I work for the Federal Government (health) and this resonates with what I see. Government staff are buried under dozens of process requirements (like Small business requirements) and leadership measures success as no one yelled at us, not “did we objectively improve things.”
Exactly. It all comes down to too much community/advocacy/etc. input. To get stuff done well, you need to be able to tell a lot of nice folks to pound sand, even when they ask for stuff that, on its own, is reasonable.
In private sector management, it's understood that goals need to be simple, hard to "game", and focused (i.e. not too many.) In the public sector, however, a new goal is added at every meeting with the groups/advocates/community members, and no one thinks through the tradeoffs to the other 500 goals already on the books. No dare objects, because the culture of those groups is to bite your head off if you do, and most of them haven't managed anything with clear deliverables so don't really understand the trade-offs themselves. Also, most people in government are progressives themselves, so don't want to get on the wrong side, socially, of any particular progressive pet issue.
A lot of these problems are downstream of not having a non-progressive party that cares about government service provision. Most "moderates" don't care enough about government to get involved, so you either align with the groups, or you align with the party that just wants to drown you in a bathtub.
I'll say, I think this overestimates social pressure and underestimates legal pressure. The concern I hear is not usually 'people will be mad at us' but 'mad people sue and I want to get this project done, not sit in court.'
The solution to that is the solution to a lot of other problems: make courts more efficient so people are more afraid of losing in court and less afraid of being sued.
If "sit in court" means "go down to court for two days in a couple of months, explain why they are wrong and the court will agree with you and throw the case out" then people would be much more prepared to go to court.
IMO the story here is that society should be defining the goal via democracy, and government should execute on that goal. The problem is that we leave execution up for political debate as well.
Yep, you both are describing the micro dynamics of why a government monopoly on rail travel sucks. I agree 100%. But also don’t know anyone looking to get into that business so not sure the options.
And I agree, we could use a labor party to help fix shit like this. We never would’ve been landed with Trump if those interests had been minded anyway.
Isn't having a party whose basic outlook is premised on handwaving away the existence of inconvenient externalities and minimizing regulatory burdens kind of an odd conceptual fit for urban America? Cities are pretty much externality factories, and leaving the innumerable interpersonal disputes they create up to the court system instead of an ex ante regulatory regime seems like it might even be worse than the regulatory regime itself. Meanwhile mass transit isn't conceptually impossible to privatize but at a minimum has an awful lot of both dependence on public infrastructure and characteristics of a natural monopoly, whereas Libertarianism generally looks askance at the public sector at large.
Note that I'm not saying I don't want an alternative to the urban Democratic machine (bring back the Rockefeller Republicans, I guess?) so much as that I find the Libertarian party / brand to be a particularly unusual proposed standardbearer for one, even if on the margin a great deal of regulatory reform or rollback of public sector over-provisioning would be in line with the Libertarian ethos.
Tell us specifically what a 'moderate Conservative party' wants. I bet it would be pretty unpopular. Much like libertarians are outside their little bubble.
In a pure urban government ecosystem, you want the main party competition to be between a technocratic party that concentrates on effective delivery of government services and a "don't forget minority X" party, because that's the main failure mode of technocracy; the second party can be pretty patronage/clientelist because the technocratic party can counter that problem.
Yeah, at least in New York City (and from what I gather this is pretty ubiquitous in urban Democratic politics across the states) clientelism is pretty much in the position of telling technocratic effectiveness to stop hitting itself.
Does anyone know if the various branches of the military operate in a similar way or are they more efficient (e.g., goals more defined, leadership hierarchy more established)? I feel like the Army Corp. of Engineers has a strong reputation -- what's their secret?
Yes and no, largely depending on what the military is doing. The hierarchy is very established and is generally meritocratic (not perfect, but pretty good as large organizations go). You have a pretty clearly-defined set of interests, and these exist to support the primary goal of training readiness or application of foreign policy when deployed. Logistics, communications, etc. are all subservient to the ultimate goal of applying force in one way or another. There are regulations for most anything, which is where I suspect that the Engineers do well--the Army does a pretty good job of collecting and codifying best practices so that most parts of the Army are interchangeable.
