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.

Managed Diversity

Putin’s Russia is described as a managed democracy: a country that holds elections and maintains a democratic facade, but is in reality autocratic and brutal toward dissenters. On the same principle, the trend in gentrified first-world cities can be described as managed diversity. City leaders will build cultural districts for popular minorities – Chinatowns, Little Indias – and even amenities for well-assimilated gays and lesbians. Then when nobody looks or cares they will promote police brutality, ignore hate crimes, and do nothing to fight discrimination or segregation.

Ever since Richard Florida told cities that being gay-tolerant would make them more prosperous (and happier, and economically freer), and perhaps even before, mayors in more liberal American cities have dedicated gay bars and found nice clean areas for some amount of counterculture to exist. While this represents a welcome change from the days of the Stonewall raid, the attitude toward less photogenic minorities is changing at glacial pace. See, for example, police and emergency service treatment of the transgendered, a minority that so far has not been on anyone’s list of interest groups to be nice to. For another example, look at community groups’ treatment of sex workers. And while the emphasis on the power of diversity leads to recognition of people who do good work, it can also lead to pinkwashing, in which companies with dubious human rights records sponsor events that make them look better.

If things are getting better, it’s in fits and starts, and usually the credit should go to local organizations that pushed for them rather than to top-down leadership. Even Bloomberg, a top-down reformer whose record on e.g. needle exchange is strongly positive, cut funding to the program in the recession. Other sources of authority have much less positive records on such issues. The process of civil rights activism is partly about putting a minority group’s status in the limelight, so that it becomes one of the groups leaders hug in order to look good.

This relates to what I brought up in my previous post, about the distinction between individuality and individualism. The pro-gentrification mayors who worry about property values and investment have no trouble with harsh attitudes toward protesters or minorities or the homeless or sex workers. In much more general terms than this, Risk and Culture alludes to this by noting the alliance between individualists and hierarchists, something that can also be seen in real estate developers’ embrace of bigoted attitudes as a source of profit.

This is not to say that individualism is opposed to individuality. For all I know, they could even be correlated. But they’re distinct. In my experience, if you go to any group or event or community that fights for radical self-expression of a group that’s not terribly photogenic (for example, BDSM), the political attitudes will range from libertarian to mainline liberal to far left. Some will be radical libertarians, motivated by the idea that racism (and by extension other forms of discrimination) is a type of collectivism; others will have communitarian and egalitarian motivations. And if you go to a community that practices radical individualism, for example Seasteaders, you’ll see a mixture of people who think women’s suffrage was bad and people who find the above brutality to be a special type of communism.

The importance of this is that a city leader who supports diversity that looks good and says all the right things about gay rights and immigration may still engage in brutal activity toward people who are different where we are not looking.

When Jane Jacobs tried to identify the characteristics that make a good diverse neighborhood, she was talking about physical and economic diversity. But she might as well have been talking about diversity as understood today, as an issue of a space that’s open to everyone and not just members of a dominant social group. A city that takes diversity seriously will have not just ritzy gay bars and civil rights museums, important as they are; it’ll also have harm reduction programs, and unmolested BDSM clubs, and shelters for homeless transgendered youth, and sex workers who feel safe when the police is nearby, and an ironclad anti-discrimination law.

None of the above will come from benevolent, progressive mayors who think diversity is good for the city economy, though such mayors may be instrumental in helping implement these policies, as in the example of Bloomberg’s funding for needle exchange. They come from activists in the community in question, a community that is almost by definition more than just one neighborhood (in which the majority is frequently NIMBY) and is instead a city- or region-wide network. After all, gay rights, too, used to be a radical movement struggling to gain even minor foothold in New York and San Francisco, and it’s decades after the fact that mayors embrace gays as a source of good diversity. And the same is true of every other group that’s currently typecast as deviant or nonconforming.

