I occasionally have exchanges on social media or even in comments here that remind me that too many people in the American middle class believe that Europe is much poorer than the US. The GDP gap between the US and Northern Europe is small and almost entirely reducible to hours w … | Continue reading
The abandoned right-of-way of the Rockaway Cutoff, or Rockaway Beach Branch, is an attractive target for reuse by some groups. Area railfans have wanted to do something with it for years, and I was mostly negative about these plans, but more recently, QueensLink has emerged as a … | Continue reading
New York just passed congestion pricing, to begin operation on June 30th. The magazine Vital City published an issue dedicated to this policy two days ago; among the articles about it is one by me, about public transportation investments. People should read the entire article; he … | Continue reading
The BART to San Jose extension always had problems, but somehow things are getting worse. A month and a half ago, it was revealed that the projected cost of the 9.6-kilometer line had risen to $12.2 billion. Every problem that we seemed to identify in our reports about constructi … | Continue reading
The ongoing designs for the Interborough Express are making me think about bus redesign again. Before the Transit Costs Project, Eric and I worked on a proposal for a bus redesign in Brooklyn, which sadly was not adopted. The redesign was based on the reality of 2017 – the riders … | Continue reading
I have annoying commenters. They nitpick what I say and point out errors in my thinking – or if there are no errors, they take it beyond where I thought it could be taken and find new ways of looking at it. After I wrote about frequency relative to trip length last week, Colin Pa … | Continue reading
Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about frequency-ridership spirals, mentioning as a side comment that the impact of mass transit frequency on ridership can be lumped together with the trip time. I’d like to develop this point here, and talk about how it affects various kinds o … | Continue reading
The American conversation about high-speed rail has an internal debate that greatly bothers me, about whether investments should be incremental or not. An interview with the author of a new book about the Northeast Corridor reminded me of this; this is not the focus of the interv … | Continue reading
In dedication to people who argue in favor of urban motorways on the grounds that they’re necessary for truck access and cheap consumer goods, here are, at the same scale, the motorway networks of New York, London, Paris, and Berlin. While perusing these maps, note that grocery p … | Continue reading
Several Bay Area major venture capital firms announce that they will shift their portfolios toward funding physical green infrastructure, including solar and wind power generation, utility lines, hydroelectric dams, environmental remediation projects for dams, and passenger and f … | Continue reading
An argument in my comments section is reminding me of a discussion by American transit advocates 15 years ago, I think by The Overhead Wire, about the tension between funding local transit and high-speed rail. I forget who it was – probably Jeff Wood himself – pointing out that t … | Continue reading
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after a drifting freighter hit one of its supports; so far, six people are presumed dead. Immediately after the disaster, people were asking if it could be prevented, and it became clear that it is not possible to build a bridge … | Continue reading
Something Onux said in comments on yesterday’s post, about connecting Brooklyn to intercity rail, got me thinking more about how metro lines and intercity rail can connect better. This matters for mature cities that build little infrastructure like New York or Berlin, but also fo … | Continue reading
Amtrak wants to extend three daily Northeast Corridor trains to Long Island. It’s a bad idea – for one, if the timetable can accommodate three daily trains, it can accommodate an hourly train – but beyond the frequency point, this is for fairly deep reasons, and it took me years … | Continue reading
The US government is contracting defense contractor Northrop Grumman to develop a concept for passenger and freight rail on the Moon, the idea being to use this to transport resources and perhaps build rockets for travel to the rest of the Solar System. Upon seeing this, I immedi … | Continue reading
Last post, I brought up the point that the neighborhoods along the Interborough Express corridor in New York are residential. An alert commenter, Teban54transit, pointed out that this should weaken the line, since subway lines should connect residential neighborhoods with destina … | Continue reading
Eric and Elif are working on a project to analyze land use around the corridor of the planned Interborough Express line in New York. The current land use is mostly residential, and a fascinating mix of densities. This leads to work on pedestrian, car, and transit connectedness, a … | Continue reading
This year, there have been some positive signs about things changing in New York on subway construction – and yet, I’m uncertain about them. There are some signs that construction costs for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 are coming under control. The New York Post broke in January … | Continue reading
I’m optimistic about the ability of fast trains on the Northeast Corridor to generate healthy ridership at all times of day. This is not just a statement about the overall size of the travel market, which is naturally large since the line connects three pretty big metro areas and … | Continue reading
In the Bronx, the Metro-North Harlem Line runs north-south, west of the 2/5 subway lines on White Plains Road and east of the 4 on Jerome Avenue and the B/D on Grand Concourse. It makes multiple stops, all served rather infrequently, currently about every half hour, with some hou … | Continue reading
Devin Wilkins and I are still working on coming up with a coordinated timetable on the Northeast Corridor, north to south. Devin just shared with me the code she was running on both routes from New Haven to New York – to Grand Central and to Penn Station – and, taking into accoun … | Continue reading
