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.

Macrodestinations and Microdestinations

In her book Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs complains that freeways as built are good at getting people to macrodestinations (downtown) but not microdestinations (particular addresses within city center). In her example from Toronto, this is correct, but in general, each mode of transportation will be good at serving microdestinations in an urban form that’s suited for it. Cars are not good at serving an intact city center; but equally, transit is not good at serving suburban sprawl, and regional rail that’s not integrated with urban transit is not good at serving urban destinations away from immediate train stations.

The idealized job center in an auto-oriented city is the edgeless city. Even the edge city, as explained in Lang and LeFurgy’s now-paywalled article Edgeless Cities, is too dense, and becomes congested too quickly; indeed, Tysons Corner is infamous for its lunchtime rush hour conditions. Ideally, cars drive from low-density residences to low-density office parks, primarily on freeways but with fast arterial connections at both ends; the freeway network in the auto-oriented city serves an everywhere-to-everywhere set of origins and destinations.

In such an environment, transit can’t do well. The distance between suburban attractors is too great for an easy walk, and the roads are too wide and fast for a pleasant walk. Buses and trains can serve a general macrodestination (“Warwick Mall/CCRI”), but not individual microdestinations, not without splitting and cutting frequency to each destination or detouring and raising travel time. The buses serving Warwick Mall and CCRI have hourly frequency, and are a long, uncomfortable walk from the hotel in Warwick I needed to go to. Judging by the frequency, I’m not the only person who chose not to use them, and take a taxi instead; everyone who has a car or who isn’t extremely price-sensitive does. The only way transit can serve such a destination is by concentrating development near the station – in other words, making a mini-transit city in the sea of sprawl, which generally conflicts with the goal of easy station parking.

In a city, the opposite situation exists. It’s easy to just pronounce transit more suited to dense city centers than driving, but the situation is more complicated. Transit, too, thrives on good connections to microdestinations. It can’t serve employment that’s dense but evenly dispersed in a large area – people would need too many transfers, and the result would be service that’s on paper rapid and in reality too slow. Instead, it works best when all destinations are clustered together, in an area not many subway stations in radius.

In this view, one failure of urban renewal is its failure to recognize that most people who visit city centers are going to do a lot of walking, and amenities should make it easier rather than harder. Traditional urban renewal would build cultural centers and other projects at the fringe of the CBD, to help its growth: Lincoln Center just north of Midtown, Civic Center just southwest of the San Francisco CBD, Providence Place and Providence Station just north of Downcity. In New York and San Francisco, there’s at least rapid transit serving those destinations, mitigating the effects. In Providence, no such thing exists. It’s an inconvenient walk from Kennedy Plaza to the mall and the train station – it’s not too long, but it crosses Memorial Boulevard right when it turns into a freeway on-ramp. Walking to the Westin, immediately adjacent to the mall, is practically impossible without rushing across roads without crosswalks. Even the walk between the station and the mall, which were built together and are close to each other, is much worse on the street than on a map, again involving crossing auto-centric roads.

Organic city amenities do not look like this. If they cluster at the same location (for example, 125th Street in New York, or Thayer Street in Providence), they tend to be along roads that facilitate rather than hindering pedestrian movement. And if they don’t, they are all located along a rapid transit network in its shared service area, where it is still a tight mesh rather than a network of radial lines.

In view of the recent emphasis on parking policy, due to Donald Shoup but now mirrored by other urban planning and transportation experts, the observation is that in any city center, on-site parking is difficult to find. Even in cities that make downtown parking relatively easy to get to, people can’t hope to park at every single microdestination, so instead they trip-chain, driving into the city and parking but going to multiple points within the city, all within a short and easy walking distance from one another. This is roughly the urban geography of the French Riviera, which combines easy parking with a dense, lively center in Nice and a fair amount of urbanity on some streets even in auto-oriented secondary cities such as Monaco and Menton.

