort when reasonably practical to serve city centers.

Bus and Rail Mantras

Bus is cheaper than rail. Paint is cheap. Rail only made sense a hundred years ago when construction costs were lower. Trains have no inherent advantage over buses. It doesn’t cost more to operate a bus than to operate a train. All of those are true in specific sets of circumstances, and Curitiba and Bogota deserve a lot of credit for recognizing that in their case they were true and opting for a good BRT system. Unfortunately, the notion that buses are always cheaper than trains has turned into a mantra that’s applied even far from the original circumstance of BRT.

The advantage of buses is that dedicating lanes to them and installing signal priority are financially cheap, if politically difficult in the face of opposition from drivers. Even physically separating those lanes is essentially cost-free. This advantage disappears completely when it comes to installing new lanes, or paving an existing right-of-way. Hartford is paving over an abandoned railroad at a cost of $37 million per km.

Not to be outdone, New York’s own MTA just proposed to pave about 8.5 km of the Staten Island Railway’s North Shore Branch for $371 million. A light rail alternative was jettisoned because the MTA insisted on continuing the line to the West Shore Plaza, along what is possibly the least developed road in the city.

Another, related mantra is that light rail is cheaper than heavy rail. This contributed to the MTA’s decision not to pursue a Staten Island Railway-compatible solution, which would allow lower capital costs and cheaper maintenance since trains could be maintained together with the existing fleet without modifying the existing yard. As with all mantras, this one has a kernel of truth: it’s much cheaper to build on-street light rail than elevated rail or a subway. As with the BRT mantra, this is not true when the discussion is about what to do in an existing right-of-way.

Worse, because the MTA believed its own hype, it completely missed the point of surface transit. People who believe these mantras about bus, light rail, and heavy rail can easily miss the advantage of on-street running wherever the streets are more central than the railroad rights-of-way. The North Shore Branch hugs the shore for much of the way, halving station radius. The most developed corridor is Forest Avenue, hosting the S48, the third busiest bus in the borough and the busiest in the same area and orientation as the line in question. (The busiest in the borough, the S53, crosses the bridge to connect the North Shore to the subway in Brooklyn.) Of the three other east-west routes in the North Shore, the one that the North Shore Branch parallels the most closely, the S40, has the lowest ridership. It would be both vastly cheaper and better for bus riders to have dedicated bus lanes on Forest, or possibly Castleton, which hosts the S46.

In cities that did not develop around mainline rail corridors but rather around major streets, the only reason to use mainline rail corridors for urban transit is that reactivating them for rail can be done at much lower cost than building on-street light rail. New York is for historical reasons such a city: Staten Island development follows Forest and Castleton rather than the North Shore Branch, and for similar reasons Park Avenue in Manhattan and the Bronx is a relatively unimportant commercial corridor.

Now, these mainline corridors have great use for regional transit. Queens Boulevard can’t be easily used for train service to Long Island, and Lexington Avenue can’t be easily used for train service to Westchester. Staten Island has great potential for regional transit – but only if it’s electrified rail going through a tunnel to Manhattan. It’s expensive, but it’s what it takes to be time-competitive with the ferry and with buses to the subway. A more competent agency than the MTA would keep planning and designing such high-cost, high-benefit projects, to be built in the future if funding materializes; such plans could also be used to concretely argue for more funding from the state and from Congress.

Instead, the MTA is spending more money than most light rail lines cost, to make such a mainline connection from the North Shore to Manhattan impossible in the future. The best scenario in such a situation is that the busway would have to be railstituted, for a few hundred million dollars – an embarrassing reminder of the busway folly, but still a much smaller sum than the cost of the tunnel. The worst scenario is that like on Los Angeles’s Orange Line, the need to keep buses operating during construction would make it impossible to replace them with trains.

There aren’t a lot of lose-lose (or win-win) situations with transportation, even if we ignore driver convenience, but this is one of them. It’s a fiscal disaster relative to predicted ridership and the operating costs of buses, it makes future transit expansion in the borough more difficult, and it follows a marginal route. All this is so that the MTA can say it’s finally making use of an abandoned right-of-way.

