Compromising with Agency Turf

Daniel Krause added his two cents to the politicals vs. technicals issue; his contention is that technical advocates are perfectionists and refuse to compromise. Writing about the Transbay Terminal design, which is slightly less wretched than originally planned but still severely constrains Caltrain capacity into downtown San Francisco, he says,

-It seems [technicals] have a difficulty in accepting design compromises. The Transbay Terminal situation is a good example. Even though the turning radius has been significantly widened, it is still tighter than they like, so the drumbeat continues about how bad and non-function the Transbay Terminal will be, even though (in my opinion) a reasonable level of service will now be accommodated within the terminal for both Caltrain and HSR.

-Things they find as deal-breakers in terms of design, are not deal-breakers to the general public. The public just wants a comfortable and reasonably fast way to get around. For example, they will not be bothered if trains go a little slower into the Transbay terminal because the turning radius is not ideal. They will still be perfectly happy to arrive into the heart of downtown SF despite the ongoing debate in the blogosphere.

The telltale sign that something is wrong is that there’s nobody to compromise with on this matter. Compromises based on community needs happen all the time. In fact one of my future projects for this blog is to propose an elevated alignment in Providence from the East Side Rail Tunnel to downtown, and this involves a series of compromises between cost, noise, takings, and speed. The problem is that the compromises leading to the Transbay design, or, worse, the design of San Jose Diridon, are not based on any local needs; they’re based on the needs of agencies that won’t cooperate. The same is true of the various caverns built or proposed in New York, and Harold Interlocking.

Although I’ve voiced the view that experts should be thought as one more constituency with its own special knowledge (namely, best industry practices), they should not be viewed as a constituency with its own interests. They should serve the public, not the reverse. And the public should pressure them to come up with designs that maximize passenger convenience.

In the case of Transbay specifically, the agency turf is not just leading to high cost. The worst aspect of it is that most peak Caltrain trains will not be able to serve Transbay, but instead have to terminate at the present 4th and King terminal, separated from the CBD by a kilometer and a pedestrian-hostile freeway connector. Passengers will be forced to transfer to the Central Subway, a very slow and low-capacity line that isn’t expected to get much more ridership than the buses it’s replacing.

Although it’s tempting to view passengers as automatons who only care about glossy trains, the reality is that the little details matter.  If the area around a station isn’t walkable, people will not walk to it. If the timetable is too inscrutable, or schedule reliability is poor, or the trains squeal, passengers will be more likely to look for alternatives. Of course laypeople may not be able to tell exactly what is wrong – they may complain that transferring is horrible but not know that transfers could be made cross-platform and timed, or they may complain about paying a series of fares but not know that fare unions exist – but they can tell something is wrong. Ordinary people are much less stupid than the elites think they are. The best argument against democracy may be five minutes’ conversation with the average voter, but the best argument for democracy is five minutes’ conversation with the average member of the elite.

I for one was not born hostile to American transit agencies. I became this way after, first, riding Amtrak; and second, stumbling across a cost per km figure for Tokyo subways that was much lower than the equivalent New York figure, eventually leading to my interest in comparative costs. And judging by the deteriorating position of HSR in the polls in California, the design incompetence is having a similar effect on many others.

Trust (Hoisted from Comments)

Robert Cruickshank’s much-anticipated reply to my posts about political versus technical transit supporters and their activism says that high-speed rail is a political issue, and therefore what’s important is to just get it done.

To me, the problem comes from my unfortunate choice of the terms political and technical. The main difference is not about technical concerns; it’s about whether one trusts American transit agencies. Thus I don’t really see the point when Robert complains about neo-liberalism and the evils of financial cost-benefit calculations. The terminology I picked may have reinforced the image of technicals as heartless engineers and technocrats, but in reality the opposite is true. Technicals have a much bigger standard deviation in their political attitudes than politicals; they range from Rothbardian libertarians to free speech advocates and people who make fun of the phrase “undisclosed location” in the context of US-sponsored torture. The common thread is mistrust of agency officials; the technical arguments are there because when we disagree with officials rather than just report what they say, we need to actually rebut their claims.

In contrast with Robert’s picture of the technical as a technocrat, my technical activism comes from the opposite end: it’s a rejection of a self-justifying bureaucracy that equates “build nothing” with “continue to build highways” and that thinks progress equals megaprojects. It’s a matter of supporting consensus politics and informed citizenry rather than subservience to agency officials. US government officials spend 2-10 times more on infrastructure projects as they have to. They have agency turf battles that make transit less user-friendly, and to cover up those turf battles they propose to spend billions of dollars on gratuitous viaducts, caverns, tunnels, and what have you. They write passenger rail-hostile regulations. And when called on it, they defraud the public and even tell outright lies. Trust in government agencies is so low that when the California HSR Authority admitted to the cost overruns, the LA Times treated it as a moment of honesty.

It’s precisely this trust that people care about, and it’s eroding when HSR becomes the equivalent of $600 toilet seats. Of course there is money for transit, but it’s either wasted or not given to transit because people can’t trust that it can be used wisely. I view it as part of my goal to showcase how good transit can be done, so that it doesn’t look so expensive for the benefit provided.