The connection to regional rail is that, historically, it descends from intercity trains, and therefore the conception of connecting the suburbs to the city is very macrodestination-driven. To name two egregious American examples, the Boston’s north side lines and Caltrain both connect many suburbs to the city while also connecting people to the suburban tech job corridor, but in reality miss the biggest job centers at both ends. North Station is two subway stations north of the CBD, and as a result ridership underperforms the south side lines; 4th and King is far enough outside the Market Street CBD that it’s not close to the CBD jobs – the proposed Transbay Center site, which is, is located near more jobs than all existing Caltrain stations combined. And if microdestination-level service to an already transit-oriented CBD is bad, then service to other urban destinations is worse: urban station spacing is wide, there’s no attempt to develop near stations, and the poor integration with local urban transit ensures that even people who could be willing to make the last-mile transfer don’t.

Trip Chaining

Gendered Innovations’ charts of trip chaining and gender breakdown of public transit riders got me thinking about how different systems of transportation handle a mixture of short and long trips. Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities reports this and suggests that transit agencies orient physical features such as accessibility to the needs of women who trip-chain care and work trips.

But to me, the first observation is that although women trip-chain more, it doesn’t seem to be true that women are more likely to ride transit in the US than men just because of trip-chaining features. Instead, women traditionally have been less likely to have jobs requiring commuting, and the commute gap has been shrinking more slowly than the gap in employment.

This comes from the fact that trip chaining on transit is cumbersome in most cases. Both cars and transit have to deal with the time it takes to stop for an errand, but transit tends to handle this worse, unless it’s very frequent and has practically zero access and egress times. Transit cities instead get people to take their short errand trips on foot – since their neighborhoods are denser and have more mixtures of uses, they make retail and care trips attractive on foot. In light of the fact that walking is not useful for long commute trips and transit is not useful for short errands, we can construct the following typology of cities:

Long \ Short mode Foot, bicycle Car
Transit Transit-oriented Traditional suburban
Car New urbanist, small-town, auto-oriented dense Auto-oriented

Auto-oriented cities are the easiest: in those places, people drive for all purposes. Trip chaining can be done on a commercial arterial road, dropping off laundry or kids or buying something on the way to work, and because of ample parking availability, the time each additional link in the chain consumes is very small, since the longest access and egress time comes from navigating from the residential cul-de-sac to the arterial and from the arterial to the office park.

Traditional suburbs, common around New York and Chicago and sometimes in other old North American cities, are similar for trip-chaining purposes. In those areas, the urban form is suburban and auto-oriented, but work trips to the city are done by commuter rail or occasionally commuter bus, since the city is not as auto-friendly as the suburbs.

Transit cities too have their long-range commuter rail, but it is built as an extension of walking rather than of driving. Neighborhoods tend to have mixed uses, and there’s a concentration of retail development near the outlying stations, sometimes forming large secondary clusters but sometimes just acting as neighborhood centers. It could take considerable time to add more trips to one chain, especially if not everything is located at the train station. But conversely, the amount of time a single short trip takes is small, unlike the case for auto-oriented cities – the supermarket is right around the corner, and within five minutes’ walk are plenty of stores. When people walk, the concept of a single trip begins to lose meaning then. Potentially, every single purchase can be considered a separate trip, in which case the chaining becomes quite long.

In many places the transit is absent and people drive outside the neighborhood, while still doing errand trips on foot. This is the typology that characterizes different environments including new urbanism, traditional cities like Providence and Tel Aviv that have been made car-oriented, and auto-oriented modernist projects such as Co-op City. Those environments all differ in how trip chaining is done. In principle, it can be done on foot, but usually people who can drive do.

If my own experience is any indication, one feature of cities in this typology is that children and teenagers walk more. In Tel Aviv, my father drove me to elementary school on the way to work while (in later grades) I walked back, and I took the bus to and from middle school. Most trips my parents did in a car, but there was a reasonable number that were short enough to walk. I’d walk to farther destinations such as the cinema and the urban mall. The view of the North Tel Aviv middle and upper-middle class of the 1990s as I remember it is that the bus is fine for trips to school, but adults drive. I doubt I’d have had the same view if I’d grown up in New York, or for that matter in the Houston suburbs, where everyone drives or is driven.

Although most of the discussion about transit cities contrasts them with car-oriented cities, the other two typologies need to be examined, too. When adults and children trip-chain differently, children can get a distorted view of who transit is for (poor people, people who can’t drive yet), and the next generation will make the city auto-oriented; this is indeed what is happening in Tel Aviv, which despite population growth in the core is adding cars and spawning low-density suburbanization well outside the built-up urban areas.