Where I think things go off the rails a bit is where each of those supporting functions intersects with the rest of the government, particularly in terms of acquisitions. I was in Army logistics and 80% of my mental energy was spent playing whack-a-mole with whatever the outrage of the day was over.
The systems for getting stuff and using it (mostly repair parts) just isn't very efficient, and the vendors are neither reliable nor fast. Buying stuff commercial off the shelf (COTS) was a nightmare, and required us to prioritize veteran vendors, "green vendors", etc. There was someone always digging about why we hadn't fixed some vehicle that was missing a backordered part for 120 days, as if I could just yell at the vendor and get them to go faster. Lots of wondering why stuff doesn't work when it's brand-new out of the box, or why a random part like a tire costs multiple times what one would expect given its quality. There's basically nothing that can be done about that at the operational level where things actually happen, so you're kind of beholden to this lumbering inefficient system for getting stuff purchased, fixed, disposed of, etc.
Basically it works overall, but there was a lot of wasted energy on busy work that probably didn't materially improve our readiness or efficiency. That's ultimately an intentional tradeoff to create repeatability and interchangeability and generally seems better than other parts of the government, but it's still not great.
Yup, totally agreed. I think they’re an example of where generally competent meritocracy and codified best practices are a really powerful combination. My own experience was in an infantry BCT, just the regular operational Army.
Yup, my time in the Army was the same way. Make trackers green, don't get yelled at by somebody at division, and remember to only buy things from one of the six special interest groups who charge us 1,000% what something should actually cost.
That's clearly better than alternative models (see the Russian military), but surely we can do better.
The trick (for the regulator, not the implementor) for those sorts of purchasing rules is to write in how much of a price premium you pay for them.
I know UK rail franchising had rules where meeting certain criteria would let you treat the bid as being 5% or 10% less than the actual price. These were combined multiplicatively (so if you got 10 of the 10% discounts, it wasn't treated as -100%, ie free, but -65%, ie (0.9)^6). I'm sure that other sorts of purchasing have these same sorts of rules, but rail franchising is one I have actually looked at. Rail franchising was ended because it collapsed over COVID, so these specific rules don't apply any more, but the general system is used in quite a lot of procurement.
If you say "must prioritise veteran/minority suppliers" then they can crank the price up hugely, but if you say "veterans can change 20% more than non-veterans" or whatever, then they know how much they can get away with.
> And importantly, telling agencies to try to hit a half-dozen different goals … doesn’t ensure that all those things will be done simultaneously. What it ensures is that, with no principled way to evaluate projects or say no to things, costs explode.
The cynic in me wants to believe that agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance. If they are solely evaluated by ridership/dollar-spent then they could fail to improve on that metric and be charged with bad decision making. In contrast, if they claim to be balancing numerous unquantifiable objectives, then it’s much harder to criticize their performance. For example, if we point out the low ridership volume then they can point to their progress in expanding access and creating good paying jobs.
And I think there is a general tendency for all leaders and workers to resist objective evaluation. For example, I've seen this criticism applied to the anti-testing movement in education where it is alleged that poor teachers simply want to evade detection.
I’ve also seen this aversion to performance evaluation within the tech industry, particularly within discussions on the tech forum Hacker News. While there are many poor approaches to measuring software developer performance (e.g., lines of code count), there still need to be some objective evaluation. Quality measures can include annual peer review using a rubric of dimensions.
Yet there is commonly fierce objection to any evaluation of software engineers within such discussions. Numerous excuses are given for any proposal, while no alternatives are offered. It seems software engineering is conceived as some impalpable art that cannot be evaluated, even by fellow artists. And this extends to strategies and criteria for interviewing prospective engineers. All commonly used methods, such as whiterboarding code exercises, are castigated as inadequate to measure the intangible brilliance and abilities of engineers.
I just think we all have some natural aversion to being evaluated for fear of failure. Therefore our institutions, both public and private, need to be designed to counteract that tendency.
But finding objective performance metrics is extremely difficult. In sport, we have a perfect record about what a player did in a game. It is still difficult to determine through objective means how well a player did.
