Tag Archives: HSR

HSR and Air Travel – partners and competitors

FRA long distance rail station – Wikimedia Commons image

Alon Levy wrote about the USDOT’s airfare database and the implications for potential high speed rail markets. Alon’s broad conclusions are that the regional markets suitable for HSR haven’t changed all that much in the last decade – the NEC is the most promising corridor, California is second, and others also make sense – but short of a true national network.

His post sparked me to ask – what are the best practices for integrating HSR with airports? High Speed Rail networks have different characteristics from airline networks. Some elements of the services are competitive, while others are complementary. A big part of the political sell for HSR in California was the counterfactual of required airport investment to facilitate travel in the state – but what’s the real impact on airports and airline service?

HSR Corridors vs Airline Hub Networks

Even modest rail systems can effectively compete against air travel in given corridors. Amtrak often brags about the barely-high-speed Acela earning an 80% share of the air/rail market (a notably smaller portion of the overall travel market) between NYC and DC. American and Delta still offer their Shuttle flights between DCA and LGA, but they don’t dominate they way they used to.

Amtrak has the advantage along a linear corridor, where one train making multiple stops serves multiple markets – If United Airlines wanted to match service along the NEC, they’d need a lot of feeder flights from DCA, BWI, and PHL into EWR – and they’d have to run them far more frequently to offer as many departure times.

Airline hubs are a different beast – the spokes all feed traffic into the hub. They’re not flying a route solely for the local traffic, they’re also feeding traffic into their hub to connect to other routes.

International Comparisons

Despite the track record for HSR in other countries, there are surprisingly few examples of excellent air-rail integration. Only a handful of big airports have quality connections to HSR networks: Frankfurt, Paris-CDG, and Amsterdam are most prominent. I found this paper exploring the history of both FRA and CDG:

In Frankfurt, the addition of HSR service allowed Lufthansa to decrease domestic flights and increase international flights without losing domestic passenger feed:

With the opening of the Frankfurt–Cologne and Frankfurt–Stuttgart HSR lines, Frankfurt Airport increased its catchment area by 10 million people who suddenly lived within 2 h of the airport…

Whereas Frankfurt Airport may be limited in terms of capacity, it has managed to support an increase in international passenger traffic and to maintain dominance in Germany as the major long-haul international airport serving the country.

Conversely, at CDG, Air France retained a small number of domestic flights to feed their long-haul flights, despite the TGV’s dominance in markets to/from Paris:

The other two routes, Paris–Lyon and Paris–Montpellier, experienced a relatively flat trend in passenger traffic, although there are competitive HSR alternatives that link these cities directly to CDG. In particular, the capacity on these routes has remained relatively stable, supporting research claims that airlines are likely to maintain a certain number of flights at their hub airports to maintain their network, even with the presence of fast and reliable HSR–air connectivity (7).

The paper’s conclusions about the characteristics of a successful HSR/airport integration:

Infrastructure. To provide feeder or transfer service between HSR and air transportation, the rail station should be located at the airport. If the HSR connection at the airport is constructed as a detour from the primary network patterns on the rail system, it is unlikely that the airport will be served with enough frequency.

Schedule and frequency. Rail operators and airlines often have the same goal of optimizing their networks, but they are separate networks. Coordinating timetables to ensure that rail service meets banks of connecting flights is an important consideration.

Market characteristics of the airport. In the two successful cases in this study, the primary airports with HSR links were the dominant international hubs of each country. For both CDG and Frankfurt International Airport, domestic traffic declined and international passenger traffic increased. Two key factors may have influenced this growth: partial alleviation of congestion at the airport by decreasing domestic flights and success of the HSR lines as feeder service for international flights.

In other words: lots of similar patterns to good transit planning on the rail side of the equation: Be on the way; frequency is freedom, etc. The key difference is about integration: is HSR service best thought of as a means of ground transportation – just extending an airport’s catchment area? Or is it best considered like a true connecting flight – integrated into an airline’s ticketing, loyalty programs, baggage handling, etc.

For airports and airlines, things are a bit more complicated. Both CDG and FRA are huge hubs, and the primary international connecting hubs for their respective countries.

In the US, the airport/airline situation is quite different. As a much larger country, no airline operates a single hub that dominates international traffic the way that CDG and FRA do in France and Germany. Far more medium-distance air travel is domestic travel; US visa rules and unfavorable geography make international-to-international connections less common – meaning domestic feed at big connecting hubs is even more important.

Future US HSR/Airport Links

Alon’s conclusions:

In the Midwest, the core lines remain strong, but more peripheral Midwestern lines, say a bypass around Chicago for cross-regional traffic or improved rail service due west toward Iowa, are probably no longer worth it. The Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati corridor may not be worth it to build as full HSR – instead it may be downgraded to an electrified passenger-primary corridor (as I understand it it already has very little freight).

Now, Alon was using this air travel data as a proxy for overall travel demand. Assuming the demand is still there (even if the recent growth has been mdoest) Chicago strikes me as a market with great potential as an air/rail hub – a huge hub airport, located near existing candidate HSR lines, and wouldn’t require a large detour to serve. The full Midwest HSR network centered on Chicago could extend ORD’s catchment area (connecting MSP, MSN, MKE, DTW, STL, CLE, and others) and potentially free up airport capacity for longer-haul, higher-value flying.

SFO is another airport that stands to benefit from HSR. SFO’s airfield is constrained and unable to expand; United’s trans-pacific hub depends on feeder flights often limited by poor visibility; the airport’s location is immediately adjacent to the planned HSR service.

Better planning for CAHSR would add even more value to the connection at SFO – particularly had planners used Altamont Pass, the airport would have a faster connection to Sacramento, increasing SFO’s catchment area.

The Northeast Corridor has lots of potential air-rail connections. The rail line itself passes plausibly close to lots of major airports: DCA, BWI, PHL, and EWR. DCA lacks international flights and is can’t grow; BWI’s hub carrier is almost entirely domestic and doesn’t have many international flights to feed.

Both PHL and EWR are interesting candidates for American and United, respectively. Newark in particular meets all of the criteria for success described in the paper. United already uses EWR’s proximity to code-share with Amtrak in lieu of flying short connecting flights from Philadelphia (though the business practices of Amtrak and United are quite different and can make for a challenging passenger experience) and United recently announced cutbacks to flights within the NEC to EWR – dropping the 4x daily BWI-EWR service due to airport constraints.