Cities and Multiple Equilibria

A growing idea among emergent urbanists is that there’s a natural form to the city, one that maximizes activity and that thrives in the absence of regulation. In this view, any sort of urban planning, from postwar suburbia to the Manhattan grid, is just a constraint that makes cities less livable, and in contrast, there is an urban form that people have a near-universal taste for, and all others are some response to bad regulations. Social problems are caused by bad urban form, and the reason American reformers wanted to move everyone to the suburbs was just that the cities failed to look like European cities.

There is an implicit ideology in this view, which is only occasionally hinted at: the ideology of single equilibrium. It holds that there’s just one stable state of nature, and all attempts to change it will just lead to an eventual return to equilibrium, and the greater the change, the more violent the return will be. If there’s a persistent situation away from the equilibrium, it’s a result of pernicious regulations. In economics, it’s the neo-classical school, shaken only by the Great Depression and by the Keynesian argument that depression is every bit an equilibrium as full employment. In every environmental controversy, it’s the individualist cultural bias holding that nature will always return to equilibrium, contrasting with the egalitarian view that nature is inherently fragile, the hierarchical view that it tolerates change within some boundaries to be determined by the experts, and the fatalist view that it is capricious.

Reality is of course more complicated than that. Cities can have multiple equilibria. Unplanned Tokyo and London are happy just the way they are; so are New York, Atlanta, Singapore, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Moscow, each planned in its own way. If people in those cities dislike the current situation, it’s not out of dislike of the present urban form but out of discontent with unemployment, living costs, economic inequality, and other social ills. And if people in mature cities dislike situations that are caused explicitly by their urban layout, then it comes from narrow urban and transportation issues, e.g. California’s air pollution problem.

Historically, this view was more associated with suburbanization and urban renewal. Of course those involved a hefty amount of zoning, but the same could be said of e.g. Christopher Alexander’s support of height limits. In both cases, problems that are really about social relations and poverty are associated with urban design and are used as an excuse to heavily modify cities; that, and not the tenement urban form, was what drove New York’s elite to want suburbanization. Indeed, suburbanization happened in almost all developed countries; the romanticism for the countryside by residents of the rich cities is part of 19th century nationalism, and happened across the first world, regardless of how cities actually looked like.

Nearly every combination of urban form and social class exists somewhere in the world. Just because Americans like some unplanned urban neighborhoods and are gentrifying the cities does not mean that there’s a universal desire for anything, or that people in suburbs are just repressed about how bad their social environment is.

To deal with the fact that people like urban environments that are very different, and that there are persistent cultural tastes determined by a few decades of policy, people who believe in single equilibria have to stretch reality more and more to get the achieved picture. James Howard Kunstler is an especially egregious example: since people don’t mind sprawl and city development that he doesn’t like (he views Manhattan as “despotically mechanistic” and sympathizes with Lewis Mumford for hating cities based on his experience on the Upper West Side), he’s spun a fantasy in which peak oil is going to create ruralization and destroy the suburbs, while also doing so in peaceful enough a way that he’ll survive to see the resulting utopia. But he’s really not doing anything Mumford didn’t do. Mumford couldn’t stand cities and thought their inhabitants just didn’t know they needed urban renewal; Kunstler thinks the same about post-1830 urban development.

Conversely, development that’s generally considered good but violates the rules needs to be shoehorned into the rules. That’s where you get people claiming that Paris is traditional urbanism, where in reality its wide boulevards are every bit as planned as Manhattan’s, just along a radial plan rather than a grid.

Because of the association between this view of nature and political libertarianism, we see defenses framed in terms of nature very frequently. It’s not only individualists or libertarians who do this (read most environmentalist tracts), and there are emergent urbanists who hint at desirability more (for example, Charlie Gardner), but this view and the insistence on natural law are still correlated. The idea inherent in this view is that what’s desirable is what the market wants, and what the market wants should be divined by looking at cases in which there is no government intervention.