A fundamental tenet of risk perception theory is that people are most concerned about risks they find morally reprehensible – and this collusion between government and government contractors offends me. Just because it’s greenwashed doesn’t mean it’s any better than subsidizing oil drilling, paying military contractors $1,000 per day, or bailing out financial companies that then use the money to pay the executives who caused the financial crisis multi-million dollar bonuses. No wonder that when Republicans talk about the ingenuity of individual business leaders, they talk about Mark Zuckerberg, the Google guys, and Steve Jobs; they have to go that far out of the industries that give money to the GOP, such as oil, to find people who’ve actually innovated rather than just sucked public money. In fact one of the impetuses for the spread of neo-liberal boosterism in popular culture is the perception that entrepreneurs who are untainted by the public sector are good, while government is inherently incompetent and corrupt. When the government doesn’t do a good job, people stop believing it’s even possible for good government to exist.

Yonah Freemark writes that it doesn’t matter if costs are high because HSR costs are a small part of the transportation budget, which is itself a tiny part of GDP. But transportation is also not the biggest priority in spending. Most of the GDP, even most government spending, is and should be things that aren’t transportation; and most transportation funding isn’t and shouldn’t be intercity.

For an order of magnitude of what other issues are involved, Robert is proposing $1 trillion in student loan forgiveness as economic stimulus. My point is not to impugn him; I agree with him there. It’s that the big-ticket items are not transportation, but instead transportation is one of many small-ticket items of spending. But pool many small expenses – a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there – and you’re starting to talk about real money.

And this is true politically, not just economically. The Democratic Party has been advocating for universal health care since the Truman administration. After early successes with Medicare and Medicaid, its efforts stalled; its empathy-based appeals went nowhere. In Politics Lost, Joe Klein writes about how Bob Shrum would insert the phrase “health care is a right, not a privilege” into the speeches of every Presidential candidate he worked for – and how every candidate he worked for lost. Meanwhile, US health care costs were ballooning faster than those of other first-world countries. By 2005-6 it was impossible to miss, and liberal pundits seized and owned the issue, portraying American health care as not only inequitable but also inefficient. Five years later, they got their universal health care bill, flawed as it is. Nowadays the people who are pooh-poohing the idea of health care cost control are Greg Mankiw and the Tea Party.

Spending is a zero sum game, but economically and politically. The Great Recession won’t last forever. Any infrastructure building plan is going to outlast the recession, triggering real tax hikes, spending cuts, or interest rate hikes in the future. It’s fine if the infrastructure is cost-effective; it’s not fine if it isn’t. (In comments on CAHSR Blog, I was told that the example of Japan shows that the recession can last forever; if it does, the US will have bigger problems than transportation.)

And this is equally true politically. The amount of government spending is controlled tightly by the political acceptability of deficits. Some deficits are more politically acceptable than others – for example, military waste is acceptable to many right-wingers – but in this political climate, HSR is at least as controversial on the right as extending jobless benefits, and far less useful as stimulus per dollar spent. The unemployed tend not to fork over much of their benefits to international consultants. If a few billion dollars are enough to showcase workable HSR then by all means the administration should spend them, but if they’d eat $20 billion out of a $50 billion jobs bill that Obama’s going to run for reelection on, there’s no point.

I think that both on transportation and on health care, there’s a political not-invented-here reasons among the partisans. Liberals owned health care cost control, so Greg Mankiw started arguing that it wouldn’t help society much and that high costs are a good thing and Sarah Palin referred to cost control as death panels. The issue with transportation is a little different; while many technicals are leftists, it’s anti-urban conservatives and Koch-libertarians who cancel transit projects, use phrases like “the money tree,” and demagogue about how no rail project is ever affordable. My instinct is to point out that those conservatives have no trouble overspending on road projects and rationalizing highway cost overruns; but if you think in terms of spending, and treat transportation as one program of many stimulus projects, there’s a real not-invented-here issue here.

Ironically, despite Robert’s claim that costs don’t matter and benefits do, much of what I rail against is exactly benefits. I personally am reminded by how awful the turf battles are every time I have to buy an MBTA ticket at the cafe since Amtrak bullied the MBTA out of the Providence station booths, and every time I take the subway to Penn Station and need to change concourses to get my Amtrak ticket. The key for me is to make transit cheap enough that it can be deployed on a large scale, and to make it convenient and pedestrian-friendly, which park-and-ride-oriented commuter rail is not.

Do Not Compare NEC with HSR Ridership

One common claim doubting high ridership estimates for American high-speed rail lines is that the Northeast Corridor gets little ridership. For example, commenter Gelboak says,

How plausible is a 51-77 million px / year ridership?

I believe the NE corridor currently has a ridership of approximately 10 million px / year, and I think the CAHSR and the NE Corridor have not all that different population sizes in the respective catchment areas. And many of generally the metro areas in the NE Corridor have larger shares of their population in dense urban cores than is the case in the Bay Area, Sacramento, LA/Orange County & San Diego.