High- and Low-Speed Rail Coordination

The debate about what kind intercity rail to build tends to be either/or. On one side, there’s HSR-only advocacy: this represents the attitude of SNCF, especially in the earlier years of the TGV, and such American HSR proponents as John Mica. In this view, legacy rail is inherently slow and money-losing and the best that can be done is to start fresh; generally, this view also looks down on integration with legacy regional rail. On the other side, there’s a legacy-only advocacy, which represents how Britain upgraded its intercity rail network in and after the 1970s and also the attitude of proponents of Amtrak-plus lines in the US.

The problem with this is that there are a lot of different markets out there, and the service levels they justify and the construction challenges they impose are different. Sometimes such markets are in the same general area, and this means some lines should be HSR and some should be upgraded low-speed rail.

Countries that tried to go to one extreme of this debate are now learning the hard way that they need to do both. Britain radically optimized its intercity main lines, which now have the highest average speed in the world except for HSR – but it needs more, and this requires it to build a new HSR line at immense cost. In the other direction, France’s TGV-only strategy is slowly changing. SNCF still doesn’t care about legacy intercity lines, but the regions are investing in regional rail, and one region even uses the high-speed line for local service. Japan gets away with neglecting most of the intercity lines because its physical and political geography is such that markets that can support HSR dominate, but other countries cannot.

This means that best network design is going to have to deal with both approaches’ political difficulties at the same time. Upgrading legacy rail means upgrading legacy rail operating practices, against opposition of workers and managers who are used to old and inefficient ways of doing things. And building HSR on the thickest markets means giving special treatment to some regions with infrastructure that other regions don’t justify; it’s economically solid, but the optics of this are poor.

But the advantage of doing it this way from the start is that it’s more future-proof, and allows integrated design in terms of schedules, which lines are upgraded, how cities are connected, and so on.

Doing it piecemeal may require redoing a connection along a different alignment. The issue is that HSR compresses travel times along the line only. It’s like urban rapid transit this way, or for that matter like the air network. A legacy rail system (or a national highway system, or urban buses) has fairly consistent average speed. This means that in a combined system, the optimal path between two cities may not be the shortest path, in case one is close to the HSR trunks.

For example, look at Upstate New York. None of its four major metro areas is large enough to justify a high-speed connection to New York by itself, but all four combined do. Although international service to Toronto is overrated, it could be justifiable in light of Buffalo’s relative economic integration with Ontario and also the mostly straight, partially grade-separated right-of-way available in Canada; this would further thicken the market.

If we draw a rudimentary map of other desired connections, none thick enough to warrant more than an upgraded low-speed train, the fastest connections are not always obvious. For example, with average HSR speed of 240 km/h and legacy rail speed of 100 km/h, it’s faster to get from New York to Ithaca via Syracuse than directly via Binghamton. This is why the connection to Ithaca is through a line that points toward Syracuse, even if it’s not the shortest route to Binghamton. It’s one of many small local optimization problems.

More interestingly, we get a mini-hub in Syracuse. Although it’s the smallest of the four main Upstate cities, it lies at the junction of the trunk line and lines to Binghamton and Watertown, and also has secondary cities at the right location for regional rail. (The largest comparable secondary city near Rochester is Geneva, which happens to be close to and have a good rail connection to I-90, a prime candidate for HSR corridor; thus it should get commuter service using the trunk line, which would be far faster than an all-legacy train.) This means that schedules should be set up to coordinate transfers in Syracuse.

This is a normal way to set things up in an all-legacy format, as is done in Switzerland, but it can equally apply to HSR. The construction challenges on the Empire Corridor are nowhere near as complex as those in California, Pennsylvania, and other truly mountainous states, but they’re still nontrivial. But now that we know that Syracuse should be a hub, one answer to the question “How many design compromises to make to reduce costs?” is “Build just enough to allow integrated transfers in both New York and Syracuse.”

(In practice this means HSR arriving in Syracuse on the hour and in New York whenever convenient. The main intercity line into New York is the Northeast Corridor, a very thick market that at HSR speed would have enough traffic to support show-up-and-go frequency. This is not true of lines serving Syracuse; Watertown is not Washington and Binghamton is not Boston.)

