Transportation-Development Symbiosis

The RPA’s Regional Assembly has included the following idea submission: expand reverse-commuter rail service. The proposal calls for surveying city residents to look for the main available reverse-commuter markets, and for expanding reverse-peak service on the model of Metro-North. It unfortunately does not talk about doing anything at the work end – it talks about looking at where city residents could go to the suburbs on commuter rail, but not about which suburban job markets could be served from any direction.

I don’t want to repeat myself about what transit agencies have to do to be able to serve suburban jobs adequately (if “suburban” is the correct way to think of Providence and New Haven), and so I’m going to sound much harsher toward the idea than I should be. Suffice is to say that talking about development requires a lot of reforms to operating practices. With that in mind, let’s look at some suburban job centers in the Northeast: Providence, Stamford, Hicksville, New Haven. As can be seen, those stations all look very suburban, and even Providence is surrounded by sterile condos, with the mall located a short, unpleasant walk away. Compare this with the urbanity that one finds around major suburban train stations in Tokyo, such as Kokubunji and Tachikawa.

But really, the kind of development that’s missing around suburban train stations in the US is twofold. First, the local development near the stations is not transit-oriented, in the sense that big job and retail centers may be inconvenient to walk to for the pedestrian. And second, the regional development does not follow the train lines, but rather arterial roads, or, in cities with rapid transit, rapid transit lines – for example, one of Long Island’s two biggest edge cities, East Garden City, is diffuse and far from existing LIRR stations (the other, Mineola, is relatively okay).

In both cases, what’s missing is transportation-development symbiosis. Whoever runs the trains has the most to gain from locating major office and retail development, without excessive parking, near the train stations. And whoever owns the buildings has the most to gain from running trains to them, to prop up property values. This leads to the private railroad conglomerates in Tokyo, and to the Hong Kong MTR.

The same symbiosis can be done with government actors, but isn’t, not in the US, and the RPA’s attempts to change this and promote integrated planning have so far not succeeded. Hickville recently spent $36.4 million on a parking garage adjacent to the station plus some extra sum on expanding road access, but none of the relevant actors has made any effort to upzone the station area for commercial, to allow easier commuting. Providence is renovating the station, with pretty drawings, but doing far short of a redesign that would add development to the area.

The importance of this symbiosis, coming back to the original idea, is that the correct question to ask is not, “Where can city residents go to the suburbs to work?” but rather “Which suburban and secondary-urban destinations can be adequately served by rail?” In all four Northeastern cities under discussion, there is more than one direction from which commuters could come. From the commuter railroad’s perspective, a rider who takes the train in the traditional peak direction but gets off in a suburb short of the CBD is a free fare, just like an off-peak rider or a reverse-peak rider.

The task for regional planners (as opposed to service planners and railroad managers) is then a combination of the following priorities:

1. As noted above, ensuring edge city and secondary CBD development is both close to train stations and easily accessible by pedestrians.

2. Aggressively upzoning near potential station sites, with an eye for junctions, such as Sunnyside, Secaucus, and New Rochelle.

3. Examining where people working in secondary centers are living, and which rail lines could be leveraged to serve them and where new construction would be needed. For example, Providence could use rail to Woonsocket and the East Bay and more local service to Cranston and Warwick, but reviving the tunnel to the East Bay could be expensive and needs to be studied carefully. Note that north of South Attleboro, there are very few people living near the Providence Line working in Providence, and so reverse-peak service is useful mainly in the original sense of people reverse-commuting from Boston, in contrast with service to Massachusetts suburbs of Providence such as Seekonk.

The problem with doing all three is political: current regional rail traffic is dominated by suburbanites using it as an extension of driving into the city. This influences local thinking because the economics of residential development are not the same as those of commercial development. Agglomeration and density are less important. Transfers and long access distances are more acceptable. People traveling within the suburb go toward the station in the AM peak rather than away from it, and so parking availability is more important. Take all of these together and you get a powerful constituency supporting continuing to choke suburban train stations with parking and sterile development for city-bound commuters, no matter how many tens of thousands of jobs are nearby.

This is why some symbiosis is necessary. One way to do it is via market mechanisms: if a well-capitalized company gets ownership of the transit infrastructure and is free to develop with few zoning constraints, it could decide to build office towers in Hicksville on top of the train station, or develop the empty lots near New Haven and Providence. This is possible, but may well be too hard politically, even more so than direct zoning reform, because every trope used by the community to oppose the changes (namely, fear of outsiders) would apply and also there would be explicit loss of control.

The other way is the public way, which is where integrated planning comes in. Even on the level of intransigent railroads, it may work if all done together. In other words, there would be simultaneous effort to add reverse-peak service on the LIRR and the MBTA, upzone surrounding station areas and make them more walkable at the expense of some parking spaces, direct major developments such as malls and office complexes to the resulting TOD, and integrate local transit with the changed commuter service in all directions.