This line has also been repeated elsewhere, among serious urban economists like Ed Glaeser as well as among commenters and journalists. It is a bad comparison, for one reason: the Northeast Corridor does not have high-speed rail. The Regional averages 110 km/h between New York and Washington and 85 km/h between New York and Boston; the premium-priced Acela averages 130 and 100 km/h respectively. This is the speed of mildly upgraded legacy lines – faster than the lines full-fat HSR replaced in Japan and France, much slower than actual HSR or heavily upgraded lines in Germany and Britain. It’s not much faster than a bus, which is why Megabus and Bolt have been so successful in the Northeast, while no comparable service exists on Tokyo-Osaka or Paris-Lyon.

In contrast, express Shinkansen trains average 200 km/h or more on the three main Shinkansen routes. So do TGVs running between cities served by LGVs, without needing to use legacy lines except in immediate station areas. For example, the fastest bi-hourly TGVs from Paris to Marseille average 230 km/h. Upgraded legacy lines are also fast by NEC standards: Britain’s East Coast Main Line and West Coast Main Line trains from London to the major cities in Scotland and the north of England usually average 140 km/h, and in one case (London-York) close to 160 km/h. For a selection of fastest-train speeds in Europe, see DoDo’s analysis at EuroTrib.

If we look at ridership on full-fat HSR, we get much higher numbers than NEC ridership. The Tokaido Shinkansen  had 141 million passengers in fiscal 2010. The Sanyo Shinkansen gets 60 million passengers per year. The LGV Sud-Est and Atlantique each got 20 million annual passengers within 10 years of opening and the Madrid-Seville AVE line 6 million (see p. 109 of the new CAHSR business plan) , and although I have no link at hand, I’ve read the LGV Sud-Est is up to 30 million by now. Taiwan HSR and the KTX both significantly underperformed expectations, but each gets about 35 million annual passengers now.

If we measure the populations of the cities connected, the Northeast Corridor is easily the busiest potential HSR line in the West. New York is larger than any other Western city, and nowhere else in the first world is such a city connected to three second cities as large as Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington. Using the KTX as an analogy, New York and Seoul have about the same metro area populations, each of Washington and Boston is about the same size as Busan or a little larger, and the smaller intermediate cities, such as Baltimore and Providence, are about the same size as Daegu and Daejeon. The NY-DC and NY-Boston distances are slightly shorter than Seoul-Busan, reducing HSR’s advantage over the highways, but conversely the KTX is quite slow, averaging about 170 km/h as of 2009. The ridership on the NEC may be 10 million with today’s service levels, but it should be far well above 50 million with higher speeds and good punctuality.

Together with the fact that international links underperform, the result is that the two lines most frequently used by critics as examples of low ridership – Eurostar and the Acela – are not comparable to the HSR systems proposed. Thus sanguine expectations of ridership are realistic, issues with connecting transit and low road tolls aside. The Northeast Corridor competes with congested, tolled roads and feeds into cities with regional rail systems that suck except for when they need to serve the Amtrak station; it is not the example one should use to rebut American HSR proposals. Let an American HSR line open first before criticizing.

The upshot is that although the costs of HSR in the US have blown out of proportion, the benefits are still high. Maybe not high enough to cover the costs, but higher than the critics think. Agency turf battles and general contractor incompetence give high-cost, high-maintenance projects, but they don’t make passengers not want to ride the lines.

Quick Note: What Does Profitability Mean?

The 2012 business plan for California HSR, in addition to admitting to wanton cost overruns, also promises that the system will be profitable. Or does it? I did not want to comment on the plan’s notion of profits, but I see via California HSR Blog that several outfits have seized upon that part and treat the release as much better news than it actually is.

The plan says, e.g. on page 15 of the PDF, that the system will generate operating profits even on the lowest-ridership scenarios. This has led Treehugger and others to crow that this will not be a disaster. But a careful consideration suggests the opposite. The medium scenario posits $1 billion in revenue in 2025 versus $539 million in annual operating costs. But those operating costs exclude depreciation; by then the project is expected to expend about $50 billion, which at even a mild depreciation schedule is more than enough to put the system in the red.

The problem is that people in the US are used to judging transit and rail profits using transit agency metrics, by which other people pay for capital and therefore the main operating ratio excludes depreciation. This is not normal accounting; EBITDA is a much less important metric than EBIT (including depreciation but not interest) or net income (including everything) for a normal, profitable business. The profitability of HSR outside the US is measured in terms of net profits; in Taiwan, the system has had positive EBITDA since a few months after opening, but went bankrupt due to elevated interest charges.

The argument that the business plan proves something special because of the positive EBITDA may satisfy people who get their criticism of HSR from hacks who conflate capital and operating costs, but it should not satisfy people who occasionally bother to read railroad budgets. The higher the quality of a line, the lower the operating costs are excluding depreciation and the higher the depreciation and interest charges are. For example, see this breakdown of Madrid-Barcelona HSR costs and profits; infrastructure charges are dominated by depreciation and interest rather than maintenance, though rolling stock charges are more maintenance than depreciation.