The main cost of doing things this way is political. It requires willingness to both prioritize markets and cut construction costs, as necessary to build HSR, and improve legacy rail operating practices and carefully integrate services, as necessary to build a working legacy rail network. The fiscal cost is not outrageous – those legacy lines are cheap relative to everything else (rebuilding the unelectrified New York-Scranton line is $550 million), and HSR on thicker markets will at least partially pay for itself.

Once we discard the notion that present-day Amtrak operating patterns are adequate, the question stops being about whether one trusts Amtrak or not, and purely about how to build a new transportation network. And then the correct answer to “High-speed or legacy?” is “Both, seamlessly integrated with each other.”

The Cost of Heavy Freight Trains

Over at Pennsylvania HSR, Samuel Walker reminds us that the dominance of coal for US freight traffic slows down passenger trains, and this has a social cost in addition to the direct costs of coal mining and burning. But another post of his, regarding cant deficiency, suggests more problems coming from mixing modern passenger trains with very heavy freight. Coal trains slow all other traffic in three different ways, of which just one is the conventional schedule conflict, and even that means more than just slowing down intercity trains.

Schedule conflict reduces not just speed, but also span and punctuality. The Northstar Line in Minnesota shares track with BNSF’s Northern Transcon; since the line is freight-primary, there’s no room for off-peak service, and passenger trains can’t extend to the line’s natural terminus in St. Cloud, not without constructing additional tracks. Similarly, in Houston, plans for a commuter line to Galveston included peak-only service from the start.

Second, independently of scheduling, slow trains force faster trains to slow down by limiting the amount of superelevation that can be used. As a reminder: on curves, they bank the track, with the outer rail above the inner rail, to partly counter centrifugal force. If they do not cant the train enough, there’s cant deficiency; if they cant too much, there’s cant excess. Although there are strict limits for cant excess (in Sweden, 100 mm, or 70 on tighter curves), stricter than for cant deficiency (150 mm for a non-tilting passenger train, give or take), technically commuter trains could safely run at higher cant excess; however, for freight trains, high cant excess is unsafe because loads could shift, and the higher axle load means trains would chew up the inner track. Very heavy trains first require the track to have a lower minimum speed, and second have an even more limited cant excess because of the damage they’d cause to the track (about 2″, or 50 mm, in US practice). Walker links to a US standard guideline that uniformly assumes 3″ cant; greenfield high-speed lines go up to 180-200 mm.

And third, heavy freight trains damage tracks regardless. Coal trains also limit the amount of revenue the railroad gets out of each train, leaving limited money for maintenance, and are not time-sensitive, giving railroads no reason to perform adequate maintenance. To compensate, industry practices have to be less than perfect: cant and cant deficiency are less than the maximum permitted by right-of-way geometry and minimum speed, and freight railroads require barriers between their track and passenger track to protect from inevitable freight derailments. Even then the US safety level is well below what’s achieved anywhere else in the world with trustworthy statistics.

Of course, coal provides a great boon to the freight railroads. It’s a captive market. The railroads could price out coal and focus on higher-value intermodal traffic. Some of the lines that already focus on intermodal traffic are friendlier to passenger service, such as the FEC.

However, realistically, the end of coal is only going to come from environmental regulations. Those same regulations would apply to oil, inducing a mode shift from trucks to rail. The coal trains that would stop running would be replaced by trains carrying higher-value goods. The details depend on what the purpose and kind of environmental regulations are, but today’s environmental movement is heavily focused on climate change and not as concerned with local environmental justice, so loss of coal traffic due to a high carbon tax or local air pollution tax, both of which would also affect oil and gas, is much likelier than loss of coal traffic due to restrictions on mountaintop removal and air quality regulations at mining sites, which would not. (Of course oil causes plenty of damage to the biosphere, but the mainstream environmental movement is much more concerned with effects on humans than on other organisms.)

The political issue at hand, besides the easy to explain but hard to implement matter of avoiding catastrophic climate change, is what freight railroads are used to. Their entire business model is geared toward relatively low-value goods. A steep carbon tax is a risk: it should raise their mode share of total value of goods transported, which is currently 4% (see also figure 4.3 here), but it would come from a new set of goods, with requirements and challenges different from those of the current mix. The railroads would have to reintroduce fast freight, which most haven’t run in decades, and refine it to deal with the needs of shippers today. It’s not only a headache for the managers, but also a substantial risk of failure – perhaps rival railroads would be able to get all the traffic because they’d adapt to the new market faster, perhaps shippers would change their factory placement to move goods over shorter distances, perhaps they would not be able to cope with the immediate increase in fuel costs, etc.