The problem is that it’s very hard to really disentangle the economy from politics. It’s easy enough when it comes to consumer goods and other cases in which markets clearly work, but when it comes to infrastructure and collective decisions, it’s much harder – hard enough that Randall O’Toole can pretend that government regulations of parking and subsidies for roads are trivial and call himself a libertarian. The obvious response is to point out the opposite, how government subsidies permeate the opposing view, which is easy enough with a person as dishonest as O’Toole. But in reality it’s often impossible to distinguish political from economic actions, and the cases where there is a clear-cut difference are rare enough that they can be shoehorned into a single theory ad hoc; most urbanist theories have more serious proponents than the people who’ve become the spokespeople of suburbanism.

The reason I insist on consensus as a decision-making tool is that it avoids this assumption that all cities have to look essentially the same. And the reason I did a mini-experiment asking commenters where they grew up and what kind of urbanism they’re comfortable with is precisely that people are different. Formal community structures of course privilege some people and ignore others – most importantly, they elevate existing long-term residents and ignore transients and people who are priced out of the neighborhood. They also lead to unpredictable results, depending on hyper-local issues of culture and history or on charismatic local leaders. But the idea of having different people come together and talk about how they’d like their city to look like is much more powerful than trying to derive a natural order from first principles and treating all other orders as deviations.

FRA Stonewalling

Stephen Smith interviewed the FRA last month asking questions about its regulations and the waiver process. The initial round of responses is included below, unmodified except very minor formatting, followed by my own commentary; there was also followup, which I’ll provide on request, but the responses generated were uninteresting. The three PDF files attached by the FRA in its email to Stephen are also included.

FRA’s role in regulating passenger rail safety

Ensuring the safety of America’s railways is job one.  FRA has jurisdiction over passenger operations of rails including current and planned high-speed intercity passenger rail service.  FRA enforces specific regulations governing passenger equipment crashworthiness, emergency systems, and emergency preparedness.  FRA does not exercise jurisdiction over insular rail systems (i.e. subway, light rail, narrow gauge, etc.). Visit http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html for more information.

FRA’s approach to safety regulation
The U.S. approach to safety regulation uses crashworthiness principles and standards.  Rail rolling stock in the U.S. is generally larger in terms of size, weight, and mass.  There are no freight trains (with the length of 125 cars) operating in Europe, nor 286,000lbs freight cars.  In contrast to the European rail network, traffic on the U.S. rail system is dominated by privately-owned freight railroads.  The mix of freight and passenger train traffic creates a complex operating environment, which pose distinct hazards.  In the U.S., intercity and commuter trains commonly share the same tracks with freight trains weighing 15,000 tons or more, requiring morestringent safety regulations instituted by FRA.

There are more than 250,000 highway-rail grade crossings in the United States, and commercial trucks are much heavier than typical European trucks (with freight tonnage substantially higher), so the risk of a crossing collision involving large commercial vehicles and passenger trains, is greater in the U. S.  As a result, FRA has actively sought to establish robust passenger rail equipment safety standards to mitigate the hazards that exist.

FRA and International Peer Review/Best Practices
FRA has studied the design and operation of European and Asian passenger rail systems, and other nations have – for decades – looked to the FRA for guidance and expertise in designing robust safety assurance systems.  Rigorous testing and applied research have helped in the development of standards for U.S. passenger rail service.

Passenger rail regulatory initiatives
There are several initiatives underway regarding alternatively-designed passenger equipment.  The key is use of alternative performance standards which may allow foreign designs to meet U.S. crashworthiness standards.  FRA expects these requirements will be formally incorporated into future regulations.  The work of the Engineering Task Force (ETF), which was created before RSIA, is an outgrowth of FRA’s Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC)—a group comprised of rail industry stakeholders – is developing Tier III (latest generation) passenger equipment safety standards.  FRA has a comprehensive system safety approach to ensure that infrastructure, equipment, and operations are rigorously designed, engineered and tested.  In the passenger rail arena, this means attention is paid both to accident avoidance, and accident mitigation (i.e. occupant survivability).