Even state-of-the-art HSR infrastructure maintenance is cheap. The 2012 business plan a little more than $100,000 per route-km (cf. €30,000 per single track-km according to a 2008 study, which works out to about the same modulo inflation and a high Euro:dollar exchange rate). It’s a second-order term. The same is true of avoidable operating costs, such as rolling stock maintenance and labor. Of course ten second-order terms make a first-order term, and indeed the total operating costs of HSR are not negligible. However, they’re still lower than depreciation charges.

The importance of including depreciation is that HSR capital doesn’t last forever. Rolling stock has to be replaced. Viaducts and tunnels need to be refurbished. It’s hard to come up with exact figures since HSR lines have not yet depreciated in full in the 47-year history of the technology, but railroads all over the world have accountants who include depreciation terms in the budget. Of course, the problem is that if the capital cost is too high, then the depreciation and interest will weigh the project down. This hasn’t really been observed abroad, except in cases in which the interest rates were very high as in Taiwan, but judging by the business plan’s numbers, it could happen in California.

Finally, although the biggest bombshell in the plan is the cost overrun, the plan also has a ridership shortfall. It’s not a big shortfall, but on page 115 the plan mentions that the revised full-buildout ridership estimate for 2035 is 51-77 million, depending on fares, down from 69-98 million according to the 2008 environmental impact statement. This partly explains why the operating revenues are so low relative to full operating costs including depreciation.

The CAHSR Bombshell

The 2012 CAHSR business plan has some bombshell construction cost numbers: the headline number is $98 billion, leading to predictable complaints that the cost has run over by a factor of 3 over the original $33 billion budget of 2008. This is somewhat misleading since it includes inflation, but there’s still a factor-of-2 real cost overrun to investigate: in 2010 dollars the cost is $65 billion, as predicted by CARRD though with a somewhat different distribution of cost overrun among the various segments.

Some of it is scope creep that could be removed later via value engineering, and some is additional delays. The new plan assumes construction will take until 2033, vs. 2020 originally. The one point of light is that the initial construction segment (ICS) from Fresno to Bakersfield is still within budget, giving time to send the people involved in scope creep to early retirement and do the designs better. The biggest cost overruns are on the Peninsula and LA Basin segments, which are now up to $25 billion, about triple the original cost estimate. This already suggests that lack of money is what is causing costs to grow: just as it’s expensive to be poor, so is it expensive for an agency to have no money and drag construction over decades, in many segments.

But it’s not just the delays. The Peninsula blended plan includes many extra features, such as $1.5 billion for 80 km of electrification (in Auckland the same amount of electrification cost $80 million), $1 billion for 10 km of very tall and unnecessary viaducts through downtown San Jose, and $500 million $1.9 billion to tunnel under Millbrae (see update below) in order to preserve BART’s three tracks.

There’s scope creep and there’s scope creep. Sometimes, a project’s costs go up because new features are added that are useful (for example, converting a single-track diesel project into a dual-track electrified light rail, as was done on the LA Blue Line), or that are necessary but were glossed over initially in order to keep cost estimates down. A little bit of the latter kind of scope creep is present in the Central Valley, in the form of more viaducts than originally planned; CARRD’s cost overrun estimate was based entirely on taking CAHSR’s unit costs and applying them to the added features as of 1-2 years ago. But the kind of scope creep we see on the Peninsula is entirely different: they are adding features that are of marginal operational use, and instead exist mainly to reinforce agency turf lines (namely, separation of agencies at San Jose).

My suspicion is that the same is true of the other segments. The fact that a cost overrun was averted on the initial construction segment in the Central Valley, after extensive value-engineering (for example, fewer viaducts), shows that the one segment CAHSR needs to build within budget in order to survive is indeed being built within budget. The other segments, for which the HSR Authority hopes to obtain private and local funding, offer easy opportunities for contractor profiteering: once the initial segment is built, there may well be momentum to complete the system, and the consultants could strong-arm local governments and the federal government to cough up more money. Indeed, no extra features useful to passengers have been added – everything is just about agency turf and more viaducts.

The only places where there could plausibly be an honest overrun, which cannot be eliminated simply by putting adults in charge and going back to older plans, are the mountain crossings. And indeed, the Grapevine alternative, now posited to be $1-4 billion cheaper than the Tehachapis, could resolve the major issue heading south toward the LA Basin. In the north, they keep studying the Altamont overlay with options including one proposed by SETEC that lets trains run at full speed right up until the built-up area of southern Alameda County; together with the Dumbarton water tunnel, it could help the project stay within budget by switching to a superior alternative, and avoid the San Jose viaduct mess entirely.

Although the political supporters of CAHSR tend to discount the Grapevine and be skeptical of switching to Altamont, they are still interested in the option of value-engineering. But it’s stupid to first propose an outrageous plan and then value-engineer it back to the original cost estimate. It offers no political advantages over doing it right the first time, and just breeds justifiable mistrust of the authority. For all I know, there could be a large real overrun that is not the result of agency turf wars.