But whatever is done, it’s critical to integrate the two functions, of transportation and development. There’s no need for an overarching bureaucracy to take care of it all, even – just cooperation between regional planners, local planners, and transit managers. Transit needs thick markets, and if all development outside the primary CBD is diffuse and auto-oriented, there will not be any thick markets for it to serve. A transit revival necessarily requires new markets, and this means going after what are now hopelessly auto-oriented suburbs. And what needs to be done is not just figuring out where new service is required or where car-free urbanites commute to, but also what kind of TOD can be done at each secondary job center.

Quick Note: Good News Week

Via Systemic Failure, I learn that the FRA is finally reforming its train safety regulations on its own. This is an amazing development, partial as it is. This appears to derive from the FRA’s previous research into crash energy management, which concluded that buff strength alone did poorly at protecting train occupants. This development is especially good for the MBTA and Metra, as agencies that could make large orders, especially of EMUs if they electrify (and both have good reason to); this will allow them to obtain better EMUs, for example measured by weight, than currently run in New York and Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, the reforms are partial, and lack two elements. First, they start from past crash tests, rather than from good rolling stock, and may still require imports to undergo substantial modifications; this is not a problem for large orders, but tends to raise the unit cost for small orders. That said, the rules are being developed in consultation with representatives from many rolling stock vendors, not only the large ones as with Caltrain’s waiver application but also smaller ones such as Nippon Sharyo and Stadler. Second, they do nothing about operating rules as opposed to procurement rules; these include brake tests, cant deficiency rules (only partially reformed), and so on. Still, count this as a positive development for the FRA.

The other good transit news: the Florida East Coast Railway, a Class II railroad primarily carrying intermodal traffic between Jacksonville and Miami, is announcing a privately-funded $1 billion project to build a medium-speed line from its mainline to Orlando and run passenger trains between Orlando and Miami, making the trip in 3 hours. This corresponds to an average speed of about 80 mph, just under 130 km/h, or in other words the same as that achieved by the supposedly high-speed Acela between New York and Washington.

The Growing and the Forgotten

Joel Kotkin’s attack on Santorum for his politics rural resentment drew a puzzled response from Cap’n Transit. Although both Kotkin and Santorum are opposed to the kind of urbanism the Cap’n and I promote, their approaches are the exact opposites of each other. Kotkin represents America the growing; Santorum represents America the forgotten. The same distinction applies to people who are not so conservative, and people on the same side of it (for example, Kotkin, Richard Florida, and Thomas Friedman) have more in common with one another than they’d probably like to admit.

America the growing is an America that is working just fine as it is. It needs more growth because capitalism always does, but it has no huge problems that can’t be solved with just more ingenuity. Kotkin’s perfect America looks like Texas. It’s rich, it thrives on bigness, and it’s doing better economically than the national average. It’s also diverse and forward-looking: its best days are ahead of it. Perhaps it looks like the growing parts of the Great Plains, but there, too, his post critiquing Santorum emphasizes diversity. This is the same as Richard Florida’s vision, except that Florida prefers the growth of gentrified, liberal inner-urban neighborhoods; the only difference between Florida and Kotkin is that Kotkin’s preferred regions lag Florida’s in gentrification, and still have fast suburban growth.

America the forgotten is the exact opposite. Its best days were behind it, and it feels bypassed by recent trends, with resulting economic decline. When there’s nothing else to do, one can keep one’s own cultural traditions. Some politicians channel this to an anti-immigrant politic. Santorum has not, his Puerto Rico language gaffe aside, but instead chose to talk about religion, gay rights, and contraception, staking positions that are often far to the right of what is mainstream in most of the US.

The same forgotten appears in cities, only it takes different forms. The Wire and the books that went into it are about forgotten urban areas; David Simon says, “The solution is to undo the last 35 years, brick by brick. How long is that going to take? I don’t know, but until you start it’s only going to get worse.” Urban NIMBYism is essentially the same viewpoint, only it’s more middle-class or at least working-class: we have a functioning community, we’re under constant assault by the powerful and by outsiders, and we need to not change.

The booster mentality of the growing does not lend itself into that kind of analysis. It has not to my knowledge produced anything as scathing as The Wire, because it tells people that they are fine as they are, and do not need to change. It’s understandable when done to boost the self-esteem of people who have too little of it; but there’s a big difference between telling a woman with a BMI of 22 that she’s not fat, and telling the global upper middle class that everything is great. It’s the death of social analysis.

As a result, this view ignores social problems until after they’ve been solved – for example, the environmental problems of today, as opposed to those that have been improving over the lat few decades. It’s unmistakable in Thomas Friedman: for example, in The World is Flat, writing about some social problems caused by the entry of Wal-Mart into regions, he says he was pleasantly surprised by the Wal-Mart executives for taking those problems very seriously and planning to address them. Of course Wal-Mart is still swatting down discrimination lawsuits and still plays towns against each other. Or, again with Friedman, consider his use of the language, “Win, win, win, win, win” about gas taxes. The point is not that he supports high gas taxes; it’s that to him such policies are obvious solutions, which nobody but special interests opposes. The fact that those special interests are fighting for their political survival does not concern him; he does not think he needs to be persuasive to people who buy gas, to explain to them why they’d be better off in a society where everyone thought of themselves as part of a common general interest rather than in one where everyone thought of themselves as part of a special interest.