Rail equipment procurement costs
With the infusion of unprecedented federal investment thanks to the Obama Administration, a renewed market for passenger rail equipment is emerging, and the stringent Buy American requirements set forth by the Administration’s high-speed intercity passenger rail program will provide a much-needed boost to U.S. manufacturing.  The Sec. 305 Next Generation Corridor Equipment Committee (comprised of the states, FRA and the rail industry) is working to develop equipment standards that balance the necessity of ensuring safety, while taking into consideration the costs and prospective benefits of regulation, as required by law.

Standards harmonization
Current guidelines are intended to allow alternatively-designed rolling stock that meets UIC standards, to be modified for use in the U.S.  See the attached draft report of the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee, Technical Criteria and Procedures for Evaluating the Crashworthiness and Occupant Protection Performance of Alternatively-Designed Passenger Rail Equipment for Use in Tier 1 Service.

Waiver requests
There are several operators seeking waivers to use lighter passenger equipment.  FRA intends to revise existing regulations to incorporate a process that ensures operators seeking to utilize non-compliant equipment, can obtain approval to do so under the existing waiver process, while maintaining the level of safety.

The section about the FRA’s approach to safety regulation is full of false claims. Let’s start from the easiest: it is completely false that American trucks are heavier than European trucks. It may be true on average, but the maximum gross weight of an American truck is 40 short tons, or 36 metric tons; individual states may impose higher limits, going up to about 60 metric tons, but the Interstate system and other national roads are designed to the federal limit. In contrast, the EU limit is 40 metric tons, and some EU member states have waivers and have higher limits, including Britain (44) and Sweden (60). Japan’s limit is 36 tons. I do not know what the gross load limit is at individual level crossings, but assuming it is not different from the national limit, in both Sweden and Japan there are many crossings carrying EMUs that are lighter than the heaviest permitted trucks. While Europe has less truck traffic than the US per capita (see e.g. ton-km numbers here), the difference isn’t so large that it justifies an entirely different policy.

Unsurprisingly, lighter weight is not a problem at level crossings: Caltrain’s waiver study, which the FRA is familiar with because it granted the waiver, found that UIC-compliant trains are at least as safe as FRA-compliant trains in grade crossing accidents.

The claim about freight train weight in the US and Europe is true in broad outline, but misleading. First, Australia has the same freight train length and weight as the US, but has British-style regional passenger trains, i.e. narrow and light. Second, from the point of view of a 500-ton passenger train, it does not matter whether it hits a 4,000-ton Swiss intermodal train or a 15,000-ton American coal train; both are like hitting a solid wall. For deformability purposes, the weight of a single car or locomotive matters more.

Although the weight of a single freight car is higher in the US than in Europe and Japan, the difference between American cars and some locomotives running in Europe and Japan is small. American locos weigh about 130 metric tons, and the heaviest cars are 155 short tons, or 141 metric. The RENFE Class 333 locomotive weighs 120 metric tons, and the Vossloh Euro locomotive has versions weighing 123 metric tons running in Spain and Sweden. Most European locomotives are lighter, but the UIC system is fully capable of dealing with heavier locos, with better safety than in the US. Japanese freight locos can be even heavier, up to 134 tons for JR Freight’s Class EH500, and passenger service in Japan is far safer than in Europe, to say nothing of the US.

Missing from the FRA’s safety regime entirely is any mention of stopping distances or derailment protection. With positive train control, the only collision risk comes from a derailed train, and derailments are common enough that freight railroads demand some track separation from passenger tracks, to reduce liability. FRA buff strength is nearly worthless in such a scenario: according to the Caltrain waiver report again or page 15 of the waiver request PDF, Tier I strength offers protection up to a relative speed of about 40 km/h; since Tier I is applicable up to an average speed of 200 km/h, we obtain that Tier I strength cuts 4% from the stopping distance. The practice in other countries with mixed legacy track is to limit the stopping distance instead – for example, Germany had to develop an entirely new signaling system to allow stopping distances longer than a kilometer.