To make sure people don’t react to the apparent factor-of-three overrun the way they should – i.e. propose to pull the plug unless costs are scaled down to reasonable levels – the 2012 plan includes higher numbers for the cost of doing nothing, i.e. of expanding freeways and airports to provide the same capacity. It was originally $100 billion, and is now $170 billion. This is less self-serving than it seems: the plan assumes a slower buildout and higher inflation, which accounts for most of the difference. But it’s still a backhanded way of trying to force the state to kick more money toward the contractors. If they can slow down airport and freeway construction (thereby increasing the final cost), perhaps they can halt it entirely – fair’s fair.

I’m still optimistic that they could put adults in charge and reduce costs to the original estimate, as they already have in the Central Valley. That is, if the federal government dangles a few billion dollars for the LA-Bakersfield segment and demands even a modicum of accountability, then they will gladly use the money to build a useful initial operable segment and only try to extort the public later. But optimistic and certain are not the same, and it’s an outrage that such a project could cost $65 billion. The tunnel-heavy Shin-Aomori extension of the Tohoku Shinkansen cost $4.6 billion for 82 km, a little more than half the proposed per-km cost of the new business plan – and Japan is a high-construction cost country.

Unless they cut the costs, I don’t see how I can continue to support the project. The initial construction segment, useless as it is on its own, is fine; the question is whether it stakes the territory for a very expensive future extension, or for one with reasonable cost. Since I doubt they’ll be able to get any additional money until they connect to the LA Basin except from the federal government and even then it will be a small number of billions, I think it’s the latter option. But the rest should be scrapped and restarted unless the construction costs drop dramatically. I would peg the maximum that the project can cost before it should be canceled, on the outside, at $60 billion or so in today’s money. This assumes timely construction – waiting decades with rapidly depreciating track hosting limited service makes the situation worse. The only consolation I have is that no matter what, the other projects they could spend the money on if CAHSR is canceled are even worse. And this says more about those other projects than about CAHSR.

Update: here is the cost escalation breakdown. It’s overwhelmingly the addition of new features, i.e. tunnels and viaducts, most of which are unnecessary (though one major issue, additional tunnels from Palmdale to LA, is required due to further study showing the need for more environmental protection). For example, Millbrae gets a gratuitous tunnel, previously estimated at $500 million, now estimated at $1.9 billion (p. 20). Unsurprisingly, SF-SJ has the biggest overrun, a factor of 2.5. Hat-tip goes to Clem for noting the extra cost of Millbrae, which I missed looking at just the business plan.

Update update: the California HSR Authority links rotted away, but were replaced with new ones. The page references remain valid; the reference to the cost in the first link at the beginning of this post is PDF-p. 15, and the reference to the breakdown of cost overrun by segment is in the update link, PDF-pp. 7-10. The cost estimate for the project was since revised down to $53 billion, in 2011 dollars, in the final 2012 business plan (see PDF-p. 23); this is entirely from leaving out the LA-Anaheim and SF-SJ segments for later, which avoids the Millbrae tunnel and other Peninsula luxuries, but does not address the extra costs of going through Palmdale or the cost overrun just south of San Jose.

Transfer Penalty Followup

My previous post‘s invocation of Reinhard Clever’s lit review of transfer penalties was roundly criticized on Skyscraper City Page for failing to take into account special factors of the case study. Some of the criticism is just plain mad (people don’t transfer from the Erie Lines to the NEC because trains don’t terminate at Secaucus the way they do at Jamaica?), but some is interesting:

This is what the paper says:

Go Transit commuter rail in Toronto provides a good example for Hutchinson’s findings. In spite of being directly connected to one of the most efficient subway systems in North America, Go’s ridership potential is limited to the number of work locations within an approximately 700 m radius around the main railroad station. Most of the literature points to the fact that the ridership already drops off dramatically beyond 400 m. This phenomenon is generally referred to as the “Quarter Mile Rule.”

Let’s look at WHY that is. If you live North of downtown and work North of about Dundas Street, it is probably faster for you to take the subway to work. So people aren’t avoid the commuter train because it imposes a transfer, but just because the subway is faster. Same thing if you live along the Bloor-Danforth line. Toronto’s subway runs at about the same average speed as NYC’s express trains. If one lives east or west of the city along the lakeshore, they are going to take the GO Train to Union Station and transfer to the subway to reach areas north of Dundas. I really doubt these people are actually “avoiding” the GO Train, though if there is evidence to the contrary I’d like to see it.

Toronto also has higher subway fares than NYC.

The issue is whether the subway and commuter rail in Toronto are substitutes for each other. My instinct is to say no: on each GO Transit line, only the first 1-3 stations out of Union Station are in the same general area served by the subway, and those are usually at the outer end of the subway, giving GO an advantage on time. Although the Toronto subway is fast for the station spacing, it’s only on a par with the slower express trains in New York; on the TTC trip planner the average speed on both main subway lines is about 32 km/h at rush hour and 35 km/h at night.

Unfortunately I don’t know about GO Transit usage beyond that. My attempt to look for ridership by station only yielded ridership by line, which doesn’t say much about where those riders are coming from, much less potential riders allegedly deterred by the transfer at Union Station. So I yield the floor to Torontonians who wish to chime in.