Friedman is more stereotypical than Kotkin and Florida, but the difference between them is one of degree rather than kind. Florida ignores the very real economic tradeoffs a city must make when staking development strategy. No worries, he tells the business class: just be hip and trendy and don’t worry and you’ll succeed. Kotkin believes in a very different strategy, but sells it the same way, grasping at straws to convince people that they should just avoid megacities and density for every possible reason.

Of course, the knockers and the forgotten have their own set of problems, coming from xenophobia and fear of change. They, too, sometimes think things are fine as they are, or even more so as they used to be, and this leads to romanticism, which ironically can then set the stage for boosterism of another sort. The best antidote to some of the social philosophy behind The Wire is Mad Men: in the era David Simon admires, things were still bad, setting the stage for the destruction of today. But at least it can be done right, even if not by Santorum and other reactionaries.

Train Weights, Bilevel Version

My previous table of train weights covered single-level trains, with the exception of the ultralight (for a bilevel) TGV Duplex. By request, here is a similar version for bilevels. Note that very light trains such as the E231 or DB’s Class 423 are inherently single-level – though a bilevel Green Car trailer version of the E231 is quite light, even at 50% heavier than a single-level trailer.

Recall that Lng is length in meters, Wt is empty weight in (metric) tons, Width is in meters, Pow is maximum short-term power in megawatts, P/W is power-to-weight in kilowatts per ton, Ld is average load per axle in tons, and Wt/Lng is weight in tons per meter of train length.

Train Lng Wt Width Pow P/W Ld Wt/lng
E231 series Green Car 20 36 2.95 0 0 9 1.79
215 Series 200 368.5* 2.9 1.92 5.2 9.2 1.84
TGV Duplex 200 380 2.9 8.8 23.2 14.6 1.9
Bom. BiLevel Coach 26 50 3 0 0 12.5 1.91
KISS, Regional 150 297 2.8 6 20.2 12.4 1.97
KISS, Interregio 100 212 2.8 6 28.3 13.3 2.11
E4 Series 201 428 3.38 6.72 15.7 13.4 2.13
NS DD-AR (w/ mDDM) 100 221 2.8 2.4 10.86 13.8 2.21
GO Transit MPI hauling 12 Bom. BiLevel Coaches 332 734 3.24 3 4.1 14.1 2.21
Metra Highliner 26 59 3.2? ? ? 14.8 2.28
Caltrain Coradia 213 517 3.2? ? ? 16.2 2.43
X40 (Coradia, Sweden) 81.5 205 2.96 2.4 11.7 17.1 2.52
Caltrain MPI hauling 5 Bom. BiLevel Coaches 150.5 384 3.24 3 7.8 16 2.55
CityRail A-sets 78 201 3.04 ? ? 12.6 2.57
MI 2N 112 288 2.9 4.5 15.6 14.4 2.57
Colorado Railcar, bilevel 26 74 3.2? 0.96 13 18.5 2.86

*Caltrain claims the same weight – see pages 36 (which partially confuses the train with a heavier Shinkansen) and 45 of its document about bilevel EMUs. Japanese Wikipedia claims a much lower weight, coming from substituting 2 for the leading 3. Given everything else, the higher figure seems more likely (with thanks to Miles Bader for pointing the above link out).

The observation here is that FRA compliance no longer neatly separates trains. Part of it comes from the very heavy low-speed trains in France, of which the MI 2N is an example. I do not know whether this is caused by special regulations – on the one hand, the TGV reportedly has 500 tons of buff strength, but on the other hand, Sweden’s X40 is also quite heavy.

The reason for this is that while high buff strength adds weight, its effect is much larger on lightweight frames than on heavyweight frames. A train that is already heavy will become heavier if it is required to be FRA-compliant, but typically only by a few tons. New Jersey Transit’s ALP-46 locomotive is 7 tons heavier than the European locomotive it is based on, of which 4.5 come from FRA regulations. This applies equally well to low-power bilevels. Even lightweight, high-power products such as the KISS would be considered middleweight by single-level standards.

Observe, however, that to achieve acceptable average weight, FRA-compliant products have to sacrifice power (as is done in Toronto or on Caltrain) and also to have a heavy locomotive drag many relatively light coaches, raising axle load. For fast service, one must use a product like the Colorado Railcar, which is the heaviest train per unit of weight on both this table and the single-level table, and which also awkwardly is a high-level train with much greater height than permitted by any European loading gauge, avoiding the low-floor weight penalty.

Surreptitious Underfunding

One third of the MBTA’s outstanding debt, about $1.7 billion, comes from transit projects built by the state as part of a court-imposed mitigation for extra Big Dig traffic; interest on this debt is about two-thirds the agency’s total present deficit. Metra was prepared to pay for a project to rebuild rail bridges that would increase clearance below for trucks and cut the right-of-way’s width from three to two tracks. Rhode Island is spending $336 million on extending the Providence Line to Wickford Junction, with most of the money going toward building parking garages at the two new stations; Wickford Junction, in a county whose number of Boston-bound commuters is 170, is getting 1,200 parking spaces.