Likewise, Cap’n Transit’s attacks on park-and-rides don’t quite capture what is wrong with the car/transit typology. A transit agency that wants to make it easier to trip-chain will want to concentrate development near the train stations, because that’s where it’s easiest to add minor trips without having to walk ten minutes out of one’s way. Of course in the middle of the dense city there’s development everywhere, which may well be orthogonal to where the subway is, but then trip-chaining becomes easier because each foot trip is so short.

The principle is that cars are a big one-time purchase but have a much lower marginal cost of usage. If one major class of trips can’t be done on transit – and chained trips generally can’t when they require the rider to wait for the next bus and the next bus will come in 15 minutes – then people will buy a car and then drive it even for trips they’d happily take transit to if they didn’t already own a car. The class of trips that can only be done conveniently by car needs to be kept small enough that people will use car share, take a taxi, or beg a friend who does own a car.

Thus what transit agencies and pro-transit politicians should devote more time to is appropriate development more than physical features of the transit system. Accessibility is important for so many reasons other than strollers. In contrast, the primary importance of using transit to extend the range of the pedestrian rather than provide a capacity boost for the car is precisely that transit needs minor trips to be doable on foot. A transit system that one needs to take to the supermarket may be technically successful, but it’s in a failed urban area.

More on Cost Comparisons

Some of my past posts on cost comparisons are getting play on mainstream publications including Slate, Salon, The Economist, and The Atlantic Cities, and one of the consistent points I see is that the difference between the US and most of the rest of the first world is so glaring that projects that are locally considered boondoggles suddenly look good.

A list containing multiple projects at over a billion dollars per kilometer can legitimize anything below it. Thus projects approaching half a billion per kilometer look downright reasonable. In reality, Tokyo Metro said that there will not be further subway construction, and I have read elsewhere that it repeated this promise in advance of its impending IPO. And in Amsterdam, an inquiry into the North-South Line’s factor-of-2 cost overrun concluded the project should have never been built.

It seems that there’s an Overton window analog, in which higher costs legitimize the previous decade’s work, making it look good when at the time it was criticized for poor cost control. In fact, this could explain the decades-long trend toward increasing real costs – an explanation that is usually given in terms of rising wages and worker safety rules, but in reality poor countries build subways for not much less money than non-Anglophone rich countries.

I contend that the best practice should still be to compare with the average, rather than with either the worst (London Crossrail, Amsterdam North-South Line, Munich Stammstrecke 2) or the best (most projects in Spain). Being more expensive than one city could be a fluke. Being five or more times more expensive than upward of 90% of subway projects is less excusable.

Most interesting to me in this discussion is the explanations for US/Europe cost differences. Although most people regrettably keep comparing the US to China, never mind that European and Chinese costs are similar, some stay on target and avoid explanations that assume the entire first world is like the US. One comment on The Economist follows:

Observations on the public construction process, having seen it in action relatively up close:

1. Failure to embrace technology except in the most expensive cases. We are behind in construction techniques overall. We will bring in European methods when the case is made they are necessary. These methods therefore tend to be used when the expense is higher. This means we don’t upgrade technology overall, just at the costly fringes. Examples come from the methods used to construct the new tunnels in Boston; one used a method developed mostly by the Dutch because our domestic methods weren’t up to it.

2. Our project management is not equivalent. European large scale construction projects run more just-in-time. Even really big ones require very large things to be built and then to arrive on a schedule. Our system can’t handle that so we build in lots of slack expecting stuff will come late and will need to be adjusted – sometimes substantially – to fit the need. That is very costly.

3. Our system is very bad at prioritizing. My experience with this is mostly at the state and local level. I have seen very competent people working at both levels. They exist in a morass of work that needs to be done. They don’t have the resources to do things properly. They have to put repair, snow, etc. way, way, way ahead of planning.

4. My overall comment is this: Europeans understand they exist in a high cost environment so they squeeze out the inefficiency to be competitive. They focus on value-added design and on efficiency in planning and scheduling. We don’t.

Bad Defunding

The furor in the transit blogosphere about the House Republicans’ transportation bill proposal, defunding the Mass Transit Account and diverting the money to roads in order to shore up the Highway Trust Fund, deserves more scrutiny from the point of view of government effectiveness. Although the proposed defunding is clearly political and cultural (to many Tea Party Republicans, trains and buses are for hippies), the way in which it is done is a good reminder about what’s going on in US politics. The principle is that when government does not work, the people in government who propose to get rid of it are part of the same ineffective governance structure.