Philadelphia would require an airport station along the NEC that doesn’t currently exist. The airport’s proximity to New York and the larger travel market there means a bit of a precarious existence, but PHL’s hub carrier (American) has recently been shifting connecting traffic to PHL and away from their greater New York operations, which are split across LGA and JFK and increasingly focused on serving local traffic.

The potential is there for these airports – the big questions will be a) if HSR service ever exists (or improves), and b) what form the airline/railroad partnership takes – as a true connection, or as extended ground transportation?

Just returned from visiting Europe…

Paris, 7th Arrondissement. Photo by author.

Paris, 7th Arrondissement. Photo by the author.

Over the past two weeks, my fiancee I had the opportunity to visit friends and family in Europe – my first trip in far too long. Our itinerary included London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Utrecht. I hope to include photos and observations on the cities and their transportation systems in several posts over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I’ll start with some general and quick observations here.

On public transit: As you might expect, this trip included lots of transit. In London, we made extensive use of the Underground, as well as the Gatwick Express upon departure. In the Netherlands, we made extensive use of the Nederlandse Spoorwegen rail system, mostly using the InterCity trains between our home base in Utrecht to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Schipol. In Paris, we used both Metro and RER, as well as RATP’s modern tramways – a chance to see the lessons of modern streetcars applied in person.

The networks are all impressive, as were the levels of service and efficiency. It’s difficult to get a true sense of how the systems work for regular riders on a day-to-day basis when you’re just visiting. For example, a local laughed at my admiration for the NS rail system (admittedly based on a small sample size), complaining about frequent delays and never-ending construction. The grass might always seem greener on the other side, but complaints from the locals aside – I’m pretty sure it actually is greener in this case.

On high-speed rail: We traveled to Paris via the Thalys high speed train, using NS to meet the Thalys in Rotterdam. This was my first experience on true high-speed rail (sorry, Amtrak). While our return journey was delayed in departing due to a previous malfunction fouling the schedule, the overall experience was excellent – easy integration with public transit on both ends of the journey, no hassles in boarding the train or accessing the platforms – just check the display for your track, and check on the platform for where exactly on the platform to stand:

On-platform display at Rotterdam Central, showing platform locations (letters) for first class and second class coaches for the Thalys high speed service to Paris. Photo my the author.

On-platform display at Rotterdam Central, showing platform locations (letters) for first class and second class coaches for the Thalys high speed service to Paris. Photo by the author.

On walking: Of all the places we visited, Paris was by far the most pedestrian-friendly. Between the ample pedestrian infrastructure (not necessarily at the expense of the cars, given the wide Hausmann streets) and the excellent, ped-friendly city-scape, travel via foot was easy. While London’s urban design is extraordinarily ped-friendly, far more of the street right-of-way is devoted to car uses. Addtionally, the traffic culture (perhaps some combination of legal and cultural reasons – or maybe just my failure to adjust to looking the other way when crossing the street) clearly prioritizes vehicular movements.

In the Netherlands, particularly in Utrecht, the threat to peaceful pedestrian strolling is not from cars, but from bikes. With narrow cartways along canals and amid old, medieval street grids, the mixing between cars, bikes, and pedestrians is amazing – but it doesn’t necessarily allow for the Parisian-kind of urban strolling.

On tall buildings:  There were lots of them. Didn’t seem to be a big deal.

More to come…

Hyperloop: lots of hype for something that doesn’t yet exist

Hyperloop

The last few days have seen lots of pixels spent on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop concept – and I couldn’t resist chiming in. It’s a fascinating idea, but far from an actionable one.  Musk seems to have put a lot of thought into dealing with some of the technical hurdles of previous vac-train ideas, but rather than put these forward in the marketplace of ideas, he has taken to bashing California’s high-speed rail project instead.

Musk’s supporters take his endorsement seriously, with many openly hoping that the Hyperloop will kill off high speed rail, even though high speed rail is a proven technology operating around the world, while the Hyperloop exists nowhere but as a sketch on the back of a cocktail napkin. It’s a testament to the power of an idea, but it also shows how easily we can fall for bad ones.

A few base criticisms of the idea come to mind: the Hyperloop is not necessarily a superior technology for the problem it seeks to solve (travel between SF and LA); technology does not change the basic geometry of a transport system (and it must respect the basic tolerances of the human body); a fancy new technology is not necessary for innovation and improvement; and every strain of common sense indicates that the cost projections for this thing are pulled out of thin air (where else would they be pulled from?)

Solving SF to LA: Musk’s proposal does not actually serve either Los Angeles or San Francisco. The ‘last mile’ problem in any urban transportation system can be really challenging and really expensive. Musk simply avoids the problem by terminating in Sylmar and the East Bay. The hyperloop’s faster speed is irrelevant to the real question: travel time. Maximum speed alone tells you little about travel time, just as the Acela Express (as limited as it is) easily takes the majority of air/rail traffic between DC and New York, despite slower vehicles and longer trip times – the benefits of easy boarding (Penn Station be damned), downtown station locations, and relatively low security requirements make for a better overall value. 

Musk didn’t just pitch the hyperloop as a way to make evacuated tube trains feasible, he pitched it as a way to make SF-LA travel work better than the CHSRA can. His pitch is part technical concept and part policy proposal, and the policy elements fall short.

Technology does not change geometry: This is true for driverless cars and for hyperloops. The type of technology used doesn’t change the technology’s purpose – moving people from place to place. Since the hyperloop is essentially a transit service, it still must obey the same geometric rules as all other modes, the ones that govern capacity, headway, throughput, etc. Musk ups the speed for his concept, but his own proposals show a very low overall capacity – and even those estimates seem optimistic given his assumptions on safety margins and safe distances between pods. At GGW, Matt Johnson compares capacities of different modes of transport:

According to Musk, pods would depart LA and San Francisco every 30 seconds during peak periods. Each pod can carry 28 passengers. That means that under the maximum throughput, the Hyperloop is capable of carrying 3,360 passengers each hour in each direction.