Supporters of transportation alternatives talk about the inequity between highway and transit funding in the US, but what they’re missing is that the transit funding bucket includes a lot of things that are manifestly not about transit. At their best, they are parking lots and other development schemes adjacent to train stations, which would’ve been cheap by themselves. At their worst, they are straight highway projects, benefiting road users only.

The situation in Boston, while unique in its brazenness, is not unique in concept. In the US, where there are no pollution taxes on fuel, the only way to mitigate air pollution is by regulation and by building alternatives simultaneously. Put another way, combined highway and transit construction is in most cases not really a combined project; it’s a highway project, plus required mitigation. Requiring the transit agency to shoulder the debt and the operating subsidies is exactly requiring transit users to pay for highways. It’s equivalent to charging transit multiple dollars per gallon of gas saved from any mode shift. And it may get even worse: the proposed House transportation bill includes a provision to allow spending national air pollution control funds on regular highway widening, in addition to the current practice of spending them on carpool lanes.

Historically, the diversion of funding from transit to roads took such insidious forms. For an instructive example from Owen Gutfreund’s book, roads advocates fought to get driver’s license fees and even inspection fees for fuel trucks recognized as road user fees, whose proceeds must be diverted toward roads. For another example from the same book, in Denver, the streetcar system was required to cover 25% of the cost of road maintenance on one-way streets and 50% on two-way streets, and as car traffic rose, streetcars both became slower and had to send over more money toward roads.

Another instructive case study is grade separations. It is to my knowledge universal that expressways and high-speed railroads, both of which must be grade-separated, pay for their own grade separations. In all other cases, who pays is determined by which mode is more powerful, and in the US, this is roads. As the national highway system was built in the 1920s, interurban railroads were required to pay for grade-separations, even when the rail came first. The practice continues today: in Kentucky, the railroad has to shoulder the full cost if it’s from 1926 or newer (Statute 177.110), and half the construction cost and the full planning cost if it’s older (177.170). In contrast, in Japan, grade separations are considered primarily a road project, and so the Chuo Line track elevation project was paid 85% by the national and city governments and only 15% by JR East (page 36). The segment in question of the Chuo Line was built in 1889; I believe, but do not know, that new rail construction in Japan is always grade-separated, at the railroad’s expense.

The situation in the US today is a surreptitious underfunding of transit, and at the same time a surreptitious overfunding of roads. It is not subject to democratic debate or even to the usual lobbyist funding formulas, but, like the obscure regulations that impede good passenger rail, hidden in rules nobody thinks to question. To pay for road mitigations and for parking, transit agencies will cut weekend service and reduce frequency. It’s bad enough when done in the open, but it’s done while claiming that transit is too expensive to provide.

Table of Train Weights

Here are some trains, and their weights. The headline figure is weight per linear meter of length, but also includes other metrics of interest. Not included is any feature of interior design, such as the number of seats or the number and location of doors, as those reflect choices about seated vs. standing capacity and about the relative importance of quick boarding and alighting.

Most trains on the list are low-speed commuter trains, but a few are high-speed. All are EMUs, except for high-speed trains with dedicated power cars and two DMUs that are included for comparison. All are single-deck except the TGV Duplex, which is as light as a single-deck TGV.

All figures are in metric units. Length and width are in meters, weight in tons, and (short-term) power in megawatts. Load is the average weight in tons per axle; it is not the same as the axle load, which is the maximum loaded weight per axle. To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to give dry weights, without passengers, though I believe the N700 Shinkansen number is with passengers.

For English units, 1 metric ton per linear meter equals 0.336 short tons per linear foot.

Train Lng Wt Width Pow P/W Ld Wt/lng
E231 Series 200 256 2.95 1.52 5.9 6.4 1.28
E231 Series motor 20 28.5 2.95 0.38 13.3 7.1 1.43
DBAG Class 423 67.4 105 3.02 2.35 22.4 10.5 1.56
Talgo AVRIL 200 315 3.2 8.8 27.9 15 1.57
E233 Series 200 319 2.95 3.36 10.5 8 1.59
FLIRT, Swiss 74 120 2.88 2.6 21.7 12 1.62
A-Train, Japan (E257) 185.5 306 2.95 2.9 9.5 8.5 1.65
Desiro Classic 41.7 69 2.83 0.55 8 11.5 1.65
E751 Series motor 20.5 34 2.98 0.58 17 8.5 1.66
DBAG Class 425 67.5 114 2.84 2.35 20.6 11.4 1.69
FLIRT, Finnish 75 132 3.2 2.6 19.7 13.2 1.76
N700 Series 405 715 3.36 17.08 23.9 11.2 1.77
CAF Regional 98 175 2.94 2.4 13.7 14.6 1.79
E351 Series 252 456 2.84 3.6 7.9 9.5 1.81
BR Class 357 83 158 2.8 1.68 10.7 9.9 1.9
TGV Duplex 200 380 2.9 8.8 23.2 14.6 1.9
X60 107 206 3.26 3 14.6 14.7 1.93
Coradia Cont., 4 cars 71 140 2.92 2.88 20.6 14 1.97
Francilien (SNCF Z 50000), 8 cars 112.5 235 3.06 2.62 11.1 13.1 2.09
Zefiro 380 215 462 3.4 10 21.6 14.4 2.15
A-Train, UK HSR (BR 395) 121 265 2.81 3.36 12.7 11 2.19
LIRR M-7 26 57.5 3.2 0.8 13.9 14.4 2.21
Velaro CN 200 447 3.27 8.8 19.7 14 2.24
MNRR M-8 26 65.5 3.2 0.8 12.2 16.4 2.52
Silverliner V 26 66.5 3.2 0.8? 12? 16.6 2.56
Colorado Railcar, 1-level 26 67 3.2? 0.96 14.3 16.8 2.59
Acela Express 202 566 3.16 9.2 16.3 17.7 2.8