Because of this, freight railroads may end up fighting a policy that would most likely benefit them. Although they represent a critical part of an emission reduction strategy, and are all too happy to point out that they consume much less fuel than trucks, fuel is a major cost to them, and coal is big business for them. These are not tech startups; these are conservative businesses that go back to the 19th century. Heavy coal trains then add a political cost as well: they help turn an industry that could be a major supporter of climate change legislation neutral or hostile to the idea.

Where Should Streetcar Corridors Be?

At a meeting of some of the Greater City people about the Providence streetcar proposal, many of us had severe criticism of the current plan. The line is too short; it is S-shaped; it detours to serve a hospital that’s close to but not on a straighter route; the frequency is mediocre; RIPTA does not have a clear plan of where subsequent lines would go. The discussion quickly turned to alternatives, involving frequent-stop commuter lines to the inner suburbs on existing trackage and perhaps a new connection to the rail tunnel, and streetcars along major corridors to fill in the gaps. It is the streetcar corridors that I want to discuss.

In brief, the existing streetcar proposal only links downtown with near-downtown job centers in College Hill and at the Rhode Island hospitals; secondary centers and neighborhoods would be served in the future, along undetermined routes. People at the meeting who know more than me believe that the western leg, serving Olneyville, is likely to be on Broadway by default, as it is a wide street, and likewise a future westward expansion would follow Manton, a similarly wide street. Instead, they propose, the streetcar should follow Westminster Street.

The issue at hand is, partially, development. Broadway looks a little more developed than Westminster (excluding the portion within downtown proper, where Westminster is a major commercial street), but this development is not dense. Westminster has developed parts and undeveloped parts that could be used for TOD. This is more than just development-oriented transit – Westminster is on the way to Olneyville – but it’s a partial reason.

But the main issue is location. The proposals that we developed at the meeting hinge on using major streets that are centrally located within neighborhoods. We prefer Hope Street to Main Street on the East Side, even though Main Street supports a higher frequency on the 99 bus than Hope Street does on the 42, because Hope Street is accessible from the entire East Side. (Both have auto-oriented commercial development that could potentially be densified.) Likewise, Westminster is closer to parts of the West End; the idea is to run down Westminster and Broad in that direction to serve the western and southern parts of the city.

This is not how I’m used to thinking about where to put favored routes, whether they are light rail or BRT. Usually I think in terms of how developed the immediate area around the street is, what destinations there are, and so on – in other words, spiky density near the route rather than general density within half a kilometer in each direction. That said, this thinking is informed by rapid transit, which is at much larger scale, and bus-oriented density is more diffuse.

The question is whether the rough sketch that came out of the meeting makes sense, or whether it’s just lines on a map. At several places, there’s tension between serving the immediate street and serving a broader neighborhood. At others, some routes are good for only part of the way: for example, in Pawtucket the streets feeding into Main are actually more central and more densely populated than that feeding into Hope, a reversal of the situation in Providence. For another example, Atwells is highly developed but not centrally located in Federal Hill, and is the opposite in Olneyville.

I’m interested to hear what existing successful practices are. Do good streetcar (or rapid bus, etc.) corridors just follow the most successful bus lines and the most developed individual streets, or do they instead serve a broader swath along the routes?

Quick Note: How Much Tunnels Really Cost

New York is currently building a 3-kilometer tunnel between Brooklyn and Staten Island, using the same EPB method that Madrid uses to build subway tunnels. The cost of the single-bore tunnel is $250 million, and the project will be completed by 2014.

Of course, this is a water tunnel rather than a train tunnel. The diameter of the tunnel is somewhat smaller than that of a single-track train tunnel. Double-track tunnels, even ones built to high-speed rail standards, are substantially wider, but the amount of concrete lining required is proportional to radius rather than to cross-sectional area. For example, the double-track Seikan Tunnel is 9.7 meters wide, little more than single-track HSR tunnels in Europe, as Japanese construction tries to minimize tunnel clearances to cut costs and instead equip Shinkansen trains with elaborate aerodynamic noses. While 9.7 is more than 2.5 times the diameter of the water tunnel in question, 250 million times 2.5 is still far below the construction cost of any recent tunneling project in New York.