For context, a freeway lane can carry 2,000 cars per hour. A subway running at 3 minute headways (like the WMATA Red Line) can carry 36,000 passengers per hour. The California High Speed Rail, which this project is supposed to replace, will have a capacity of 12,000 passengers per hour.

Technology also does not magically change the tolerances of the human body (save for science fiction inventions like inertial dampers). Musk is selling speed, and his assumptions on acceleration are more akin to a roller coaster than rapid transit. From The Verge:

According to Powell, that’s a problem: “In all our tests, we found people started to feel nauseous when you went above 0.2 lateral Gs.” The closest comparison would be roller coasters, which usually top out around half a G — but the Hyperloop wouldn’t just peak at 0.5; it would stay there for the duration of the curve. The result would be well short of blackout, which most studies peg around 4.7 lateral Gs, but it would make the Hyperloop challenging for the faint of stomach.

Others have noted the lack of bathrooms in the Hyperloop pods. It would seem that the roller-coaster analogy is apt, as roller-coaster operators don’t want you leaving your seat in the middle of the ride, either. It’s not safe.

Other opportunities for innovation: Much of the praise for the Hyperloop seems to be based solely because it’s something new and exciting (and people take Musk’s cost claims at face value); part of it also seems to be a lack of faith in high speed rail. The desire for something new ignores the reality that most innovation is incremental; it also ignores the power of transportation networks and the value of connecting to something that already exists.

Matt Yglesias looks at alternative transportation improvements that would seek to solve the same problem (decreasing LA-SF travel time) by tackling some low-hanging fruit, rather than inventing new technology. Yet, people don’t want boring improvements in processes. Molly Wood at CNet just wants to believe in technology, noting that practicality is for cynics:

I refuse to keep accepting that until our cynically imagined dystopian future comes to pass. As justone alternative to the essentially already-failed high speed rail project, we now have a detailed plan for a high-speed transit system that could cost as little as $6 billion to build and, by the way, would be solar powered and infinitely more environmentally friendly than the dirty, diesel-powered rail project. It seems obvious that Musk is unveiling this plan ahead of the ground-breaking for the rail project in what is hopefully a successful attempt to stop the monster from ever being born. So get over the sunk cost fallacyof the California “high speed rail” and move on to a better solution.

All we citizens of California, and the Internet, and the world, have to do is believe that this technology is possible. Then those of us with the lucky happenstance of representative government should use it like it’s supposed to be used, and demand better. Instead we tend to give up and talk about great ideas that will never happen — or worse, tear those ideas down as silly, unrealistic, or impossible.

Leaving aside Wood’s unquestioning acceptance of Musk’s cost estimates f0r a technology that doesn’t exist (even in prototype!), and the obvious mis-information about HSR’s power source, this kind of technological evangelism is fine for entrepreneurs (as Alon Levy’s post title argues), but it makes for bad public policy. If Wood had the same faith in HSR, and was willing to look over HSR’s faults with the same starry-eyed gaze, then HSR wouldn’t have the PR headaches that it does.

Slate’s Will Oremus is similarly infatuated with the concept, but at least he realizes the steps required for the Hyperloop to prove itself worthy:

Wise or not, California is unlikely to drop its plans just because one rich guy has a light bulb over his head. On the other hand, if Musk does build a demonstration line, and it’s faster, cheaper, more energy-efficient, and requires seizing less private property than laying down train tracks, a change of plans might start to sound pretty appealing. That’s a lot of ifs—but so is every big idea, in the beginning.

Indeed, that is quite a few ‘ifs.‘

The odd thing is, despite all of the references to Musk as a master innovator, it’s worth noting that all of Musk’s companies and products, as daring and inventive as they are, still are just incremental improvements over existing technology. Tesla did not invent the electric car and certianly did not build the massive network of auto-centric transport. SpaceX did not invent rockets. SolarCity did not invent solar power. Each company offer incremental (though meaningful) improvements on existing concepts and products.

At the risk of stating the obvious: Hyperloop is not an incremental improvement for an existing technology. Existing technologies have the benefit of linking into existing networks. Tesla’s cars can use regular roads and charge through regular outlets. High speed rail can use existing tracks and rights of way to get into city centers.

This is not a serious cost estimate: Musk is not just proposing a new technology, he is also offering an explicit critique of high speed rail. Plenty of observers have critiqued the CHSRA’s track record to date; comparisons to HSR best practices in planning, construction, and operation from around the world are not favorable. Nevertheless, this does not make the Hyperloop’s assumptions any more realistic. And, if the state were to buy the hype, the Hyperloop would likely see even wilder cost overruns – putting it on the same trajectory as Seattle’s failed monorail transit system.

Alon Levy takes a closer look at some of Musk’s cost estimates, and finds that most don’t even pass the smell test:

This alone suggests that the real cost of constructing civil infrastructure for Hyperloop is ten times as high as advertised, to say nothing of the Bay crossing. So it’s the same cost as standard HSR. It’s supposedly faster, but since it doesn’t go all the way to Downtown Los Angeles it doesn’t actually provide faster door-to-door trip times.

At a broader level, consider what Musk is claiming: that a system of precisely aligned and machined de-pressurized tubes could be built for a fraction of the cost of infrastructure with a similar footprint. Musk is proposing that the pods would clear the tube walls by fractions of an inch, compared to much larger machined tolerances for lower-speed modes of travel:

The biggest question mark is the tube itself, which has emerged as the most genuinely unprecedented part of the plan. By enclosing the track, the Hyperloop is able to sidestep worries about air friction and noise that usually limit the speed of trains to under 400mph, but the tube also presents a unique set of challenges. James Powell PhD, co-inventor of the maglev train, is particularly concerned about the smoothness of the inside of the tube. As Powell points out, the current design allows for just three hundredths of an inch between the tube wall and the skis encircling the pod. “Getting it that smooth won’t be easy,” says Powell, and might require a more expensive production process than the plans envision.

The small gap is crucial to the system’s overall design, allowing for a stable air cushion that keeps the pod hovering frictionlessly in the tube. But the small gap also requires great precision in tube construction. Powell thinks that a single bump, just three-quarters of a millimeter high, would trigger catastrophic damages, possibly even ripping the ski from the pod at top speed. Keeping the tubes straight can be done, but it won’t be cheap. “It’s going to be an arduous process,” says Vinod Badani, an engineering consultant at E2 Consulting. “Quality control and measurement have to be very accurate.” Musk’s plans envision a specially designed device to smooth out the inside of the tube, but it presents a serious engineering problem for anyone thinking of building a prototype.