Update: a kind reader sent me internal numbers. The busiest stations other than Union Station are the suburban stations on the Lakeshore lines, led by Oakville, Clarkson, and Pickering; the stations within Toronto, especially subway-competitive ones such as Kipling, Oriole, and Kennedy, are among the least busy. Some explanations: the subway is cheaper, and (much) more frequent; Toronto’s GO stations have no bus service substituting rail service in the off-peak, whereas the suburban stations do; Toronto’s stations have little parking.

Why the 7 to Secaucus Won’t Work

Bloomberg’s expressed support for the now $10-billion proposal to send the subway to Secaucus is generating buzz and speculation about the ability to secure funds. Missing from this discussion is any concern for whether more people would actually transfer at Secaucus than do today. The instinct is to say that this provides a better connection to most of Midtown, but the transfer penalty literature suggests otherwise.

One important thing to note, writes Reinhard Clever, is that for commuter rail, downtown-side transfers are much more inconvenient than suburb-side transfers. Suburban commuters will drive to a park-and-ride, but balk at a transfer at the city end. Clever’s example is Toronto, where commuter rail riders tend not to transfer to the subway at Union Station but only take transit to jobs that can be reached from the station by walking. This problem is what doomed the Austin Red Line. For all its flaws, ARC offered a one-seat ride from the Erie lines to Penn Station.

Another thing to note is that suburban commuters routinely change trains at Jamaica today, but not at Secaucus. I’m not aware of a study on the transfer experience, but I am fairly certain that the difference is that at Jamaica the transfers are timed and cross-platform whereas at Secaucus they are not. Transferring at Secaucus today involves going up steps, passing through faregates, and going down steps, with no guarantee of a connecting train. The literature is unanimous that passengers will spend more than one minute of in-vehicle time to avoid a minute of transfer or waiting time: the MTA uses a factor of 1.75, the MBTA 2.25, Houston METRO 3.5-4 (last two from pp. 31-2 of Clever’s thesis). None of this is going to change if people are instead made to transfer from a commuter train to the subway, except perhaps that the subway train is going to be less crowded because it won’t be carrying commuters from the Northeast Corridor and Morris and Essex Lines.

Both issues boil down to the same fundamental: not all transfers are created equal. Within urban rail, people transfer all the time. Perhaps the disutility of getting up while changing trains is not an issue when passengers do not expect to find a seat in the first place. Regional rail riders transfer as well, when the transfers are easy and there’s no additional waiting time – in fact, setting up a timed transfer on a highly branched regional line increases the frequency on each branch, so any disutility from transferring is swamped by the more convenient schedule. What people don’t normally do is ride a regional line that gets them almost to their job, and then take urban transit for the last mile.

Commuters on the Erie lines can already make an uncoordinated transfer involving passing through faregates at two locations: Secaucus, and Hoboken. Some, but not many, already take advantage of this to get to jobs near Penn Station or in Lower Manhattan. The contribution of the 7 to Secaucus would then be to create a third opportunity for a transfer to 42nd Street. While 42nd is closer to most Midtown jobs than Penn Station, the heart of Midtown is in the 50s. At Queensboro Plaza more inbound riders transfer from the 7 to the N/Q than the reverse, emptying the 7 by the time it gets to Manhattan: the MTA’s crowding estimate as reported by the Straphangers Campaign, has the taken at the entrance to the Manhattan core, ranks the 7 the least crowded subway line at rush hour. Thus, although the 7 to Secaucus would add to the number of jobs served by a two-seat ride, many Midtown jobs would require a three-seat ride, no different from transferring to the E at Penn Station.

Therefore, good transit activists should reject the 7 to Secaucus as they did ARC, and I’m dismayed to see NJ-ARP‘s Douglas John Bowen throw in his support behind it as an ARC alternative. Before anything else is done, the Secaucus faregates should be removed, and the platforms should be remodeled to let passengers go directly from the Erie platforms to the NEC platforms. Here are better candidate projects for adding a pair of tracks under the Hudson:

1. ARC Alt G. Despite the ARC cancellation, it remains the best option.

2. Hoboken-Lower Manhattan. This doesn’t give Erie commuters a one-seat ride to Penn Station, but compensates with a one-seat ride to Lower Manhattan, and a two-seat ride from the Morris and Essex Lines to Lower Manhattan. The Manhattan terminal should not be more than a two-track stub-end with short tail tracks and the potential for a connection to the LIRR Atlantic Division. With about 50 meters of tail tracks and a platform with many escalators, the Chuo Line turns nearly 30 tph on two tracks at Tokyo Station. It’s an outlier, but given the extreme cost of building larger stations in Manhattan, the response should not be “They’re different, our special circumstances won’t let this happen,” but “how can we have what they have?”. Modern signaling and punctuality are critical, but, as the Germans say, organization before electronics before concrete.

2b. Jersey City-Lower Manhattan. The same as option 2, but with somewhat less tunneling in Manhattan and a lot more tunneling in Jersey. The main advantage is that new underground stations at Journal Square and Exchange Place would serve more jobs and residents than a station in Hoboken. It may be cheaper due to reduced Manhattan tunneling, or more expensive due to less maneuvering room coming into Lower Manhattan. It also forces the Manhattan platform to be east-west rather than north-south for a far-future cross-platform transfer with Grand Central and Staten Island.