The expensive part of tunneling, then, is not the actual tunnel. It’s everything else, especially the station caverns. Both ARC and East Side Access included multilevel deep caverns in Manhattan with full-length mezzanines; of course they’d be more expensive.

For what it’s worth, an 8-kilometer long, 9.7-meter wide tunnel from Staten Island to Manhattan would cost $1.75 billion at the same per-km, per-meter cost of this water tunnel. Of course stations at St. George and especially Lower Manhattan would add much more, forcing a lot of difficult choices about location, but the basic infrastructure is not all that expensive.

What’s a Subway/El?

The rapid transit built in New York beginning with the first els codified two characteristics that spread to the rest of the US, and are often seen in other countries’ rapid transit networks as well. First, it is separate from surface transit – even when it did still have grade crossings, they were controlled railroad crossings, rather than street-running segments as is common on light rail. And second, it is separate from mainline rail.

Not much later than New York started building els, Berlin built the Stadtbahn, also an urban elevated railroad. However, it was meant to be used for mainline rail from the start, with two local passenger tracks and two long-distance passenger and freight tracks. Part of the impetus was to connect different railroad terminals within the city, which American cities did by building union stations disconnected from local traffic. Shortly later, Tokyo built its own mainline rapid transit system – the Yamanote Line bypass in 1885 and Tokyo Station connecting the Chuo and Tokaido lines in 1914. Both cities ran frequent local commuter service early, Berlin doing so even before electrification.

Of course, nowadays US regulations locked in the separation of rapid transit from commuter rail, but at the time, there was no such separation. New York could have built its subway to mainline specifications and run trains through to the LIRR. It didn’t because of historical accidents – it preferred compatibility with the els and even when the BRT chose a wider loading gauge for its own subway network, it still opted for narrower trains than on mainline track. At the time it seemed like no big deal, although some of the subway lines built were redundant with existing commuter lines (for example, the Flushing Line with the Port Washington Line). Again due to historical practice, commuter rail did not try to operate to rapid transit standards, keeping frequency low, and so nearly all urban stations closed. In both New York and Chicago, it’s often easy to figure out where the city ends or where the subway/L network ends because that’s the point beyond which commuter train stop spacing narrows, providing makeshift local service.

In subsequent decades, the German and Japanese approach proved itself much more capable of providing good transit to growing suburbs. In Tokyo, subways are legally railroads, and most lines are compatible with at least one commuter line in order to permit through-service. German cities have mainline rapid transit (S-Bahn) and also separate subways or subway-light rail combinations (both called U-Bahn). Many other cities and countries had to adopt the same system to increase transit ridership, at much higher cost since the necessary viaducts and tunnels connecting stub-end terminals were done much later. This is what led to the Paris RER, and what’s led to Thameslink and now Crossrail in London. Any other approach would require spending even more money on extending urban lines to the suburbs, exactly what’s done now in the two big suburban-focused US rapid transit systems, the Washington Metro and BART.

The kink is that despite the above problems of subways that are separate from both mainline and street rail, there’s now a different reason to build such lines after all: they can be made driverless. Most first-world cities already have legacy rapid transit or else have so much sprawl rapid transit is inappropriate, and third-world cities aren’t saving much money by eliminating drivers, but in the few cases of new builds (Vancouver, Dubai, Copenhagen, the newer lines in Singapore), driverless trains are common, and this allows trains to run more frequently, or even 24/7 in Copenhagen’s case.

This kink aside, there’s really no reason for a city to build a new New York-style subway, i.e. disconnected from light and commuter rail and running with a driver. Extending a legacy system is fine, but for new systems, there’s no point. This could be especially bad in growing third-world cities, which could find themselves paying too much for a subway they don’t need or unable to connect a subway they do need to the suburbs once they start suburbanizing. Third-world construction costs aren’t much if at all lower than first-world costs, but wages are much lower.