Musk proposed using I-5’s right of way as a way to keep land costs down. However, I-5 has trucks. If one semi truck jack-knifes on the road, ramming into one of Musk’s cheaply-built pylons, how will his tube maintain that level of precision required for safe operation? Musk asserts his system is safer than HSR during earthquakes (nevermind the safe operation of Japanese HSR during major earthquakes) without any evidence, yet the basic physics of what he is proposing demand a high level of precision on a massive scale.

The real question should be if it’s even possible, not asserting that it will be cheap.

In the New Yorker, Tad Friend takes note of Musk’s propensity for exaggeration:

The bad news is that there’s no conceivable way that the system would cost just six billion dollars, or that one-way tickets would cost twenty dollars. Overpromise disease is endemic to Silicon Valley, but Musk has an aggravated case. When I wrote a Profile of him, in 2009, he told me that a third-generation Tesla would be selling for less than thirty thousand dollars in 2014, the same year that he expected SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to begin ferrying tourists around the moon. Well, no and hell no. More worrisomely, he promised that you could start driving the Model S in western California “at breakfast and be halfway across the country by dinnertime.” Musk is a lot better at math than I am, but he eventually acknowledged that by “dinnertime” he really meant “the following morning’s breakfast”—if, again, you didn’t stop to go to the bathroom.

This isn’t to argue that exploring these ideas shouldn’t happen. It is, however, an argument that a concept like the hyperloop shouldn’t be used to bring down high speed rail. If the Hyperloop is nothing more than a device to force better results out of the CHSRA, that would be a welcome result. However, if that is to happen, it won’t be because the Hyperloop is a realistic (or event a plausible) alternative.

Two weeks ago, Eric Jaffe editorialized that we should stop obsessing about the “next great thing” in urban transportation. There’s thinking big, and then there is fantasy. It’s worth noting that a project like California High Speed Rail is plenty ambitious – it’s certainly thinking ‘big.’ It’s also achievable, but is facing real-world constraints (economic, political, physical, institutional, procedural, regulatory, etc) and is in need of some practical planning.

The Hyperloop may seem like an attractive end-run around these constraints, but such benefits are illusory. The real benefit is in reforming the institutions to reduce the constraints.

Capacity on the Northeast Corridor

Tucked into the testimony of Amtrak President Joesph Boardman at last week’s Senate hearing on the future of the Northeast Corridor is this graphic demonstrating the number of daily train movements by operator at different locations along the spine of the Northeast Corridor:

One interesting thing to note is the difference in the volume of Amtrak trains (light blue) north of New York, compared to south of New York. This also makes it easy to see the relative volume of Amtrak intercity trains and commuter trains, as well as a few freight movements per day north of Washington Union Station. Capacity improvements are needed to allow for a combination of increased intercity and commuter services (or even better), and other bottlenecks are likely in need of greater capacity for freight expansion on adjacent corridors.

In other Amtrak news, Systemic Failure takes note of the US rail regulatory apparatus continuing to shoot itself in the foot on even allowing efficient high speed rail and learning from everyone else around the world that has already done this hard work. The FRA rejected Amtrak’s reasoning below, with emphasis added by Drunk Engineer:

The assumption that the standards simplify the design process of the equipment and would save $2,000,000 per train set is false. The Acela example indicates the exact opposite to be true. The FRA rules, as existing and proposed, eliminate the possibility of purchasing off-the-shelf equipment. The engineering work required to design new compliant equipment alone would far outstrip any possible savings from the rules if there were any to be had.

For background on the previous history of the Acela’s regulatory weight problems, see posts here, here, here, as well as a GAO report here.

The Acela and economic geography

Acela - CC image from wiki

Last month, the New York Times Magazine featured a story on the “Empire of the in-between,” the places along the tracks traveled by Amtrak’s Acela Express.  Decaying post-industrial landscapes, battered and half-abandoned residential neighborhoods, and so on. The train serves as a metaphor for the changing nature of the American economy:

But for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in Newark’s machine shops and tanneries, Trenton’s rubber and metal plants, Chester’s shipyard, Baltimore’s steel mills. That’s where raw material was turned into valued products by hard-working people who made decent wages even if they didn’t have a lot of education. Generation after generation, and wave after wave of immigrants, found opportunity along the corridor. Washington collected the taxes and made the rules. Wall Street got a small commission for turning the nation’s savings into industrial investment. But nobody would have ever confused either as America’s driving force.

This model was flipped inside out as Wall Street and D.C. became central drivers, not secondary supports, of the nation’s economy.

While the general trajectory is correct, the idea that the emergence of Washington and New York as dominant centers isn’t quite correct.  As the Economist points out, the real story is less about a nefarious capture of sectors of our economy, but the shifting nature of how our economies are structured:

Yet to pin the broad changes in the geography of the northeastern corridor (and similar shifts across the nation and rich world as a whole) on an explosion in rent-seeking is a mistake. The real story is more interesting: the economic role of the city itself has changed.

The Economist continues:

The difficulty this creates for the northeastern corridor is that this kind of clustering creates a demand for a different set of workers (and often a different infrastructure) than was necessary a century ago. Adjustment to this shift in labour demand has been taxing for major cities, but more importantly it has placed a great deal of stress on middle-income workers, whose talents are no longer needed. Cities continue to serve as engines of wealth-creation, but they are less effective as engines of broad economic mobility than they once were.

The article uses New York’s ports as an example.  The state of the art for transportation has shifted away from breakbulk cargo and towards containers.  New York remains one of the top ports in the United States, but the location of the bulk of the port activity shifted with the changing technology away from Manhattan’s waterfront and instead to container terminals.  The same pattern could be said for the industrial assets along the Northeast Corridor tracks, where freight trains are now rare and high(ish) speed passenger rail is the prime cargo.