Tucker Carlson has been wowed by Putin’s Russia as of late and is reporting about how great it is; I wouldn’t normally talk about it, except that among the things he crowed about was Kiyevskaya Station on the Moscow Metro. He described it as clean and drug-free, and showed videos … | Continue reading
At the Transit Costs Project, we study the costs of urban rail lines per kilometer. This, with our usual controls, is a rough indicator of how efficient a city’s infrastructure construction program is. However, cost-effectiveness is different from efficiency, and is better measur … | Continue reading
A few days ago, Streetsblog covered a new study about the impact of transit subsidies on efficiency. Transportation economics research is skeptical of operating subsidies to public transit, arguing that it incentivizes waste. In contrast, the new study argues, the opposite is the … | Continue reading
In comments, Sarapen asked me about security on urban rail. It’s common in developing Asia to require people to go through metal detectors to get to the platforms; I’ve seen this in Bangkok, she mentions this in the context of Manila, and it’s also the case on Indian metros and C … | Continue reading
Canada just announced a few days ago that it is capping the number of international student visas; the Times Higher Education and BBC both point out that the main argument used in favor of the cap is that there’s a housing shortage in Canada. Indeed, the way immigration politics … | Continue reading
It’s an empirical observation that rail riders who are faced with a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if it’s near their home than near their destination. Reinhard Clever’s since-linkrotted work gives an example from Toronto, and American commuter rail rider behavior … | Continue reading
President Alexei Navalny (RB) has been beset by political instability since taking office three months ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Russian Armed Forces in face of a Ukrainian offensive with two divisions’ worth of Leopard 2s and 10 squadrons’ worth of F-16s. The loss … | Continue reading
Here are the slides; they are not in Beamer format but in Google Slides. They’re largely a summary of the New York report with analysis informed by the overview with more direct comparisons with other cities, and for example the recommendation section won’t tell you anything you … | Continue reading
We’re launching the Transit Costs Project conclusion and New York case this Friday at 3 pm. Unlike the October panel, this will not be moderated – Eric, Elif, and I will just talk about our report and take questions from the audience. While the talk will almost certainly be recor … | Continue reading
Henry Grabar at Slate just wrote about our construction costs report. He centers the issue of consultants; the article is called Consultants Gone Wild, and he includes quotes from Eric and from our report about the contrast between in-house capacity and the privatization of the s … | Continue reading
From time to time, I see people assume that low-construction cost infrastructure must compromise on quality somehow. Perhaps it’s inaccessible: at a Manhattan Institute event from 2020, Philip Plotch even mentioned wheelchair accessibility as one factor leading to the increase in … | Continue reading
My interactions with Americans in the transit industry, especially mainline rail, repeatedly involve their telling me personally or in their reports that certain solutions are impossible when they … | Continue reading
A seven-hour rail trip from Munich to Berlin – four and a half on the timetable plus two and a half of sitting at and just outside Nuremberg – has forced me to think a lot more about th… | Continue reading
On the 27th, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced the creation of a new program called Momentum, to export what he calls best practices around the world. Buttigieg said he invites g… | Continue reading
A brief discussion on Reddit about my post criticizing Penn Station expansion plans led me to write a very long comment, which I’d like to hoist to a full post explaining how big an urban tra… | Continue reading
The US Department of Transportation has an equity action plan, and it’s not good. It suffers from the same fundamental problem of American governance, especially at the federal level: everyth… | Continue reading
The G train is bad. I say this, 16 years after I moved to New York, 11 years after I left, and I know it’s what every New Yorker knows. Tourists walk too slowly, rent is too high for small ap… | Continue reading
I know I’ve been on hiatus in the last few weeks; here is the continuation of my series on institutional factors in public transportation. I have harped for more than 10 years about the need … | Continue reading
Richard Mlynarik is too nice. He uses expressions like “we’re doomed” and “inexplicably not indicted” and “grossly corrupt,” but I get the feeling that it&… | Continue reading
I did a poll on Patreon about cost issues to write about. This is the winning option, with 12 votes; project- vs. budget-driven plans came second with 11 and I will blog about it soon, whereas neig… | Continue reading
I’ve spent more than ten years talking about the cost of construction of physical infrastructure, starting with subways and then branching on to other things, most. And yet there’s a pr… | Continue reading
The rail advocate Shaul Picker has uploaded a fascinating potpourri of studies regarding commuter rail operations. Among them, two deserve highlight, because they cover the invention of bad timetab… | Continue reading
Now that there’s decent chance of US investment in rail, Randal O’Toole is resurrecting his takes from the early Obama era, warning that high-speed rail is a multi-trillion dollar money… | Continue reading
I just saw an announcement from November of 2020 in which the Federal Transit Administration proposes to study international best practices… in on-demand public transit. It goes without sayin… | Continue reading
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori… | Continue reading
The history of tilting trains is on my mind, because it’s easy to take a technological advance and declare it a solution to a problem without first producing it at scale. I know that 10 years… | Continue reading
Subways can be built in two ways: cut-and-cover, and bored tunnel. Cut-and-cover means opening up the street top-down, building the system, and roofing it to restore surface traffic; bored tunnel m… | Continue reading