Some of the world’s largest cities have made or are making this mistake. Mumbai is building a new subway, on a different track gauge from the Indian mainline network, preventing through-service to the overburdened commuter trains. Shanghai and Beijing have vast subway networks, without express tracks or any ability for trains to run fast through city center; they have widely spaced stops so that they are faster than most other subway systems, but they have nothing on the rapid commuter trains in Tokyo. (Beijing is also developing a parallel commuter rail network, running diesel trains from the exurbs to the traditional city terminals at low frequency.) It works fine now, but when Shanghai grows and suburbanizes to the degree Tokyo has, it may find itself having to spend many billions on digging new tunnels.

Since a New York-style subway is inappropriate for new builds, some cities need to ask themselves which of the three kinds is the most appropriate. A subway-surface solution is mainly an option when one underground line can naturally split into multiple surface lines, as is the case in Boston, San Francisco, Cologne, and Frankfurt; this is because there’s a big difference between on-street and grade-separated capacity.

Tel Aviv, which is building a subway-surface line without any branching, is doing it wrong. For the other choice, I believe it’s a matter of how well-developed the suburban rail network is, and how much future suburbanization the city can realistically expect. In Tel Aviv specifically there’s also a separate element, which is that for religious reasons public transit does not run on weekend. If driverless technology makes the difference between trains that run 24/7 and trains that run 16/6, then it should be used even at the cost of otherwise worse service to some suburbs and destinations easily reached by legacy rail branches.

Finally, in North America, one of the reasons to engage in strong regulatory reform is to allow the mainline option to work. Some lines, for example the Harbor Subdivision between LAX and Union Station, should ideally host a mixture of local and rapid trains on the same tracks, and also allow intercity trains; if the Harbor Sub becomes an electrified commuter line then high-speed trains could serve the airport, providing a connection from the Central Valley to a major airport in addition to SFO, which would only get a station at Millbrae.

More in general, the only real disadvantage of legacy commuter networks is that they tend to not be very dense in the center of the city, requiring new builds; most of the Tokyo subway is just lines offering the commuter lines more capacity into the CBD, overlaying itself to also provide a tight in-city network. There’s no technical reason not to just build an electrified local mainline network as its transportation backbone, and if more capacity is required then build additional lines in the mold of Tokyo.

One-Way Pairs: the Bad and the Ugly

One of Jane Jacobs’ prescient observations about bus service in The Death and Life is that one-way pairs, as practiced on the avenues in Manhattan, are bad for riders. Her argument was that one-way pairs require people to walk too long to the bus line, and this cancels out any gains in speed. (This is truer today, when signal priority is an option, than it was fifty years ago.) Jarrett Walker has formalized this in two posts using station radius as an argument; the issue is that passengers need to be within a short walking distance of both halves of the line, and this reduces coverage.

However, not all one-way pairs are created equal. An underrated reason to keep bus services on one line is simplicity: it’s easier to remember that a route follows one street than that it follows two, and also service to specific destinations can become easier. Taking a cue from proper rapid transit, ITDP’s magnum opus BRT standard treats it as a given that buses should run in the median of a street and only even lists one-way pairs as an option on very narrow streets, and even then as an inferior one. The argument revolves around service identity.

In particular, one-way pairs that preserve a semblance of service identity and simplicity are not as bad as one-way pairs that do not. For the original walk-distance reason, it’s also better to have the one-way pair closer together. Jarrett specifically praises Portland’s light rail one-way pair, located a short block apart, as an example of a good couplet. Manhattan’s one-way pairs are located a long block apart, so the walking distance is worse.

But even Manhattan’s one-way pairs are at least coherent. The First/Second Avenue bus follows First and Second Avenues for the entire length of the avenues; south of Houston, it follows Allen, the continuation of First. This is the advantage of the grid. In Providence, things are not as nice, though still somewhat coherent, if one remembers, for example, that Angell and Waterman Streets form a one-way pair (they’re treated as such for car travel, too, so anyone in the neighborhood would know, though people from outside would not).

In contrast, this is how Tel Aviv’s one-way pairs work. They’re getting worse amidst the various bus reform. The post is in Hebrew, but look at the map at the bottom of bus #5, the city’s busiest (and most frequently bombed back in the 1990s and early 2000s). The travesty is that none of those streets on which the line runs in one direction only is even one-way. East of Ibn Gabirol, the street hosting lines 25, 26, and 189 on the map, the streets are wide and two-way. The reason for the complication is lack of left turns. In order to make car traffic flow a little more smoothly, Tel Aviv has completely eviscerated its bus service.