The other sections basically say “Trust us, we know what we are doing, and at any rate we will do better in the future.” Sometimes, the FRA is even contradicting earlier statements it made, for example that its regulations do not increase passenger train weight; however, the biggest zinger, the claim about truck weight in the US vs. in other developed countries, is a consistent line.

Whether the FRA’s upcoming Tier III regulations will actually be an improvement remains to be seen, but is doubtful. The documents supplied by the FRA are ambiguous as to whether the FRA will even permit high-speed EMUs, a configuration used since the Shinkansen in the 1960s. The FRA says on page 23 of the first PDF it attached:

FRA realizes that some of the more modern HSR train sets used overseas eliminate the conventional power car and use an electrical multiple‐unit configuration that includes passenger seating in the cab car. However, there are no simple answers to the question of whether passenger seating in cab cars is appropriate. The answer will require careful research and full consideration of the operating environment where the trainset operates. Protection for the operator and passengers will remain a key factor.

Readers with some knowledge of HSR history will know that the Shinkansen has had no passenger fatalities. But in fact more is true: the ICE has only had one fatal accident and that came from the bridge falling on a derailed train, killing people in car three and behind while sparing the first two cars; the Pendolino EMUs running at 200-250 km/h all over Europe have not had passenger fatalities; and the recent Wenzhou accident involved one train falling from the bridge, killing people in multiple cars. Finally, at Zoufftgen the passenger train was an EMU, and the low fatality count (6 including the crew of the freight train) was attributed to the presence of crumple zones and a survivable space.

This is stonewalling at its finest: insist that the people in charge know what they’re doing and handwave all concerns by appealing to special circumstances, which are usually not all that special. As we’ve seen before with the FRA’s self-justifying approach to waivers, the agency exists mainly in order to keep existing. Finer examples of Decide-Announce-Defend exist in environmental policy, but this is a very good one in transportation policy.

The Tappan Zee Replacement’s Outrageous Cost

The Tappan Zee Bridge is about to fall down. As a result, the replacement and widening project is in spare-no-expense mode. Ordinarily, widening a bridge from seven lanes to ten would be judged in terms of costs and benefits, after which the costs would be ignored as they always are for US road projects. But now everyone thinks New York needs this project, to the point that even transit and livable streets advocates are more worried about commuter rail tracks on the new bridge than about the costs of the entire project.

Cap’n Transit cribbed study numbers before they disappeared from the official website. The budget of the project, without the transit component, was about $7 billion, and is now up to $8.3 billion; this includes highway widenings at both ends. The transit component people are fretting about is another $1 billion for BRT and $6.7 billion for commuter rail.

To put things in perspective, consider the Øresund Bridge-Tunnel complex. Whereas the Tappan Zee is 5 kilometers of bridge, Øresund consists of 8 kilometers of bridge, an artificial island with 4 additional kilometers of road, and 4 kilometers of tunnel. The cost, including landworks on both sides, was a little more than €3 billion in 2000, which works out to $5.5 billion in 2010. The bridge-tunnel is narrower than the Tappan Zee replacement – four lanes of traffic plus two tracks of rail – but it’s also three times as long, and more complex because of the tunnel.

More importantly, if the Tappan Zee really needs that capacity, and width is such a constraint, they should build rail first, BRT second, and car lanes last. Roads will never beat mass transit on capacity per unit width of right-of-way. With all traffic from Rockland to Westchester County funneled through one chokepoint, and some centralization of employment (in Manhattan, White Plains, and Tarrytown), rail could work if it were given the chance. So the only environment in which a bridge with so many traffic lanes is justified is one in which the cost of ten lanes is not much more than the cost of four.

To be completely fair to irate Rockland County residents, more people use the Tappan Zee than Øresund, since the tolls are lower and it’s a commuter route. But not enough. The bridge is crossed by 138,000 vehicles per day. This means the replacement and widening project, excluding all transit improvements, is $60,000 per car. With normal commuter seat occupancy, it’s perhaps $50,000 per person. Transit projects in the US routinely go over this, but those are for the most part very low-ridership commuter rail projects. Second Avenue Subway, the most expensive urban subway in the world per kilometer, is about $25,000 per expected weekday rider.