First, consider some recent projects or proposals for projects to expand transit. In Houston, as noted by rail critic Tory Grattis, of the four proposed light rail lines, the first two to be built are the less cost-effective two, while the more compelling Universities Line is saved for later. In Los Angeles, the Foothills Extension is being built before the Westside Subway. And the first California HSR contract to be tendered is for the northernmost initial construction segment, the segment that should be first on the chopping block if necessary to divert money to the more important Los Angeles-Bakersfield mountain crossing. In order to prevent smart scope changes from leaving the cost-ineffective parts out, the planners take the cost-effective lines hostage in order to make sure that they are built.

The same is true in the opposite direction. It was not so clear up until now because the big-ticket rail cancellations all involved just one major project per governor, but now that the Republicans are bundling all transit together, the pattern looks clearer. There is no accounting for good and bad projects here. Even cost-effective projects such as Second Avenue Subway would lose funds they need for completion. The goal is not to cut government waste; it’s to cut spending on people who the people who proposed the bill find distasteful, and the effect of quality of government services is about what you’d expect of any politicized government program.

It’s for the same reason that I think very little of Chris Christie’s ideas about transportation management, despite my criticism of ARC. Although some of the rumors floated suggest that the depth of the cavern was one of the things that made Christie think the project was ridiculous, he made no effort to try fixing it. Instead, he canceled the project, trumpeted it as a cost saving measure, and proceeded to spend more money on freeways. Aaron Renn, hardly an orthodox leftist (he is a fan of Mitch Daniels), compared him to Chainsaw Al and called his style of governance kindergarten-level.

In analogy with technical and political transit supporters, there are technical and political road supporters. The technicals exist, in various driver magazines that support spending more money on maintenance and less on expansion, and do not mind raising tolls or gas taxes to pay for infrastructure. But the politicians do not care about cost-effectiveness, and have no problems supporting Big Dig-style projects. At the risk of overinterpreting blog comments, let me say that every road supporter I have seen express an opinion on the Big Dig thinks that it was a necessary project and should have been built regardless of the cost (for the record, $15 billion for what to the best of my understanding is about 200,000 cars per day). The thinktanks that support them care more about finding ways to convince people to want to pay more money for expensive freeways rather than about cutting the cost of construction or reducing environmental impacts.

Thus the House transportation bill is bad not only because it’s bad for transit, but also because it’s bad government. It’s not even selective worrying about cost-effectiveness, a charge often thrown by political transit supporters. It makes no attempt to decouple any funding from gas taxes, a decoupling that it necessary for the purpose of making it possible to tax pollution without demands from both APTA and the AASHTO that the revenues raised be plugged back into transportation. It makes no attempt to let go of projects that cost too much while maintaining those whose cost is adequate. It’s purely an exercise in muscle-flexing, a continuation of the US practice of not having a transportation policy that’s separate from the usual political and lobby bickering.

Why Long Island Should Get An HSR Spur

Having looked into why high-speed rail from New York to Boston should go through Providence, I want to explain why it should go through New Haven, rather than through any of the fanciful Long Island routings proposed most prominently by the Penn design group. Like Hartford, Long Island should have high-speed trains use the LIRR Main Line, but at medium speed rather than high speed, and with careful consideration to the much more important needs of commuter rail.

Although the LIRR Main Line shares one characteristic with the New Haven-Springfield line, namely that it is very good for 160-200 km/h but bad for 300, the reasons are subtler and less geometric. The most visible is NIMBYism. Even increasing the traffic of existing LIRR trains raised the ire of some suburbs along the Main Line, which opposed the three-tracking project (since canceled due to budget shortfall) on the grounds that extra train traffic would reduce quality of life and that eminent domain would be required. This is not Caltrain, whose local residents do not know what electric trains sound like; this is Long Island, which has lived with these trains for generations. Introducing HSR is asking for trouble.