In principle, Tel Aviv has infrastructure for consistent one-way pairs when necessary and regular two-way service elsewhere. For example, Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda, the two north-south streets hosting buses to the west, function as such for cars. They both have contraflow lanes for buses, allowing buses to use them as two-way streets; some do (for example, #5 on Dizengoff), while others still go one-way (for examples, #9 and #55). Likewise, Jabotinsky, the east-west street feeding into the big circuit, is one-way and narrow west of Ibn Gabirol, and could be a one-way pair with Arlozorov to its south; but Arlozorov is kept two-way, and so #66 is two-way, and #22 uses the two as a one-way pair. (By the way, those are fan-made maps; the official maps don’t use color to distinguish routes, and are thus completely unusable.)

The results of the mess coming from ending any service coherence are predictable. Israeli car ownership, low by first-world standards, is rising rapidly, and the social justice and affordable housing protesters are now complaining about high fuel prices. None of them is anti-transit on principle, and all who I confront tell me they’d ride transit if it were usable. I live without a car in a city with worse transit than Tel Aviv, but to me car ownership is not aspirational. When the only transit people know in their country is unusable, people this generation will get cars. The next bus reform will then take into account more left turn restrictions coming from the need to accommodate more vehicles. The next generation of people will grow up with the expectation of even worse bus service and not conceive of any alternative to automobility.

Amtrak Expects 10 Billion Passengers

April 1, 2042

Washington – the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (AMTRAK) expects ridership in fiscal 2042 to top 10 billion and net profit to top $8 billion, after an aggressive program of expansion. Ridership in fiscal 2041 was 9.8 billion, predominantly on a network of regional lines in the Northeast and California, and net profit was $7.3 billion, split about evenly between the core regional networks and the national high-speed intercity train network.

The members of the board who resigned during the shakeup of 2014 sent Amtrak President Natalie Biden a letter of congratulations for Amtrak’s achievement of its long-term goals of fiscal sustainability, network expansion, and mode shift; Amtrak is credited with spearheading the growth of mass transit use in the United States, which as of the 2040 census stands at 30% of commuters.

Although the members who resigned in 2014 and 2015 left the railroad indefinitely and pursued other interests or joined the private sector, an insider within the company who spoke on condition of anonymity explained, “The entire structure of Amtrak was put together in the reforms from 2013 on. The people who implemented them were simply unfortunate enough to get caught in the scandals about the cost overruns, but the people who took charge later just implemented the original plan.”

Amtrak had initially proposed to spend $117 billion on implementing high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, but backlash due to the plan’s high cost led to a scaling back behind the scenes. After the regulatory reforms of 2013, a new team of planners, many hired away from agencies in Japan, France, and Switzerland, proposed a version leveraging existing track, achieving almost the same speed for only $5 billion in upfront investment. They explained that the full cost of the system would be higher, but service could open before construction concluded, and profits could be plugged into the system.

To get the plans past Congress, President Barack Obama had to agree to limit the funds to a one-time extension of Amtrak’s funding in the transportation bill S 12, which would give it $13 billion for expansion as well as ordinary operating subsidies over six years. To defeat a Senate filibuster, the extension had a clause automatically dismantling Amtrak and selling its assets in case it ran out of money, leading to the first wave of resignations by longtime officials.

Despite assurances that both the cost and the ridership estimates were conservative, the program was plagued with delays and mounting costs, and to conserve money Amtrak needed to cancel some of its money-losing long-distance routes and engage in a controversial lease-back program selling its rolling stock to banks. The modifications required to let the Shinkansen bullet trains decided for the system run in the Northeast pushed back the completion of the first run from the middle of 2015 to the beginning of 2017. The president and most of the board as well as the engineers resigned in 2014, and many of their replacements resigned in the subsequent two years. When the reformed system opened in 2017, it was still incomplete because some of the high-speed segments had no funding yet, travel time from Boston to Washington was four hours and a quarter, rather than the promised three and a half.