Given the high cost, the only correct response is a true no-build: dismantle the bridge, and tell people to ride ferries or live on the same side of the Hudson as their workplace. Given expected ridership and Øresund costs, I believe the Tappan Zee replacement would make sense at $3 billion, with the transit components; without, make it a flat $2 billion. Go much above it and it’s just too cost-ineffective. Not all travel justifies a fixed link at any cost.

Consensus and Vision

The death of Steve Jobs has led to impromptu discussions about the nature of his genius, causing some to call for a Steve Jobs of transit. Human Transit quotes such calls in comments and tries to strike a balance between good organization and singular vision; Market Urbanism tweets that it’s impossible only because of public control.

Instead of this fantasy for someone who will have enough power to make transit great, let us step back and ask what makes transit cities work. It’s not really vision – the inventions that have made transit more useful in the last few decades (for example, the takt and the integrated timetable) are so distributed that it’s impossible to assign them a single inventor or even agency. And in the US, the last true visionary of urban transportation, Robert Moses, had about the same effect on the city he ruled that such visionaries as Stalin and Mao had over their countries.

The absolute worst quote one can invoke in the field is Henry Ford’s apocryphal claim that if he’d asked customers what they’d wanted, they’d have said faster horses; Ford may never have said that, but he believed something along these lines, and as a result lost the market to General Motors in the 1920s. People tend to project the same attitude, with far more success, to Steve Jobs: he saved Apple from ruin when he came back, he saw potential in Xerox’s computers that nobody else did, he focused on great design above all. Some of this is due to the cult of personality Jobs created around himself, unparalleled in the industry; a better assessment of Apple’s early growth comes from Malcolm Gladwell, who dispenses with Great Man histories and talks about innovation as an incremental process requiring multiple different business cultures to get anywhere.

In cities, there really is a need for consensus rather than autocratic vision. The reason Moses was so bad for New York is not just that he happened to be wrong about how cities should look. Roads were not his only sin, and on one account, the use of tolls, he was better than the national road builders. No; he reigned over a city that to him existed only on maps and in models, routing expressways through blocks with the wrong ethnic mix and depriving neighborhoods of amenities in retribution for not being able to complete his plans. Because he was insulated from anyone who could tell him what the effect of his policies was, and had no effective opposition, he could steamroll over just anyone.

The reality is that any Steve Jobs-like autocrat is going to act the same. Moses did it; Janette Sadik-Khan is doing it, delaying even popular projects in Upper Manhattan because of the perception that it’s against livability; Jaime Lerner did it, moving pollution from Curitiba to its suburbs and slowing but not preventing the spread of cars. In contrast, Jane Jacobs’ own observations of her struggle are the opposite, focusing on consensus and participation and crediting “hundreds of people” with saving the West Village. Everything I said about consensus and cities and about democratic consensus applies here.

The same is by and large true of transit. Although the subject is more technical, the role of experts is similar to their role in urbanism: answering narrow technical questions (“does the soil allow this building type to be built?”, “how much will it cost to run trains faster?”), helping people see tradeoffs and make their own choices, bringing up foreign examples that local activists may not be familiar with. They’re just one of several interest groups that have to be heard.

I think people who ascribe invention to great individuals finding things consumers didn’t even know they wanted are projecting the history of the 19th century to present times. At the time, invention was done individually, often by people without formal education. It was already fairly incremental, but much less so than today, and was portrayed as even less incremental since to get a patent approved the inventor had to play up his own role and denigrate previous innovations. Since it was not done in the context of large companies or universities, the corporate culture issue that Gladwell focuses on didn’t apply. The economy, too, was understood as a process involving discrete inventions, rather than a constant rate of growth, as Andrew Odlyzko’s monograph on the Railway Mania discusses in chapter 15.