Of course, the same could be said about any suburb that HSR needs to pass through. Connecticut is full of NIMBYs, just like Long Island. The reasons usually given for avoiding the existing Shore Line are that it’s too developed and has too much local opposition. But those are present on Long Island, and are worse because of the higher population density. For examples, compare Westport and Cos Cob with Brentwood and Farmingdale. The LIRR offers multiple straight rights-of-way, but all are going to have the same speed limits as heavily upgraded and modified tracks on the Shore Line – 250 km/h in the better parts, and 200 in the worse parts.

The Penn design proposal is not even the best Long Island proposal, for three reasons:

1. It insists on proceeding from Penn Station to Jamaica on the Lower Montauk Line. If a connection from the line to Penn Station opens, it’ll be far more useful for local rail, while intercity rail can use the Main Line. The difference between appropriating a Manhattan-accessible Lower Montauk Line for HSR and replacing the Lexington Avenue Line with a truck tunnel is one of degree, not kind; in both cases, local passenger rail is the most valuable use of the infrastructure.

2. It departs from the Main Line to use the Hempstead Branch (necessarily eviscerating commuter service) as well as abandoned tracks through endless residential suburbs, full of urban grade crossings. The Main Line has grade crossings and would need to be four-tracked, but the local NIMBYs actually supported grade separation, and multi-tracking at least could be sold as the local transit improvement project that it is.

3. Last and worst, it sharply veers north after stopping at Ronkonkoma, along a curve whose radius judging by the alignment map is around 900 meters (=150 km/h if superelevation and cant deficiency are set at normal HSR levels, or 170 km/h at cutting-edge levels). Then it crosses the Long Island Sound at its widest, so that it adds more than 20 kilometers to the New York-New Haven route length over the Shore Line, all at medium speed.

A route similar to the Penn design route but using the more feasible Main Line alignment would be 9 minutes slower than the optimal Shore Line route – 41 versus 32 minutes – with stops at Jamaica and Hicksville, enforced by unfixable track curvature near the stations. But in addition to the extra travel time, fixing the alignment through New Rochelle, Darien, and Bridgeport is far cheaper than a long undersea tunnel. A better Long Island route would follow the Main Line to the end and tunnel near Greenport, trading deeper waters for shorter tunneling and a route length comparable to that of the optimal Shore/I-95 alignment, so it could achieve a comparable trip time. But even that’s unneeded: it’s 15 km of deep tunneling, whereas if one is willing to slightly compromise on trip times, the only Connecticut tunneling required for a Shore Line fix is 3 km in Bridgeport.

The other problem is what to do about commuter service. The Providence Line’s traffic level is low enough and its average interstation is long, allowing a blended plan. Shared tracks between New Rochelle and Penn Station would see more commuter traffic, but intercity trains would go slower anyway, and there is more room for four-tracking. The Ronkonkoma Branch’s 10-minute peak service requires at least one overtake between Hicksville and Ronkonkoma and probably two, in addition to four-tracking the Main Line; this is feasible, but less than optimal, and the overtakes would have to be constructed in more constrained locations than those available on the Providence Line. East of Ronkonkoma commuter service may need to be cut, but this is less of a problem on account of its low traffic. On the other hand, the Main Line west of Hicksville is not a problem with four tracks, and neither is the New Haven Line – express commuter trains could weave in and out.

On the benefits side, offering Long Island service to Boston that doesn’t go through New York is better than not doing so. However, the difference in benefits with New Haven, while positive, is smaller than it seems. The New Haven Line has almost as much ridership as the LIRR Main Line, and Stamford is a bigger edge city than Mineola and Garden City. On top of that, since the optimal LIRR option connects to the Shore Line in the far east of Connecticut, there is no hope for service to Hartford except on legacy track. On balance, the advantage of the LIRR option is just service to Jamaica, a larger draw than those smaller cities and suburbs, but there the time saving is the smallest.

On top of that, does such a small benefit really justify the cost? Having some high-speed trains run through to Jamaica, Mineola, Hicksville, and Ronkonkoma at lower speed requires re-electrifying the LIRR with catenary, which is a fraction of the cost of all those urban grade separations and 1-2 order of magnitude cheaper than an undersea tunnel and land connections. On a similar note, since half an undersea tunnel is of no use, it’s harder to break construction into small chunks if it is necessary, putting it at a disadvantage against a route consisting of cutoffs and modifications of the existing line. The route of 1834 may work now that we can build tunnels, but the cost structure favors that of 1846 and 1852.