The table separates Japanese, European, and American trains, the latter two with hardly any overlap. I did not include too many French and British commuter trains, and those are fairly heavy by European standards, but even they are a bit lighter than the M-7, the lightest modern FRA-compliant train (British trains tend toward 2 t/m, French trains toward slightly more). I did include the lightest European trains I know of but not all the Japanese trains, selected mainly for the big Tokyo-area workhorses (E231, E233) and longer-range, higher-speed JR East trains that I thought were comparable to the needs of longer-distance American regional lines.

Eyeballing the non-American trains, I think it’s fair and unambitious to think of a train of the future that weighs 1.8 tons per meter, can achieve 15 kW/t, and is capable of 160 km/h. Multiple vendors beat that, often by a large enough margin to cushion against the slight weight increase coming from a wider loading gauge. The upshot of this is that any regulatory overhaul and regional rail revival in the US has to be coupled with a large train order replacing older, less capable trains over time, which means dropping an order for several thousand EMUs over 20 or so years. No single company can make all of these, but sharing in the order, as was done for the R160, could work.

FRA Rules Are Not Just Buff Strength

The FRA waiver approach, adopted by Caltrain, appears to be a relatively simple way for agencies to get out of the buff strength rule. Caltrain applied for and got a waiver from a number of regulations that increase train weight, including buff strength but also several others. The comments written in Caltrain’s application, as well as the experience from SMART, suggest that there are problems with the FRA bigger than just the one regulation that’s most glaringly unnecessary.

First, the regulations that Caltrain asked out of are not just buff strength, but also less sexy rules: corner posts, collision posts, anti-climb mechanism, and so on. All of these are extra work for trains, and Caltrain indicates that it’s impossible to modify European EMUs to meet these rules for a small order. It would result in “no bids,” the application said, based on feedback from the largest vendors.

Now, SMART’s experience is very high capital costs for rolling stock: $6.7 million per two-car DMU. Those are compliant DMUs; there were four other bids, some compliant and some not, all more expensive. However, even the noncompliant bids were not off-the-shelf. They were not even noncompliant in general – they needed to comply with all rules except buff strength. Off-the-shelf DMUs run on mainline tracks in North America with time separation. One positive example is the O-Train, which has spent $34 million on six three-car sets for a service expansion, using completely off-the-shelf Alstom Coradia trains for the new order; the initial order not only used off-the-shelf Bombardier Talents, but also piggybacked on a large Deutsche Bahn order.

Although the performance under a partial FRA regime can be comparable to that under a European regime, the cost of modifying small orders can be very large, as Caltrain discovered. As a result, commuter rail agencies make do with inferior products such as the Colorado Railcar (which loses 42 seconds accelerating to 60 mph, vs. about 30 for a Stadler GTW) and pay $4-5 million per car.

For large orders, the problem is less acute, and indeed, Northeastern commuter rail EMUs are fine, if not great. The M-7s are a little heavier than comparable European EMUs, and the Silverliner Vs and the M-8s are much heavier, but the cost per car is only about $2.5 million, the performance is fairly good, and the reliability is very high. Spread over more than a thousand M-7s, the modifications required to build a compliant EMU are not too expensive. The FRA or other branches of the government could theoretically try to get uniform designs for other cars to spread modification costs over multiple orders, but instead, the next-generation trains proposed for Amtrak orders are overweight and low-performance, and explicit geared toward the needs of local manufacturers rather than those of transit agencies.

Another issue is the reliance on large vendors in drafting regulations and waivers. That’s a first line of cost increase, since it could shut out smaller vendors, which can’t adapt to the unique regulations so easily. Auckland had 11 bids for rolling stock for its electrification project; Caltrain designed its waiver in consultation with 4. On top of this, note again that Caltrain said about the buff strength rule that “to require compliance would result in no bids received.” If there could be bids but they are too high, then it’s harder if at all possible to get waivers. Many of the regulations are quite small and vehicles could be modified to meet them, for some additional cost – nothing huge by itself, but added together, it makes a DMU cost $3.3 million per car and not $2 million.

Finally, while the waiver regime allows new rolling stock to get in, it says nothing about maintenance regimes. Caltrain did not ask for waivers from maintenance requirements, even though the FRA discourages multiple-unit trains by treating them as locomotives for maintenance purposes. The Talents, Coradias, etc. have established maintenance requirements, and often agencies order not only the trains but also maintenance over their lifetime, from the manufacturers, who already know how to fix them. They do not explode from undermaintenance in Europe. Neither do their counterparts in Japan.