In soccer, a player could screw up receiving a pass, but what if the player that passed the ball was more at fault for making a bad pass? What about a forward that scores fewer goals than another forward, but was better off the ball and in defensive play? Statistical techniques are still improving. I recall the book Moneyball stating that baseball fielding didn't matter, which seemed like nonsense then and we now know is definitely nonsense.
In software, there are many things that determine how well a worker did. Subjectively, you know Bob is better than Alice, but how do you know that? What objective criteria can you use?
Off the top of my head, here are some dimensions I’ve commonly seen used
* Technical Skills - At each Eng level, what are the expected capabilities?
* Impact - What degree of contribution is expected for each level?
* Mentorship - For higher levels, the mentorship responsibilities
* Leadership - Again, higher levels, the degree that they should drive the team and interact with other teams
* Collaboration - How well do they help other people get stuff done?
* Interview - For higher levels, how involved should they be in interviewing? How well are their decisions calibrated against other interviewers for the same candidates?
For each dimension, an engineer will be ranked on a scale of 0-5. The rubric will include criteria and examples for each score.
On an annual basis, each team member will review other team members as assigned by their manager. Only the manager sees the results of each review and they combine multiple reviews to create an aggregated performance evaluation. That can then be shared with the team member to learn how well they are performing against expectations and their progress towards promotion.
While never perfect, the rubric is regularly revised in an iterative process using feedback from all team members. The result is a clear description of expectations and current performance for all members on the team.
Frankly, these are solved problems. Sports analytics people have done a ton of work to quantify the value of individual soccer players. You can argue there’s more to do because those evaluations aren’t perfect, but the specific problem of distinguishing a good player on a bad team is not intractable at all.
Same goes for software. Most tech companies I’m familiar with have some form of goal-setting and tell engineers “your job is to move us towards the goal, and that means prioritizing working on impactful projects rather than vanity engineering projects.” Now this won’t work perfectly in every case but it would certainly fit a network-effect business - and if there’s a better example of a network-effects business than a *transit system* then I don’t know what it is.
If a team's job is to reduce a certain kind of defect, and that defect rate actually went up, then everyone on that team is objectively incompetent and they should all be fired. Right?
Not really. You're interested in counterfactuals. What would the defect rate have done without that team? What would the defect rate have done with a newly hired replacement team?
In tech we do some amout of A/B testing, but that's usually on the external-facing product level, and causal inference is not simple to get right.
This boils down to the distinction between “not simple to get right” and “extremely hard to even do”. I’m going to say that it is true that getting this right requires some work but it is eminently doable, particularly for the government given where it’s starting.
Not irrelevant, but much less important than previously thought and hard to measure. The best batter is probably ten wins better than the worst; the best fielder is more like three, so you can live with some really bad fielding to get great batting (which was the insight of that era, if not how Michael Lewis put it in the book).
But we got a lot better at measuring fielding than we were in 2003, which means we can actually tell which fielders are three wins better than the others; when Moneyball was written, we could measure fielding so badly that it took multiple seasons of data to realise that Derek Jeter was a below-average shortstop. Now, we'd know within half a season and he'd have been moved to third base.
But I think it is still fair to criticize the stats that are being gathered. And the measurement of performance as a result of bad stats, bad counting, etc becomes far less useful. In baseball the frame rate is one of the lousiest measures of defensive efficiency and it has been given far more credence than the catcher’s ability to hold runners, call a good game etc. it’s gotten several catchers paid far more than they deserve. You could only discover this when you get to see the pattern of strike/ball calls by umpire (most umps miss badly behind the plate and it doesn’t matter who is catching).
EPA and DVOA measures (don’t get me started on o line stats) are really weak in pro football because the way a defense or offense play against one another naturally ends up being a path dependent game…so we lose repeatability.
Most of these issues revolve around an attempt to quantify the individual allocation to teamwork…I used to be a big fan of the use of these statistics but over time I’ve found them lacking over and over again as opposed to just using your lying eyes.
I’m not sure if there are lessons elsewhere other than that the workers in this case don’t generally make the stats…but maybe that doesn’t help in terms of objective measurement?