We no longer live in such a world. Fixed-route public transportation has existed since the 1820s. Practically all innovations within transit since have been slow, continuous improvements, done by large groups of people or by many individuals working independently. Even implementations of previous ideas that became wildly successful are rarely the heroic fit of a mastermind. The few cases that are, such as Jaime Lerner’s dirt-cheap BRT, indeed spawn rants about democratic consensus and raves about vision and fast decisions.

In contrast, I do not see any mention in mainstream US media of the role of Swiss consensus politics in the backing of the Gotthard Base Tunnel or in SBB’s 50% over-the-decade growth in passenger rail traffic. If there’s a story about Tokyo or Hong Kong, it’ll be about skyscrapers and development, not about their collective decisions to restrain car traffic while rapid transit was still in development. And while China’s rapid expansion of transit and high-speed rail, at much lower cost than in the US, has gotten much media coverage, scant attention has been paid to Spain even though its costs are lower and its expansion is nearly as rapid.

What’s happening is that people imagine single heroes to do what is really the work of many. Alternatively, they romanticize autocrats, even ones who were unmitigated disasters, such as Moses. Even stories about consensus and social movements get rewritten as stories about great people, for example Jane Jacobs, or more broadly Martin Luther King. It’s an aesthetic that treats everything as a story, and in the 19th century, it often was: in other words, it’s steampunk. The difference is that steampunk artists don’t wish to return to a world in which women have to wear corsets. And in similar vein, people who imagine benevolent, visionary dictators should not try to confuse their fiction with reality.

Congestion, Freeways, and Size, Redux

As a followup to my previous post about the TTI’s new congestion report, I finally did a multivariate regression analysis, with the dependent variable being cost and the independent variables being size and freeway lane-miles per capita. Such an analysis reduces the regression coefficient between freeways and congestion even more, to -42.5 from the uncontrolled -233. More interestingly, if we log all numbers (population, congestion cost, and freeways), the regression coefficient becomes a positive 0.02 – that is, adding freeways is correlated with making congestion a little worse.

Of course, it’s not literally true that adding freeways makes congestion worse. There’s a correlation if we look at the variables in some way, but it’s not going to have any statistical significance. Therefore tweaking variables slightly can make a correlation go from weakly positive to weakly negative.

In univariate regression, we can think about the square of the correlation as the percentage of the variance that is explained by the regression line. Freeway lane-miles per capita explain 3.8% of the variance in congestion (and logging either variable makes this number smaller); with 101 urban areas surveyed, it’s statistically significant, but barely so. But after controlling for population, this proportion drops to 0.7%. Thus, any sentence of the form “adding one freeway lane-mile per thousand people only cuts $42.5 from the annual congestion cost per capita” is inherently misleading: the correlation is so weak that some cities can reduce congestion without building the requisite amount of roads, or building any roads at all (for example, nearly all American cities in the last five years, congestion having crashed in the oil price boom and the recession), while others can keep building but see congestion increase (for example, Houston since the 1980s, and even today).

It goes without saying that such analysis is not going to appear in the TTI report itself. The TTI gets funding from APTA and the American Road and Transportation Builders Association. It pays lip service to congestion pricing as a solution to congestion, and instead talks a lot about building public transportation and even more about building freeways to keep up with demand. American cities may be building freeways faster than their population growth, but cities that enact no traffic restraint and just pour concrete can expect demand to grow faster than population as people become more hypermobile.

Congestion and Size

The Texas Transportation Institute has just released the latest version of its much-criticized Urban Mobility Report. Although the conclusions and recommendations made by the TTI tend to reflect its funding sources (APTA, American Road and Transportation Builders Association), the underlying data seems sound, and suggests conclusions orthogonal to those made by the report. In addition, looking at the correlations more closely suggests obvious hazards coming from any simplistic analysis of linear regression. It even showcases how we could use data dishonestly and lie with statistics. So let’s take the data that’s relevant right now and see what we can conclude ourselves.

First, the size of an urban area is a very strong correlate of its level of congestion. The linear correlation between size and per capita congestion cost is 0.71. The correlation increases to 0.8 if we take the log of population and the log of congestion, or if we consider congestion in the absence of public transportation; in both cases, it comes from the fact that New York is far below the population-congestion regression line.