Still, even if not the best analysis of the economic geography of the corridor, the Times Magazine piece serves as a metaphor for the shifting nature of our economy.  At the same time, however, you don’t want to overdo it, and conclude too much.  Aaron Renn does just that when asking “is the Acela killing America?” by directly linking the finance industry’s influence over DC’s regulatory apparatus to the rise of the Acela.

Never mind the logical challenges of such a claim (the old Metroliners ran faster between DC and New York on the same tracks; the two cities have been linked by frequent air service for years as well), other industries have been able to curry favor with DC.  Oil is one example; perhaps focusing on decisions like Exxon-Mobil’s location of substantial workforce presence in suburban DC (workers soon to be consolidated in Texas – such is the power of industrial agglomeration).  However, I don’t see anyone claiming Big Oil’s favorable treatment from the federal government is solely attributable to flights between Houston and Dulles.

 

HSR and the Aerotropolis

Frankfurt Airport long-distance rail station - CC image from Heidas on Wiki

Alon Levy has a post up about the potential for high speed rail to fulfill the goals of ‘decongesting’ US airports. Alon looks at origin/destination pairs and compares the flight time to comparable HSR ranges where the technology has a chance to offer a superior travel time.

The takeaway is that the benefits for airport relief are likely bigger in California than they would be in the Northeast Corridor.  Assuming a fully built out rail system, this makes some intuitive sense: California’s big cities are arranged somewhat linearly along the coast/central valley, just as the NEC cities do along the fall line.  The big difference would appear to be the proximity of other cities – much of the California air traffic is intra-California travel:

Anonymouse in comments brings a good point about the distribution of short-haul travel within airport systems: there is often proportionately more of it at the secondary airports…

The five LA-area airports between them have 27.5% of their domestic traffic within 3-hour radius, but this splits as 21% at LAX, 35% at Long Beach, 37% at Santa Ana, 40% at Ontario, and 63% at Burbank. The three Bay Area airports between them have 19% of their domestic traffic going to LA and a total of 35% within 5-hour train radius, but this splits as 14% and 29% at SFO, 27% and 48% at San Jose, and 35% and 57% at Oakland.

In California, this isn’t a surprise, as SFO and LAX are the big international hubs.  In the Bay Area, SFO is next to the proposed line, but LAX is not.  Translating that to the NEC is different, however.  One element is adjacency – the NEC (or a short extension thereof) runs directly next to DCA, BWI, PHL, and EWR – of which only EWR is a major international hub.

This raises a few issues for HSR trips substituting for flights:  will HSR replace an entire trip, or just one leg of a trip?  If HSR is going to replace one leg of a trip, how easy does the HSR-Airport transfer have to be?  What kinds of trips would make sense for this kind of transfer, and are the best airports positioned along the line to handle them?

On the domestic/short haul flights, commenter Anonymouse writes:

In the Bay Area at least, there’s been a slow tendency for flights to get more concentrated at SFO, with OAK and SJC having mostly domestic flights, and most of those short hauls operated by Southwest. With an HSR line to LA, each of OAK and SJC can easily lose a quarter of its passengers overnight, and with good connections to San Diego, Las Vegas, and Reno, that could become half of all their traffic. SFO and LAX would lose some of their existing passengers, obviously, but not as many, thanks to the fact that they’re hubs. And that means that airlines are more likely to cut flights at the secondary airports, rather than SFO, thus filling the SFO capacity right back up with the passengers displaced from the secondary airports.

On the NEC, a similar retrenchment to the big airports would mean more traffic at IAD, EWR, and JFK.  These three are the busiest international airports along the NEC.  Dulles in particular is one of the few with room to grow, and grow substantially.  The one problem: Dulles (like JFK) isn’t adjacent to the NEC.

Maybe the more interesting case is DCA.  With no international facilities (save for border pre-clearance cities), DCA’s traffic is virtually all domestic.  DCA’s old noise-related perimeter rule also limits most of the destinations to a 1,250 mile radius.  The wiki summary of domestic destinations shows several ripe for rail substitutions (in bold):

Busiest Domestic Routes from DCA (May 2011 – April 2012)[26]
Rank Airport Passengers Carriers
1 Atlanta, Georgia 828,000 AirTran, Delta
2 Chicago (O’Hare), Illinois 697,000 American, United
3 Boston, Massachusetts 685,000 Delta, JetBlue, US Airways
4 Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas 489,000 American, US Airways
5 Miami, Florida 449,000 American
6 New York (LaGuardia), New York 362,000 Delta, US Airways
7 Orlando, Florida 350,000 AirTran, Delta, JetBlue, US Airways
8 Fort Lauderdale, Florida 315,000 JetBlue, Spirit, US Airways
9 Charlotte, North Carolina 294,000 US Airways
10 Houston, Texas 264,000 United

The same data for BWI:

Busiest domestic routes from BWI (May 2011 – April 2012)[33]
Rank City Passengers Airline(s)
1 Atlanta, Georgia 720,000 AirTran, Delta, Southwest
2 Boston, Massachusetts 549,000 AirTran, JetBlue, Southwest
3 Charlotte, North Carolina 483,000 AirTran, US Airways
4 Orlando, Florida 463,000 AirTran, Southwest
5 Detroit, Michigan 342,000 Delta, Southwest
6 Tampa, Florida 301,000 AirTran, Southwest
7 Denver, Colorado 294,000 Southwest, United
8 Providence, Rhode Island 293,000 Southwest
9 Fort Lauderdale, Florida 283,000 AirTran, Southwest
10 Manchester, NH 273,000 Southwest

These two airports would seem to be the candidates to see a lot of rail trip substitution, with Dulles remaining the region’s predominant international hub.

Again, the problem is that Dulles is not along the NEC, preventing the kind of air/rail connection you see in Frankfurt or in Paris.  Or, look at the top destination for both DCA and BWI – Atlanta.  Given Atlanta’s massive hub status, what kind of air-rail connection would be required to get passengers to use the train for the first leg of that journey? Making the connection to get an international flight at Frankfurt is one thing, but doing so in Atlanta is another – particularly if the rail and air terminals are not co-located.

Having a great HSR-Airport station at DCA or BWI is relatively easy (compared to, say, IAD).  Alon makes this observation about California:

Note, by the way, how California is planning the Oakland Airport Connector and considering an HSR station at Burbank Airport instead of downtown Burbank. Because if there’s one place Californians would really need to use HSR to get to, it’s an airport 63% of whose traffic competes with HSR.