2017 was also the last year in which Amtrak lost money. Ridership on the Northeast Corridor intercity trains topped 20 million, and in 2018 it operationally broke even, allowing it to use $1.5 billion in unspent S 12 money on completing the full system by 2020. To simplify its temporary deals with track owners in Connecticut and Massachusetts, it made a complex deal with the Northeastern commuter railroads in which it took over operations, with existing amounts of state money lasting until 2022. The primary purpose was to allow rapidly moving workers between divisions, away from commuter trains, which were being streamlined to reduce staffing, and toward the growing high-speed rail market. A similar deal was made in California, where Amtrak leveraged its operation of commuter trains in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Areas and its fledgling profits to take control of the California High-Speed Rail system, whose initial operating segment opened in 2019.

Although industry insiders believed that the takeover was intended entirely to streamline labor issues, in 2020 Amtrak announced a reorganization, in which commuter trains within each metropolitan area would be run without respect for state boundaries or previous agency boundaries. Starting with the preexisting fare union with the MBTA, from which it bought Boston’s commuter rail operations, it entered into fare union and schedule coordination agreements with the major cities in the Northeast and California, allowing the local commuter rail lines to act as complements to the urban subway networks. Although this had been hinted in the original plans drawn up in 2013, the separation of agencies and Amtrak’s focus on building the core high-speed network delayed this.

Together with aggressive construction of extensions and long-desired urban commuter rail projections, usually at much lower cost than advertised in the 2000s and 10s, the changes led to a rapid increase in ridership. Together with the commuter lines, Amtrak’s ridership was 700 million in 2020. By 2030, it had risen to 4 billion. By then, high-speed lines opened along more corridors, connecting from the Northeast to Albany, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta; from California to Phoenix and Las Vegas; and in the Midwest from Chicago to Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis. Most, though not all, are operated by Amtrak, with seamless inter-railroad operation through trackage rights, and in many of these cities, beginning with Chicago, the local transit agencies engaged in the same commuter rail modernization afforded to the Northeast and invested in additional rapid transit or light rail lines. The effect on the share of commuters using public transportation to get to work was large. In the Philadelphia region it rose from 12% in 2020 to 36% in 2040, in the Chicago region it rose from 15% to 39%, and in the Los Angeles region it rose from 9% to 40%.

Not all commentators and transportation professionals agree with Amtrak’s role in the trend of rising public transportation use. The libertarian Reason Foundation and its associated Siemens Institute for Urban Development both note that the largest cities in the United States also upzoned to allow for taller buildings near train stations. SIUD’s statement cites 2020s development near Secaucus Junction in New Jersey, two stops away from Penn Station, as one example. The head of the Reason Foundation’s transportation program said, “Amtrak is fully unionized, and this may spell problems in the future,” adding that so far it had only been able to maintain productivity because of its fast growth, but in the future layoffs and pay cuts may be necessary.

On the left, the Mayor of Atlanta attacked Amtrak’s focus on profits and its unwillingness to help set up regional rail in the South. He said, “We have a lot of people here who think that trains are just something for rich people. I know that it’s not true – I mean, this focus on public transit began back when it was opposite – but nowadays rich cities like New York and Los Angeles have this infrastructure and Atlanta doesn’t. None of the people who set up this system intended to have this racial effect, but it’s there, and we need to address it.” Both members of Congress representing part of the city released statements agreeing with the mayor’s remarks, and one of their staffers, speaking on background, added that she finds it suspect that the revival of public transportation in the US began just as African-American motorization accelerated in the early years of this century.

In fact, Senator Katrina Schweitzer (D-MT) announced her intention to introduce an amendment to the existing Climate Change Reduction Acts, to lower the carbon and pollution taxes collected from rural states. Beltway insiders consider the friction point to be remarks made by several members of the Amtrak board in the early 2030s, taking credit for near-unanimous Northeastern and Californian support for the first such act in 2030. Sen. Schweitzer’s office released numbers showing a divergence between living standards in the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Chicago region, and the rest of the country, coming from reduced urban costs of living and increased rural costs. As an alternative, Sen. Schweitzer’s office added, Amtrak should be required to spend its profits on expanding to the South and Interior West. Amtrak ruled out such a move in the short run.