The alternative approach is to start from service needs, rather than from bureaucratic needs. This is what I mean when I talk about FRA revolutions. A train or a train concept with a history of success elsewhere should by default be legal on mainline tracks in the US and so should the established operating and maintenance practice, and it’s up to the FRA to show that it’s unsafe rather than up for the manufacturers to prove it once again. This is to a large extent the approach used with time-share waivers, which have put Talents and soon Coradias on mainline track in Canada and GTWs and Desiros in the US. If collisions with freight trains are prevented using other means (not that FRA compliance offers much protection to begin with!), and there is a track record of normal operation absent freight trains, there should not be problems with running those trains on shared mainline track. They do it in Europe and Japan, more safely than in the US. There’s no legitimate reason not to import that practice.

Providence: The Quiet Revival

Rustwire’s recent article about Providence, and a less recent article on the Urbanophile, have made me think about Providence’s growth. The Urbanophile comes strongly on the side of the power of its coziness; Rustwire takes the opposite track, talking about redevelopment and about the problems of the current recession, which has hit Rhode Island particularly hard.

With the caveat that I’m familiar mainly with the East Side, let me say that the redevelopment is unimpressive. Providence doesn’t look like it’s booming (in reality, its metro area income growth is high), and the city itself is very poor. That said, it doesn’t look very poor – not just on the East Side, which is solidly upper middle-class, but also near downtown. Downcity has a lot of urban renewal hell, but it doesn’t look especially bad.

To me the contrast is with New Haven, a city I’ve visited many times over the last few years, and there’s simply no competition. Although New Haven’s Chapel Street is busier and livelier during than anything I’ve seen in Providence, away from it the city looks post-apocalyptic (and even then, Thayer Street generally stays open later than Chapel). Yale student housing is in glorified project towers surrounded by too much parking, and a never-completed freeway stub and elevated parking structures cut off the main campus from the medical center. Providence has its share of freeways slicing neighborhoods apart, but the East Side managed to avoid them, and its housing stock is normal buildings, developed by different individuals over hundreds of years. Perhaps this better urban integration is why despite being poorer than New Haven, Providence maintains lower crime rates, echoing Jane Jacobs’ points about safety.

In other words, Providence is starting from a much better base than peer cities, though, going purely by income, nearly all secondary Northeastern cities are growing fast. The issue is not that Providence is rebranding itself as the Renaissance City, or Creative Capital. It’s that it was messed up less than other cities. Worcester has almost nothing next to the train station. New Haven has housing projects that I know people who are afraid to walk through. Providence has sterile condos and a mall, but next to them are some nice secondary shopping streets, and beyond them, in the right directions, lies intact urbanism, on the East Side and in Federal Hill.

If anything, most relevant government policy even in recent decades has hurt city walkability. In the 1980s, the city moved the railroad tracks north of the river, severing them from the East Side Railroad Tunnel. Simultaneously, it built Providence Place Mall and today’s train station, covering what used to be elevated track. The project was meant to remove an eyesore from downtown, but instead just moved the station to a more inconvenient location, and the mall sucked retail out of Downcity streets. Even what Rustwire calls highway removal was really a realignment: the I-195 river crossing was moved to a more southerly location since the old route was not up to the latest design standards, and this also happened to move the freeway farther away from Downcity and reunite it with the previously-isolated Jewelry District. There’s nothing wrong with that realignment, but it’s the kind of project Robert Moses would’ve supported.

On top of this, the attitude toward economic development is just embarrassing. Last year, I went to a meeting featuring smartphone app writers who claimed that “Providence is like a startup,” without a shred of irony about using this word to refer to a 17th-century city. A representative from the city government talked about the subsidies the city is paying to young entrepreneurs to just come live here.

And still the revival continues. Rhode Island may have one of the highest unemployment rates in the US today, but income growth is high; things are slowly getting better. The most visible growth in the US is in population rather than income, and so the usual markers are new housing starts, new infrastructure, and a lot of “coming soon” signs. Providence of course doesn’t have much of this. Instead, people are getting richer, slowly. RISD students occasionally go down the hill to Downcity (though Brown students don’t, since Brown’s campus is much higher uphill).

Economic growth in the richest countries is slow enough that people don’t perceive it. Instead, they think it’s the domain of countries that are catching up, such as China, where it’s so fast it includes new construction and the other markers that signify population growth in the first world. In the long run, it matters that a city’s income grows 1.8% a year rather than 1.1%, but it’s not visible enough to be captured by trend articles until long after the spurt of growth has started.

Commuter Rail Stop Distribution

One of the features of American commuter rail is that it’s intended to be used by suburbanites. The propensity for making nearly every station a park-and-ride, with poor pedestrian access, is one effect of this. Another effect is stop distribution. It’s not just stop spacing – many commuter lines have tighter stop spacing than some European and Japanese lines – but rather where the stops are dense and where they aren’t. Normally, a commuter line will have densely spaced stops in the city, where the population is denser and there are more connection points and important destination, and thin out in the suburbs, where speed is more important. American commuter lines are different – in the city they make very few stops, since they don’t connect well to local transit and are treated as too special, but in the suburbs, at least the inner suburbs, they have very frequent stops.