Slight tangent but there seem to be pockets emerging of individual win/loss match-ups within team games that are very predictive. For example, the shoulder pad accelerometer data is very predictive for wide receiver 1:1 separation and NFL scouting depts. have this for their teams + most power 5 conferences.
When you work in sales like I do however, there are absolutely no problems with evaluating performance, and there's no way to hide from the evaluation either haha. Your numbers are your numbers- it's crystal clear for both you and management- really anyone could glance at the leader board and see exactly how good everyone is
To be clear- I'm talking retained executive search where the board engages us, pays us a retainer up front, then we look through our network of C-level executives. I'm *not* talking about run-of-the-mill recruiting where they just spam out a bunch of messages for a lower-level position. Retained executive search is like a totally different (and vastly more respected) field than 'regular' recruiters like Robert Half or Aerotek or CyberCoders or whoever
This is certainly something I’ve seen in the private sector. At my large tech company, almost all teams have measurable goals against which they’re judged and held accountable. But one team I worked on explicitly (and successfully) resisted setting goals, citing “we don’t have enough control over the outcomes” as justification. But in retrospect it became clear that setting goals would have meant the team would have been scrapped; the lackeys like us working on that team would have found new jobs in the company, but the leadership would certainly have gotten laid off. Any goals they would have set would have been so ludicrously far off from success that they would constitute an indictment of the leadership of the team.
But also, when this organization is run from the outside, with 1001 interests screaming at you, you tend to serve those interests and do what it takes to balance making everyone happy that’s screaming at you.
What’s required to make this service more appealing is some risk taking and experimenting. This will necessarily piss some people off, so its not well executed by government. You need a profit motive driving or else its necessarily going to be catering to everyone. And as is sadly the case in my experience, nearly everyone has an astonishing lack of vision and appetite for trying new solutions.
I think you're right, the 1 clear metric is actually an advantage in this case though. Every transit official can now shrug their shoulders at all the local screamers and say "sorry it doesn't increase ridership, that goal was set with someone above me, take it up with them."
Tech executives are looking for simple, objective metrics that they can evaluate mechanically at scale. If you had a panel of subject matter experts review each one of your changes in depth, in light of its context, then you could do a pretty good job evaluating SWEs. In practice nobody’s going to pay for that. The closest you can get is asking people about their coworkers. But they don’t want to ask you about your coworkers. They want a report they can run across thousands of people overnight without any judgement calls, arguing, or potential bias. The SWE community rightly contends that there is no such report that would be even vaguely aligned with how practitioners understand being good at their jobs.
Things are a little less dire at the team level since you can check if the product a) was built, b) works well, or c) has the intended effect on the business. However an and b run dangerously close to asking “was the estimate accurate / budget sufficient”? Estimation is a different craft from engineering, and most of us are pretty pessimistic about the possibility of estimating well unless you have already done a very similar thing (in which case why don’t you just reuse it?). Poor quality happens when you are pressured to cut corners to meet an underestimated deadline. And products can fail to make make business impact because they are badly implemented, but more often they fail because they were bad ideas in the first place. You want to hold SWEs accountable for, what, not quitting a team in protest because the product manager’s idea was bad?
I agree with you that "(transit) agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance", but for a much simpler reason: these investments are rarely justifiable based on that metric. Here in Los Angeles there's huge political will to build out a public transportation system (we voted to raise sales tax to pay for expansion). What we don't have is people willing to ride the trains once they're built. Our newest subway line is estimated to take $435 in upfront spend per trip, per year, which puts the payback period at 300 years for a $1.50 ticket.
If you're in charge of a transit agency, you have your peers saying that LA would be a much better city if it had a public transit network. The people of Los Angeles, to who you're ultimately accountable to, are saying they want trains built (for other people to ride). Even if you were the world's greatest transit genius and could lower costs by 90% to sub-Euro levels, it's still not a great payback on investment.
So what do you do? Pack it up and say it's not worthwhile? Tell the city council to get back to you in 50 years when NIMBY issues have been solved and there's enough density? Nope! You, I, and anyone else hired would do the same thing - build what you can then invent enough new metrics to justify the spend post-hoc.