3. The L to Secaucus, or to Hoboken. This has all the problems of the 7 to Secaucus plus more – 14th Street is at best a secondary CBD – but it conveniently replaces the L’s current low-throughput terminal with another. Ideally the L should only be extended a few hundred meters west, to the Meatpacking District, but if such an extension has large fixed costs, the incremental cost of extending the L all the way could be low enough to be justified by the benefits of a Secaucus extension, which are low but nonzero.

Electrification and Carbon Emissions

Railvolution reports FTA numbers that say the average CO2 emissions of the New York City Subway are 0.17 pounds per passenger-mile (48 grams per passenger-km). That’s the equivalent of 114.6 passenger-mpg of gas, if you prefer to think in those terms. The presentation gives average seat occupancies, which we can also confirm with the NTD; it works out to about 4 car-mpg of gas. Other agencies can have somewhat different numbers, based on train efficiency and especially the local sources of power generation, e.g. BART has very low emissions coming entirely from the fact that the Bay Area has ample hydro power resources.

New York’s emission number, 4 mpg, may be familiar to you as roughly the emission-efficiency of regional diesel trains. Per ton of car mass the regional diesel trains do slightly better, since the regional train in question weighs 40 tons vs. 33-39 for New York’s subway cars, but this comes from making fewer stops. At agencies with very dirty power generation, such as the Chicago L, and even ones without very dirty power, such as the energy-hungry Washington Metro, the numbers are even lower, even though they’re electric and the regional diesel trains are not.

What we see is then that railroad electrification does not add too much to fuel economy. The question is then why the situation for cars is so different. The Nissan Leaf’s EPA-rated fuel economy equivalent rating is 99 mpg – almost as good as the New York City Subway, better than nearly all subway systems in the US. But if we try to break it down based on energy consumption, we get other numbers; the EPA just massaged the numbers to make plug-in hybrids look good.

The Leaf’s energy efficiency is 0.34 kWh per vehicle-mile, pardon the mixed units; the FTA’s numbers for major US subways range from 0.186 kWh per passenger-mile in high-seat-occupancy New York to 0.388 in low-seat-occupancy Chicago. This is not 99 mpg, unless one uses a fairly clean mixture of fuels; with the New York mixture, it’s 63 vehicle-mpg. So right off the bat, the official numbers underestimate the Leaf’s CO2 emissions by 36%, and overestimate its CO2 efficiency by 57%.

But even that doesn’t take care of inefficiencies in generation. Well-to-wheels, plug-in electric cars have about the same emissions as regular hybrids. This confirms the rough numbers we’ve seen from trains. The Tesla Roadster, a very fuel-efficient car, gets even better energy-efficiency even wells-to-wheels, but it also has much lower electricity consumption, and to get the right numbers it assumes electricity is generated from natural gas rather than coal.

Bear in mind, all of this assumes certain things about the grid mix. At the current US grid mix, on average electrification does not impact carbon emissions. Of course, since people need electricity for reasons other than transportation, any regime in which carbon emissions fall is one in which electricity becomes lower-carbon, and this would tilt the field in favor of all-electric vehicles, both cars and trains.

So, why electrify, if there’s no carbon emission benefit, why electrify? Two answers: air pollution, and, for trains, performance. Electric trains outperform diesel ones, and also cost less to operate in terms of both energy and maintenance. But electrification should be sold only on grounds that are in fact correct.

Highways and Cost Control

I’ve been reading Earl Swift’s The Big Roads, and the early biography of Thomas MacDonald had passages that jumped at me. Unlike Owen Gutfreund, who focuses on MacDonald’s industry ties and use of astroturf, Swift portrays MacDonald as a Progressive reformist who believed in better engineering as a way to improve society, literally paving the way to the future.

While he used special interests to further his goals, he was also concerned with efficiency. He first made his name as the chief of the Iowa State Highway Commission, where he built a road system with virtually no budget; neighboring states had several times the planning budget Iowa had. At the time, the building contractors had colluded, dividing the state into regions with each enjoying a local monopoly; this drove up costs twice, first by increasing construction costs, and second by requiring more maintenance since the work was shoddy. MacDonald’s contribution was to break up the monopolies and demand that contractors compete.

MacDonald also believed in personally instructing local officials and contractors in good road construction methods. He’d often be visiting construction sites and participate in construction, partly for the photo-ops but partly for showing the locals how good engineering is done.

As a result, MacDonald became famous among road builders for his success in building roads, and was made the head of the Bureau of Public Roads. Iowa at the time had one of the highest car ownership rates in the US, about 1 per 7 people (about the same as Manhattan today). The person who became Governor toward the end of his tenure in Iowa was anti-roads, but this did not slow down highway and car growth.

The importance of this for good transit advocates is threefold. First, it shows that it is in fact possible for government officials to promote good government and increase efficiency. Of course we must not neglect broader social trends, but sometimes well-placed competent individuals can make a major difference.