For examples, let us compare Metra and the Paris RER. I’m choosing the RER because it’s an express system, meant to provide fast service within the city rather than comparable stop distance to the subway. Some RER lines even have a slightly American-style station distribution, if they don’t go deep into suburbia, making them more like express subway lines in New York, though even then the difference is much smaller than in the US, without even such long nonstop segments as 59th-125th Streets on the A/B/C/D. Metra is where the American stop distribution tendency is the most extreme, though the lines I picked are those for which Wikipedia lists mileage for stations. All distances in the following table are in kilometers and start from the Chicago terminus or from Châtelet-Les Halles.

UP North BNSF Line Milwaukee North RER A to Marne-la-Vallée RER A to Cergy
4.5 2.9 4.7 2.8 1.8
10.5 6 10.3 4.8 4.5
15.1 11.3 13.2 7.8 9.1
17.7 14.5 14.5 12.3 10.5
19.3 15.5 16.4 14.5 14.8
21.4 16.1 18.7 ~15.5 17.5
23.2 17.7 23 17.6 18.8
24.5 18.8 26.1 20 25.6
25.4 19.8 28 22.7 29.7
26.7 21 30.3 24 ~32.5
28.5 22.1 34 30 34.8
30.9 22.7 36.9 35 38.6

Observe that the stop spacing for the first 3-5 stops is very express, but drops to that of an average subway for the Metra line beyond that. The UP-North line is especially egregious – despite serving the densely populated North Side, it barely stops there, letting the Red Line do all the work. Meanwhile, on the RER A, this is not the case – although stop spacing tightens slightly beyond the first few stops, the effect is small. Even the long nonstop segment between Etoile and La Défense (the second and third stop on the RER A to Cergy) is not enough to create the same effect seen in Chicago, and to some extent other American cities.

Bear in mind, the RER is explicitly an express railroad, though it is fare-integrated with local transit within Paris proper. Systems called S-Bahn, as well as commuter rail in Japan, range from operationally indistinguishable to operationally barely distinguishable from wholly-urban rapid transit. Thus their stop spacing is much smaller, especially in the urban core.

Part of the issue is that there’s not much development around railroads in American cities, since development follows arterial roads and urban transit instead. This is related in both directions to the failure of commuter rail to provide good urban service: there’s upzoning around subway and light rail stations, but not around commuter rail stations. But even when there is development near commuter rail stations, such as around Forest Hills in New York, service is suburban-focused (midday LIRR frequency to Forest Hills is hourly).

Whatever the ultimate cause of this, the result is that commuter rail is not usable where people are most likely to ride transit. Thus it is not too useful for a transit revival. The present revivals proceed from the inside out, starting from the urban core and expanding to outer-urban neighborhoods and then inner suburbs. At each stage, it’s useful to expand transit a little bit beyond the reach of the revival to capture additional ridership, and perhaps hit an anchor, and so there’s room for additional transit use from farther out. This is short-circuited when urban and suburban transit are kept segregated. So far it’s not been enough to prevent some transit revival in some American cities, such as New York and Washington, but it’s a problem in such cities as Boston and Chicago and may prove a problem everywhere once cities run out of subway-accessible areas.

Park and Rides, and Good Planning

Some people with experience in American bus planning have come strongly for park-and-rides, as a convenient means of concentrating all people boarding buses at one spot in order to improve frequency. The charge is led by Joel Azumah of Transport Azumah, who, responding to my question of whether it’s worth it to have strongly peaked buses, says,

Instead of running a separate park & ride and regional service, you can broaden the span of park & ride service. That would allow you to use some buses more than once or to add the early & late buses for flexibility. Park & riders that use services with a narrow span will drive in if they think their schedule is going to change. The extra buses will reduce that tendency.

In this view, the primary purpose of off-peak service is to provide peak riders with extra flexibility, making it a loss leader. This is indeed one of the main purposes of an all-day clockface schedule, as opposed to the essentially peak-only service provided by nearly all North American commuter lines. And yet, one part of Joel’s response bothered me. Observe that he contrasts his view with “running a separate park-and-ride and regional service.” In other words, a bus that serves a park-and-ride can’t serve walkable residential and commercial suburban strips. While this is a plausible constraint for an express bus, it is not a real issue for commuter rail, as long as the commuter rail is done right: trains make multiple stops, and those can include both walkable towns and some regional park-and-rides.

Of course, American commuter rail is without exception done wrong. This manifests itself in three different problems, all of which make park-and-rides look much more important than they actually are.

First, the rolling stock used, except on the LIRR, SEPTA, and Metro-North, is substandard. In particular, trains hauled by adapted freight locomotives take a long time to accelerate to even medium speed: the MBTA’s current trains lose 70 seconds just accelerating from 0 to 60 mph, and the FRA-compliant improvement, using Colorado Railcar DMUs, only cuts this to 42, as established in Table 3.1 of the Fairmount Line study. For comparison, modern EMUs, even of the FRA-compliant variety, lose about 13 seconds. The result is that trains can’t make frequent stops while maintaining acceptable average speed. Thus the service pattern already includes widely separated stops, forcing people to drive to stations, and moreover involves complex patterns with express trains.