Now, a DCA rail station has far more potential that just serving the airport (it would essentially replace the current Crystal City VRE station and could easily offer pedestrian connections to both Crystal City and to National Airport), and it would be far more than just the massive parking garage that is the BWI rail station.  Burbank (~2.5 million passengers a year) also isn’t anywhere near National Airport (~18 million passengers a year). So, what might the future look like for DCA and BWI in an age of ubiquitous HSR? Alon offers one possibility:

For New York, the best things that can be done then are to use larger planes on domestic flights, and find relief airports. In Japan, the domestic flights use widebodies, sometimes even 747s, and this has enabled Tokyo-Sapporo to grow to become the world’s highest-capacity air city pair. In the US there are more airlines and the city pairs are less thick, but there is still room for larger planes than 737s and 757s.

Changing DCA’s perimeter restriction could plausibly open the door to such a change, though security and airfield restrictions limit that to some degree. (Boeing did recently bring a 787 into DCA for display, and Delta did operate 767s into DCA to add passenger capacity prior to the Obama inauguration – would’ve been fun to be at Gravelly Point for that.) Larger planes, and potentially different destinations – if HSR changes the distribution of the airline hub model.

Commenter Jonathan English offers a competing hypothesis:

Unfortunately, major American airlines (compared with European and Asian airlines) are obsessed with frequency. They believe that they will only attract business travellers if they offer many flights per day, in many cases hourly or even more. This means that even if high-speed rail really eats into the number of people flying, airlines may just compensate by down-gauging from 737s and 320s to regional jets. They’ll still operate just as many flights and put the same pressure on runways.

Given the importance of frequency to transit, complaining about frequent air service might seem a bit ungrateful, but air travel isn’t really like transit.  Due to limited capacity and security, you must schedule in advance. Security, logistics, and airport location demands an early arrival.

Predicting what the air travel marketplace will look like in this hypothetical scenario is somewhat pointless – what if oil prices spike? What if there is political action on global warming resulting in a carbon tax or something like it? Air travel will most certainly still have a major (and a high value) role in linking these places, but exactly which places are linked could easily be disrupted.

The difficulty of unintended consequences – airlines, HSR, and deregulation

Pittsburgh International Airport - CC image from Fred

Philip Longman and Lina Khan make the case for re-regulating America’s airlines, claiming that deregulation is killing air travel and taking de-hubbed cities like St. Louis with it (hat tip to Matt Yglesias).  The authors do indeed present compelling evidence that airline deregulation has indeed shifted the economic geography of many cities in the US – but as Matt Yglesias notes (channeling the aerotropolis thesis), in many cases this is merely an example of the air travel network’s ability to emphasize agglomeration economies:

They observe that… once the imposition of market competition caused some medium-sized midwestern cities to lose flights, the per flight cost of the remaining ones went up. That tends to produce a death spiral. Eventually the market reaches a new equilibrium with fewer, but more expensive flights. Except that equilibrium tends to drive businesses out of town. And once Chiquita leaves town, Cincinnati will have even fewer aviation opportunities which will further impair the business climate for the remaining large companies in the city.

This is a great concrete and usefully non-mystical illustration of agglomeration externalities.

Yglesias argues that fighting these agglomeration economies is counter-productive, but that’s not the only flaw in Longman and Khan’s thinking. Using the example of Pittsburgh, where the America West-US Air merger meant PIT losing hub status, they cite examples of the problems this represents for business travel:

K&L Gates, one of the country’s largest law firms, used to hold its firm-wide management meeting near its Pittsburgh headquarters, but after flying in and out of the city became too much trouble, the firm began hosting its meetings outside of New York City and Washington, D.C. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the biggest employer in the region, reports that its researchers and physicians are increasingly choosing to drive to professional conferences whenever they can. Flying between Pittsburgh and New York or Washington can now easily take a whole day, since most flights have to route through Philadelphia or Charlotte. A recent check on Travelocity showed just two direct flights from Pittsburgh to D.C., each leaving shortly before six in the morning and costing (one week in advance) $498 each way, or approximately $2.62 per mile.

The problem is that Pittsburgh to New York and Pittsburgh to DC aren’t all that long as the crow flies.  Longman and Khan explain why that’s problematic, thanks to those pesky laws of physics:

One reason this business model doesn’t work is that it’s at odds with the basic physics of flying. It requires a tremendous amount of energy just to get a plane in the air. If the plane lands just a short time later, it’s hard to earn the fares necessary to cover the cost. This means the per-mile cost to the airlines of short-haul service is always going to be much higher than that of long-haul service, regardless of how the industry is organized.

Indeed, part of the economic logic of the airline hub was to ferry passengers to the hub via loss leader (or, hopefully, less profitable) short-haul routes so that they can then use the more profitable long-haul services – transcontinental and international flights, and the like.  The problem is that Longman and Khan can’t see beyond the end of the runway.  We have a transportation technology that has a different economic calculus, one that works well for those shorter trips up to about 500 miles – high speed rail.

This isn’t to counteract Matt’s first point – just because HSR can make travel time competitive with air travel over such distances does not mean building it will be cost-effective, but the broader point is about the need to think beyond the modal silos.  Current rail service from Pittsburgh to DC and New York isn’t time-competitive with flying, even with those connecting flights.  But HSR could be. Indeed, given the current economics of the aviation industry, HSR ought to have a larger role in key corridors.

Indeed, Longman and Khan do consider rail in their article, but they pick out the history of railroad regulation instead:

 By the 1880s, the fortunes of such major cities as Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cincinnati rose and fell according to how various railroad financiers or “robber barons” combined and conspired to fix rates. Just as Americans scream today about the high cost of flying to a city like Cincinnati, where service is dominated by a single carrier, Americans of yesteryear faced impossible price discrimination when traveling or shipping to places dominated by a single railroad “trust” or “pool.”

This, more than any other factor, is what led previous generations of Americans to let go of the idea that government should have no role in regulating railroads and other emerging networked industries that were essential to the working of the economy as whole.