Not enough density, and the density that exists is spread over multiple office and residential hubs which makes each additional route low value-add.
It's relatively easy somewhere like NYC where (pre-COVID) all the jobs were in Manhattan and cheap(er) housing was in Brooklyn or Queens, so you can have a hub & spoke system in downtown. LA doesn't have that center of gravity since jobs are spread out in Santa Monica, Century City, DTLA, El Segundo etc.
I fall into the same thinking often when considering government services and policy, my biz brain I guess. But these are most often not meant to function like a profitable business, but rather to provide for common good…for overall lower costs for society, promotion of unity and order and prosperity too.
Trump and gang tried to push this same thing in terms of the Post Office, and I thought that was/is tremendously short sighted especially as to the speed of commerce for our nation with so much payment and billing still executed by mail.
So the question really becomes, will the cost of construction+ operation cause enough usage to displace the costs of other transit displaced. So costs to consider against that “$10” include fuel+vehicle depreciation+road depreciation+ externalities of carbon pollution from driving+ benefit of reduction of congestion on highways (maybe) +\- commute time benefits for riders.
You're right, it is subsidized - prices probably should be closer to NYC / SF ($2-$3+) level to account for operating costs. Part of that $8.50 is the consumer surplus though, you can't capture all of that.
I believe this has been addressed a couple of times in other slow boring articles but the LA Transit buildout is coming with nearly zero land use changes and this is causing a lot of problems. There's absolutely zero effort going into upzoning around stations, building TOD or doing land value capture for future funding like BART has spent the last decade doing.
It sort of fits into the theory that one reason government is more dysfunctional than it needs to be is that modern GOP has become so hostile to government itself. Famous example is FEMA and "heckava job Brownie". But without buy in from both parties, you get a situation where one party ends up being able to pander to all of its interest groups with impunity with resulting excessive cost overruns.
Classic example and maybe most impactful example is environmentalism (which is obviously related to public transport). Pre 1990, GHWB administration was able to find a more economically efficient way to deal with acid rain because in part they actually believed acid rain is a problem and said government can play a role in solving it. Today, in theory GOP should be the loudest voices in favor of eliminating or reforming zoning or limiting delays caused by environmental impact studies. But instead because of their stance towards government in general, there is this missing voice for reform.
>If Dems are the only ones pulling for transit and applying to work at the agencies
I disagree entirely. This assumes rail is not a huge factor in commerce and freight, which it is, having worked in beverage, it is essential for low-cost density item transportation. Rail is not wholly pushed by Democrats. And the workers of Amtrak, while perhaps skewing urban and low income and therefore lots of minorities, are not wholly Democrats either not by a long shot. I would venture a large majority of Amtrak workers didn’t vote in 2022 elections, but admittedly have as little data as you do on this
I might agree that the cure is worse than the disease, but let's not pretend that the reason that there are a billion forms and reviews is right wing groups nutpicking. Historically there has been a lot of corruption in government and progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s ran repeatedly on campaign promises to clean up government by getting rid of corruption. Similarly in the 60s and 70s, progressives were the driving force behind limiting government power to bulldoze communities by instigating environment and community reviews. They were the instigating force behind these requirements far more than right wing groups.
I’ll generally agree with this. My general conclusion (when I was a government employee) was that the many measures in place to stop very low level fraud actually were more expensive than the potential fraud they were combatting.
I think its perfectly fine to get mad at right wing groups for lots of things. But this doesn't make sense to me. Most right wing groups generally don't want more red tape, they want government to get out of it entirely - often foolishly!
But its progressives who use forms and procedures to rationalize or defend government action.
Many of the places where this is the worst are places where right wing groups have no power at all. If they were behind this at all, it wouldn't be AS bad there. But since this is primarily driven by progressives - its the worst where they have the most power.
I think you can make a case that this is also about ridership. I like the Jane Jacobs theory that the best way to police antisocial behavior is to have lots of people around. A subway car with 1 crazy person and 90 not-crazy people feels much safer than a car with 1 crazy person and 10 not-crazy people.
Planes are a terrible enough comparison so as to be useless. You literally need to go through a security screen to get on a plane.