Second, nearly all agencies, assume because of tradition that they can only serve peak riders to the CBD. Occasionally there’s some reverse-peak service, but its usage as a percentage of employment in the suburbs served is trivial. Even Metro-North, perhaps the most forward-thinking agency for reverse commuting, is uncompetitive for suburban employment. Stamford has a ridership of about 4,000 employees, in addition to about 3,000 residents working in New York; the total number of transit users working in Stamford is 8,600, itself only 11% of the city’s employment. This pattern in which nearly all ridership is inbound peak reinforces itself, and agencies do not usually try to provide adequate off-peak and reverse-peak service. The MBTA provides two-hour service off-peak on most lines. The LIRR runs trains one-way on the Main Line during peak hour, to allow the peak frequency of 20 trains per hour to run express trains rather than just locals.

And third, invariably, the suburban stations are all park-and-rides themselves. Some are explicitly configured as such, such as Metropark and Route 128. Those are good and need to be there. The problem is that pretty much all stations are friendlier to cars than to pedestrians. Sometimes they’re located outside the towns they purport to serve – for particularly bad examples, look at satellite photos of Plymouth and Westborough. Plymouth’s station is to the north of the old train station and town center, robbing the station of pedestrian traffic, and because Plymouth’s ridership has to come from drivers, the MBTA prefers to have most trains skip Plymouth entirely and just serve Kingston-Route 3, a standard park-and-ride. In a similar manner, Hicksville has a fair amount of development near the station, but so much parking that it’s poorly connected to the station for the pedestrian. Even Providence, Worcester, and New Haven get stations without much pedestrian-oriented development nearby; Providence, the best of the bunch, has development, but it’s sterile residential plus a mall flanked by pedestrian-hostile arterials.

The result of all this is that there isn’t a single example in the US of a commuter line, rail or bus, where most people walk to the station. Thus, issues including off-peak ridership and development near the stations look unsolvable. Those park-and-ride users grumble about difficult parking and do not take trains except to the city during rush hour. Who will drive to take a train that comes every two hours when it’s possible to just drive to the city?

Commuter rail done right does not have this problem, because it runs good (high-performance, low-energy consumption) trains with only one or two staff on board, and so it can run with long span and high frequency while serving many stations. This is roughly how many modern light rail lines in North America operate: there are a few park-and-rides, and a lot of stations located in between that are accessible to pedestrians and interface with feeder buses.

But for mainline rail, one has to look for examples outside the US. In Japan, new transit construction outside the dense city cores is accompanied by intense development near stations: see, for a recent example, the Tsukuba Express. Shopping centers and dense residential areas will generate ridership all day and in both directions; park-and-rides exist, but do not occupy center stage as they do in the US. Likewise, in Germany, one of the practices that evolved in the recent transit revival is closely spaced stations, located everywhere a railroad intersects a walkable place; speed is maintained via trains with good acceleration and level boarding, resulting in average speeds that match those of American commuter lines despite the shorter interstations.

The political infrastructure that exists in Germany and Japan and allows this and is absent in the US is coordinated planning. There is no way a single entrepreneur can create all the required development and local transit coordination. Transportation isn’t web entrepreneurship; it has no Mark Zuckerbergs or Larry Pages, who can almost singlehandedly create all the agglomeration required to support the new technology. Most of the time, this is done by cooperative government planning. The rest of the time it’s done by established conglomerates, usually combining real estate and transportation, including the Hong Kong MTR and the private railroads in Japan.

There is also some component of technology there. Small-scale entrepreneurs can run express buses, which can’t adequately serve many stations while maintaining competitive speed, much more easily than they can run trains, which can. They cannot run trains at all in the closed-access paradigm that rules American (and Japanese) railroading; they have an easier time in open-access Europe, and yet even then most private players are again big conglomerates, such as Veolia and Virgin.

Although transit must make room for the private sector, a transit revival that relies on uncoordinated private players will necessarily fail. Britain, the most privatized of the countries with a revival (high-income East Asia has no revival, as in the big metro areas transit never declined in the first place), needed to revert to public infrastructure planning with Network Rail, and maintains some of the key features of cooperative planning, including integrated tickets and fares. The rest of Europe contracts out services, but still strives to improve intermodal and interagency transfers; in Switzerland, transfers are timed even when multiple operators are involved. The role of people like Joel and the other private-sector players is to bid for operating routes that fit into a combined system, and add service (still within a fare union!) on thick routes where timetable coordination is less important.

What this means is that a transit revival must include more competent government planning. If there had been no Interstates, and certainly if there had been no expressways built by the states from the 1930s on, some of the railroads would’ve survived to do planning entirely in the private sector, as is the case in Japan. But given that there’s nothing like Japan’s private railroads in the US to plan integrated transportation using market principles, the government needs to do it, and it needs to do it well. It can’t privatize everything; the operators will just loot it for subsidies and neglect any components of development that don’t lead to immediate profit. And it needs to learn from some of the practices of express bus operators, but recognize when it can do better than just copy them.