The problem with applying this logic to the current airline situation is that the railroads of the turn of the century didn’t just have a monopoly over a given town as the sole operator of service along the line, but they had a monopoly on the very technology that could offer such increases in mobility.

That technological mobility is no longer the case.  The excellent Mark Reutter article The Lost Promise of the American Railroad (now behind a paywall) documents the many reasons for the decline of American rail, including new competing technologies (both air travel and cars taking away long distance travelers as well as commuters), outdated regulations (such as WWII era taxes meant to reduce unnecessary travel during the war – and were quite successful at doing so – that remained in place until the mid 1960s), direct subsidization of competitors by the government (see taxpayer funded highways and airports, in the face of largely privately financed and taxed rail assets), and differing regulatory regimes.

The regulations present a compelling story.  The original regulations, as noted by Longman and Khan, were devised in an era before heavier-than-air human flight had even occurred – yet alone before the rise of commercial aviation.  Yet, the regulations devised by the Interstate Commerce Commission (formed in 1887) were the basis for a portion of the blame for the decline of American rail less than a century later.  Longman and Khan defend the need to regulate, despite these shortcomings:

To be sure, any regulatory regime can degenerate and wind up stifling competition, and the CAB of the late 1970s did become too procedure bound, ruled, as it came to be, by contending private lawyers rather than technocrats. It would have helped, too, if the country had not largely abandoned antitrust action after the Reagan administration. But even strong antitrust enforcement wouldn’t have helped that much, because airlines— just like railroads, waterworks, electrical utilities, and most other networked systems—require concentration both to achieve economies of scale and to enable the cross-subsidization between low- and high-cost service necessary to preserve their value as networks. And when it comes to such natural monopolies that are essential to the public, there is no equitable or efficient alternative to having the government regulate or coordinate entry, prices, and service levels—no matter how messy the process may be.

While this can be a compelling case for the need for regulation in the abstract, it doesn’t present a compelling case for the content of those regulations.  How can these regulations possibly change to reflect changing economic realities, such as the rise of new technology?

Chris Bradford put forth an interesting idea regarding land use regulation: give all zoning codes an expiration date (a similar idea to the zoning budget).  If the anti-trust and equity concerns are so great as to require this kind of regulation, requiring some sort of periodic review is an interesting idea for simulating some of the innovation and competition that a freer market might provide.

The extreme positions aren’t that illuminating.  Likewise, merely promoting the idea of regulation in the abstract (without speaking to the content and effects of those regulations) isn’t helpful, either.  The specifics matter. Regulation for the sake of regulation is pointless, and we must have mechanisms for continual re-evaluation of the regulations we do have to ensure they actually work towards our stated policy goals.  All too often, this re-evaluation falls short.

This isn’t meant to be a broadside against regulation – far from it.  There’s clearly a role for it.  Instead, I ask for periodic review to ensure the regulations are helping achieve our objectives rather than hindering them. Likewise, the inevitable reality is that whatever regulations we impose now will have unforseen, unintended consequences.

Weekend Reading – Hauling Freight

Amtrak-UP

Amtrak and Union Pacific trains pass each other. Photo by SP8254.

While American passenger rail often leaves much to be desired, our freight rail network is second to none.  This privately owned and operated network often finds itself at odds with desires for increased passenger service and high speed operations.

Hauling the Freight: Freight rail companies have been reluctant to embrace the recent enthusiasm for high speed rail.  In a recent article from the Economist, railroads expressed all sorts of concerns, from technical considerations for offering mixed-speed service along shared passenger and freight lines to a complete re-regulation of the industry, which was de-regulated in 1980.  One such pending requirement will be use of Positive Train Control (PTC) on all routes where freight and passenger trains share the same tracks.

Freight railroads fear a return to the bad old days.  From the Economist article:

Federal and state grants will flow to the freight railroads to help them upgrade their lines for more and faster passenger trains. But already rows are breaking out over the strict guidelines the [Federal Railroad Administration] will lay down about operations on the upgraded lines, such as guarantees of on-time performance with draconian penalties if they are breached and the payment of indemnities for accidents involving passenger trains. The railroads are also concerned that the federal government will be the final arbiter of how new capacity created with the federal funds will be allocated between passenger and freight traffic. And they are annoyed that there was little consultation before these rules were published.

There have been some heated meetings between freight-railroad managers and FRA officials. Henry Posner III, chairman of Iowa Interstate Railroad, ruefully notes that freight railroads, in the form of passengers and regulation, “are getting back things that caused trouble”.

Prior to de-regulation, American railroads had obligations to offer money-losing passenger services, dealt with heavy taxation, and paid for their own infrastructure in the face of heavy subsidized interstate highways undercutting their core markets.   Mark Reutter documented these challenges back in an excellent 1994 Wilson Quarterly article entitled “The Lost Promise of the American Railroad.”  One core issue is defining the best balance between public and private interests.  America’s railroads are private enterprises, and back in the day where they dominated all travel and enjoyed de facto monopolies on various markets, they were regulated accordingly.  As transportation infrastructure financing shifted towards public funding (such as the interstate highway system), the regulatory structure did not evolve to meet the new realities.

The current debate is essentially one of re-defining the proper roles for each of the partners in this mother of all public-private partnerships.  Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic suggests that the Economist’s take isn’t as dire as the railroads might make it seem:

If the public is committed to the funding of improved tracks along privately owned freight corridors, it has the right to demand that those companies allow passenger trains to run along them. From that perspective, the freight companies have little room to complain.

But the federal government does have a long-term interest in promoting investments that offer improvements in both freight and passenger offerings. Freight lines that run through the center of cities should be moved to new routes that detour, allowing passenger services to take over these access corridors much more essential for people than for cargo. Lines running both passenger and freight trains should be expanded to three or more tracks to allow multiple running speeds in both directions. Projects could theoretically be sponsored by public-private partnership, using both government and freight company funds directed to investments that benefit both.

These changing roles are not without tension.  The California High Speed Rail project has run into problems in their negotiations with the Union Pacific Railroad.  Likewise, DC has been involved – CSX’s rebuilding of the Virginia Avenue Tunnel to a double track, double stack standard is a direct example, and the impacts on passenger rail in the region are unclear.  CSX is poised to see a huge jump in traffic with the opening of new, larger locks at the Panama Canal.  MARC has big plans for future expansion and Amtrak has an eye on electrification to Richmond – how these projects will all fit together is unclear, indicative of the larger dialogue and coordination that needs to happen regarding freight and passenger rail.