Now, more freeways do not really lead to congestion reduction. There’s some correlation between freeway miles per capita and congestion per capita, going in the expected direction, but it’s weak, -0.2, and while it’s statistically significant, the p-value is an uninspiring one-tailed 0.025. Looking at a scattergram doesn’t make any nonlinear relationship obvious.

Moreover, size is a correlate of both congestion (0.71 as above) and freeways (-0.23). This is fully expected: literature on cities’ economies of scale (here is a story of one controversial example) suggests that congestion and the economic activity causing it grow faster than linearly in city size while the amount of required energy and infrastructure grows slower than linearly. I open the floor to anyone with more powerful tools than OpenOffice Calc to do multiple regression; again, the sanitized data is here.

Even without controlling for population, freeways are not a very strong correlate. The regression coefficient is -233: increasing the number of freeway miles per thousand people by 1 (the range is 0.13-1.4, with few large metros above 1 or below 0.35) reduces the congestion cost per capita by $233 per year, also uninspiring.

The regression number alone can be used as a dishonest trick when arguing on the Internet. If we overinterpret weak correlations, we can declare that the only way to decrease congestion is to build an unrealistic number of freeways, and thus declare the problem unsolvable. Of course, for most cities we can find other cities of comparable size with much less congestion and without enormous amounts of asphalt – this is why the correlation is so weak. But a good hack should not bother himself with such caveats to talking points.

So if making an urban area larger makes it more congested, independently of and much more strongly than all else, should we give up on cities? Well, no. Assuming no change in traffic policy, congestion results from more economic activity. It then becomes straightforward to institute congestion pricing. It’s no different from how big cities can use their resources to hire more cops to deal with the crime that could result from extra interactions between people. On top of this, in very large cities, mass transit becomes a serious option: this not only reduces the amount of congestion per capita, but also removes many people from the highways to the point that congestion becomes irrelevant to their daily lives, except perhaps through higher transportation prices, which they can fully afford given the extra wealth.

Another thing to consider is that most American cities have added more freeways than people since 1982, the first year for which TTI data is available, while also becoming much more congested. If a simple relationship between freeway miles per capita and congestion held, it would be robust to these changes over time. Of course, traffic has grown even faster, leading the main report to showcase on PDF-page 21 how congestion increased the fastest in regions where road demand outgrew supply the most. But this raises the question of whether the main issue is one of demand, rather than one of supply. This is not just an issue of size: the log-log regression coefficients with cost and time is 0.42, i.e. doubling an urban area’s population will raise its per-driver congestion cost and travel delay by a factor of 2^0.42; since 1982, the average urban area on the list has seen its population grow by a factor of 1.46 and its travel delay per driver grow by a factor of 2.85 = 1.46^2.77. Cost has grown even faster, because of higher value of time.

That said, quantity of freeways does not equal quality (from the drivers’ perspective, of course, rather than the city’s). On paper, Greater New York has added freeway lanes about 9% faster than people over the last thirty years. In practice, none has addressed the major chokepoints within and into the city itself, where traffic is worst. Of course, commutes involving Manhattan are overwhelmingly likely to be done on public transportation, but diagonal commutes within the city are more likely to be done by car than on transit.

On a parenthetical note, the units of comparison here are TTI-defined urban areas. TTI’s belief about urban area population growth trends is sometimes at odds with that of the Census Bureau, but the raw population numbers are close enough. More important is the question of what to do about urban areas that are really exurbs of larger areas, such as Poughkeepsie-Newburgh and the Inland Empire. My first instinct was to lump them in with their core metro areas, but their congestion level per capita is not high. Their commutes are long, but not very congested for their size. Finally, although most correlations here are with congestion cost, the correlation numbers with travel delay and excess fuel consumptions are very similar; the one exception I’ve checked, for which I have no explanation, is log-log congestion-fuel correlation (0.84, with regression coefficient 0.73).