Second, it reminds us that many of the rules that are currently associated with government dysfunction were passed with opposite intent and effect back in the Progressive Era. Lowest-bid contracts were an effort to stamp out corruption; civil service exams were an effort to reduce patronage; teacher tenure was meant to make teachers politically independent; the initiative process was intended to give people more control over government. All of those efforts succeeded at the time, and took decades of social learning among the corrupt and incompetent to get around. Although programs built under these rules often turned out badly, such as the Interstate network, with its severe cost and schedule overruns, this was not due to the contractor collusion seen in the 1910s or today.

And third, it’s a warning to those who hope that placing well-meaning individuals in power is enough. Every person with power thinks that his power is used for good and wants to extend it. Thus, once MacDonald became head of the Bureau of Public Roads, he made sure to maintain control over highway funding and gave himself the power to sign contracts with states, which Congress was then obligated to fund.

Good engineering can improve engineering standards, but it cannot improve society. Although the decisions to tear apart neighborhoods were made by local officials more, of whom Robert Moses is the most infamous, the idea that a cadre of technocrats who look at cities on maps and in models know what cities ought to look like more than the people living in them was an inherent part of this attitude. Indeed, the 19th century impetus for suburbanization, using rapid transit rather than roads, came from the same class of reformists. The Interstate system was simply when they had enough money and power to impose their modernist vision nationwide.

Making Elevated Rail Work

Everybody hates els. They’re ugly and noisy and cities will even move their train station away from downtown to tear them down. The hypocritical treatment of els versus much wider and noisier elevated highways is fortunately the subject of another post, on Market Urbanism. I would instead like to discuss how elevated rail could be made to work in cities, allowing the construction of rapid transit at acceptable cost.

One way viaduct structures can be made more acceptable is if they’re branded as a new technology. This is the case of Vancouver’s SkyTrain, the JFK AirTrain, the Honolulu light rail line, and monorails. Another is if they’re along rights-of-way that are already considered blighted, such as freeways; this also helps explain why the JFK AirTrain was built whereas the proposed subway extension to LaGuardia was not.

As a first filter, the above examples suggest that the most useful elevated rapid transit – grade-separated mainline rail, or els over major streets – is impractical due to community opposition. But as a second filter, we could simulate some features of both cases in which viaducts are more acceptable – new technology and freeway right-of-way. If we build a well-designed and aesthetic arched viaduct over a wide road, this could pass community muster. For example, Robert Cruickshank prominently used the second and further photos in this CAHSR Blog post to argue that grade separations on the Peninsula will not be a blight. The 7 viaduct in Sunnyside is also a good example of an el.

As a third filter, the success of the elevated train over Queens Boulevard comes precisely from the enormous street width. East of Sunnyside, Queens Boulevard becomes practically a highway, nicknamed the Boulevard of Death and excoriated on Streetsblog for its lack of pedestrian scale. At the same time, the 7 above Roosevelt Avenue darkens the street and the steel el structure is very noisy. But when there is an el about Queens Boulevard, everything works out: the street is broken into two narrower halves, with the el acting as a street wall and helping produce human scale; the el is also farther from the buildings and uses an arched concrete structure, both of which mitigate its impact.

It’s possible to mitigate even further and imitate the methods of the AirTrain or SkyTrain. Those use modern viaduct construction techniques and are therefore relatively unobtrusive: see for example this photo on Greater City: Providence, in the context of reinstating some of the elevated infrastructure torn down in the 1980s. Even if the technology is your standard railroad, newer viaducts can reduce impact. In addition, the old els were built with very tight curves, producing squeal; building with wider curve radii is the norm today, and although it increases visual impact and can require more takings, it reduces noise impact, often to practically zero.

Commenters from various Northeastern suburbs have told stories of how people don’t even notice the electric regional trains, but complain about the freight trains. Of course those regional lines were built in the 19th century, but they were built to mainline standards, rather than to the standards of the Chicago L, and thus have what by rapid transit standards are wide curves.

The 7 el is 12 meters wide, and works fine on Queens Boulevard, which is 60 meters from building to building, and poorly on Roosevelt, which is 22. These give an upper and lower bound for street width. The N/W el on Astoria, at 12 meters over a 30-meter street, is also quite bad, though perhaps not as much as the 7 el on Roosevelt. The 1 el in Manhattanville is an imposing steel structure, but its problem is one of topography and height rather than street width, and so it should be put in the category of good els from the perspective of width; this is 12 meters over a 43-meter street. Finally, the Metro-North viaduct in Harlem is 18 meters over a 43-meter street; the area is quite blighted, though it could be a characteristic of the neighborhood more than of the el. Optimistically, it seems that a more modern two-track el, about 9 meters wide (and thus blocking light less than the New York examples regardless of street width), could work over a 30-meter street, such as the Manhattan avenues.

Of course, another issue is the surrounding density. Despite the above calculation I would not want to see new elevated lines on the Manhattan avenues. Partly this is because the population density in Manhattan is so high that the higher cost of a subway is acceptable. But partly it’s because the buildings are tall and would not pair off with the viaduct nicely as they do in Sunnyside. However, it could be a good solution in Queens and the North Bronx, where, additionally, the streets that could take rapid transit are wider than a standard Manhattan avenue.