Coordination needs to encompass technical questions (standards for train control? shared track? dedicated track? electrification?) as well as financial ones (who will pay for these infrastructure upgrades? what kind of control will come with public dollars?).

Get on the Bus: Aaron Renn writes about bus service improvements over at The Urbanophile, building off of this New York Magazine piece on New York’s new select bus service.  The article outlines many relatively cheap and easy to implement programs that can vastly improve the bus experience – fare pre-payment, limited stops, exclusive lanes, multi-door boarding, etc.  Renn writes:

[C]learly there is enormous opportunity in the US to start transforming the transportation infrastructure of our cities with high quality bus service in a way that is faster, cheaper, and much more pervasive than we’d ever be able to achieve with rail.

In the piece, Jarrett Walker highlights Jay Walder’s quote on taking bus lanes seriously.  He also notes, however, that such seriousness is not without compromises.  Others, such as Cap’n Transit have noted that while these bus improvements are tremendous, we should be careful to not oversell them, as many often do with terms such as a ‘surface subway.’

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

Weekend Reading

CC image from sabeth718

CC image from sabeth718

There’s a whole host of good stuff out there this weekend, covering the economy, smart growth, transit, high speed rail, and more:

Smart growth is nothing to fear: Roger Lewis aims to quiet the fears of Washington Post readers:

In fact, as new long-range plans are implemented in the coming decades, your property’s value will probably go up, your way of life and neighborhood character will be enhanced, and traffic congestion will not worsen. Indeed, it may ease. Also remember that such plans primarily serve future generations.

Optimism is justified. Stable, low-density residential neighborhoods and subdivisions will remain untouched. Transportation network plans do not depend on routing future traffic through subdivisions and local residential streets, many of which are loops and cul-de-sacs. And redeveloped areas actually will provide new, desirable conveniences for residents able to walk or bike to buy a quart of milk or sip coffee in a cafe.

Daniel Gross puts that into a larger context: Complete with quotes from Richard Florida, Mr. Gross looks to optimistic visions of the future and the chance to re-shape our economy, using the pending economic rebound to re-shape things – putting those kinds of smart growth plans into action:

So what will our new economy look like once the smoke finally clears? There will likely be fewer McMansions with four-car garages and more well-insulated homes, fewer Hummers and more Chevy Volts, less proprietary trading and more productivity-enhancing software, less debt and more capital, more exported goods and less imported energy. Most significantly, there will be new commercial infrastructures and industrial ecosystems that incubate and propel growth—much as the Internet did in the 1990s.

Not everyone is so optimistic: Reihan Salam at The Daily Beast isn’t nearly as optimistic about our economic prospects, despite the good intentions and aspirations of folks like Roger Lewis.

But one could just as easily argue that we’ve been furiously spending taxpayer dollars propping up the McMansion-and-Hummer economy. To protect homeowners, we’ve launched an extraordinary series of interventions designed to buttress housing prices, an approach that effectively transfers wealth from those who rent to those who own. Collapsing housing prices could prove a boon for less-affluent households or cautious investors who were reluctant to buy at the top of the market. That can’t help unless we accept that housing prices can and should collapse, even if that hurts key constituencies in the short term. And the same goes for efforts to keep the domestic automotive industry on life support.

So, are we in a moment of change or not?  The point about renters and owners is well taken, it reminds me of plenty of discussion around tax day about the perils of the mortgage interest deduction.

Beyond these big, national-level policy questions, there’s plenty of room to debate the local impact.  Housing Complex notes that DC has lots of jobs (relatively) and high rents, circling back to the notion that the ability to change things won’t be uniform across the nation.  Places like DC are positioned well to make the transformation – provided the Federal framework enables these kinds of changes.

On that note, Aaron Renn looks at a potential city-friendly federal policy framework, emphasizing talent, innovation, and connection – looking at policy areas of transportation, housing, the environment, and immigration.  Perhaps the key takeaway is the requirement of flexibility – many of today’s problems stem from federal policies that are too rigid to be of much use in urban environments.

Density discussions: Density is good for cities.  It’s also often misunderstood and feared – see Roger Lewis’ calming of fears regarding smart growth.  A few posts on the subject:

  • Yonah Freemark questions whether streetcar suburb densities are enough to get real urbanism and transit use.
  • Aaron Renn asks if density is overrated for smaller cities, as they can still compete without it, taking advantage of highways and cars that work well at lower densities.
  • Cap’n Transit criticizes both thoughts, emphasizing the bigger picture about why we want to encourage urbanism and transit use in the first place – arguing that Renn’s rationalization isn’t helpful in the long run.

Miscellany:

Olympic Investments

CC image from marcmo

CC image from marcmo

Several weeks ago, Colorado released an ambitious high speed rail plan.  The $21 billion plan would feature two trunk lines: one running north-south connecting the cities along the Front Range, and the other running east-west along the I-70 corridor connecting Denver International to the state’s mountain ski resorts.   Colorado’s ski resorts along I-70 are a crucial economic engine for the state, but the interstate is jammed on the weekends.  Mountain geography provides an ideal choke point for successful rail transit, as there simply is no room for I-70 to expand, and adding capacity on alternate routes would only induce more demand.

At the Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark notes that such a large investment might make sense for Colorado, but isn’t a national priority.  These ideas sneak forward in the absence of a national high speed rail plan.

Enter the Olympic Games.   David Williams at the Colorado Independent sees the prospect of the 2022 Winter Olympics as the catalyst to encourage some long-range transportation vision for the state.

Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics, only to later reject via referendum the funding to pay for the required infrastructure, forcing the IOC to award the ’76 Games to recent host Innsbruck.  Thanks to this slight, it’s not certain the IOC would ever award the Games to Denver again – to say nothing of the recent feud between US officials and the IOC.

Nevertheless, at least the prospect of winning the Games has Colorado thinking big and long term.   Vancouver stands to benefit from multiple infrastructure investments in the run-up to the 2010 Games, and perhaps Colorado can do the same – even if their corridors are not a national priority.