Do you have a lot of experience riding transit? I really do not mean this as a slight, but if that comparison even occurs to you, it makes me think you are not someone who has ever used transit regularly. It's just not the same thing at all.
I suspect this is a reason that light rail ridership in Los Angeles refuses to take off. The ratio of unpleasant people to normal commuters is just too high and that deters other potential commuters from giving it a try and thus changing that ratio for the better.
This is the classic feedback loop of a social network: the antisocial person reduces ridership, which causes fewer people to be around, which amplifies the ridership-reducing effects of the antisocial person. There’s a reason social/commercial network businesses tend to focus on user growth above all else (including revenue/profit more often than not): once you’re in that downward spiral you’re in trouble. Conversely if you can sustain an “upward spiral” you can make enormous money.
I think this would be particularly effective on the west coast. Once Covid hit the busses were filled with homeless people. The people who cleaned the busses were finding lots of dirty needles. The number of discarded needles declined significantly… because people switched to fentanyl. And people smoking fentanyl on transit became a thing.
One thing that was very frustrating was that these perfectly rational concerns were dismissed as the obsessions of the privileged. And we should just ignore it because the people doing stuff linke that must be desperate. Except that the people who were most upset about this were not affluent. Often they weren’t white. And the people excusing this antisocial behavior tended to be people who didn’t take transit.
I agree its an issue, but the biggest? I would say poor frequency and bad routes are a much bigger issue in reducing ridership than anti-social behavior. Not to mention antisocial behavior becomes less of a problem with higher ridership- more of a buffer.
CCTV on buses is much cheaper than cops on buses. And having the ability to spot trouble and route a cop to the bus and have CCTV as undisputable evidence goes a long way. Every bus in London has CCTV, for instance.
Also provide an easy, fast, anonymous way for people to report antisocial behavior. When a report is received, footage from the time and vehicle can be viewed to figure out who caused the problem and their pass/credit card/email can be blocked from future use.
Definitely--on the L in Chicago, you have to get up and press an obvious "help" button. Good luck not becoming the latest object of attention for whatever crazy shit is happening on the train!
You put some people in housing (we need more housing) other people in mental health care facilities and others in prison. All of the anti social behavior I have seen on public transit comes from mentally ill or drug addicted (or both) homeless people. So much doesn’t get fixed until the American metro areas with massive homeless problems deal with the issue directly and not commission the 134th “study group” to analyze the issue and do nothing. I’m sick and tired of people saying it’s too hard to solve. It’s not, it just requires some grit and willpower y’all. That’s true of a lot of problems in America.
I was about to write exactly this, then read down.
Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
They should have rotten fruit thrown at them every goddamned time they dare to open their imbecilic, ignorant mouths.
Only once that entire set of beliefs is a social net negative and not some kind of post-scarcity, status-elevating hipster stance, will people stop holding it.
>>Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
Yes, it's incredibly annoying that a certain section of people treat tolerating antisocial behavior on transit as a badge of city life authenticity...but they're not themselves the ones who are the problem
I don't mean those folks, except insofar as they overlap with the ones who actively believe the police enforcing the law is bad and the very concept of coercion is illegitimate regardless of what it's in service of.
In NYC, at least, Plenty of antisocial behavior is *also* engaged in by unusually able-bodied young men who do acrobatics to music. This is a combination of “not enough cops” as well as the (usually extremely minor, IME, I don’t get the impression it’s especially lucrative, but it’s probably a lot more fun for the doers of it than working in an Amazon warehouse) financial support of a small number of riders for it.
I want to just sit (or, more likely, stand) and listen to my audiobook in peace instead of being involuntarily subjected to shitty loud music (also, I prefer to not to risk being kicked in the face). This is, conveniently, also the societal consensus and unambiguous law. I'm pretty sure "breaking the law against doing exactly what you're doing in order to cause a nuisance for a car full of people who didn't ask for it in hopes of maybe getting a few dollars" counts as anti-social behavior.
(Also, I don't think "Showtime" belongs in the same conceptual bucket as sitting-with-a-guitar busking.)
A couple months ago I was on the Seattle light rail at 7 am and a man was staring at me and masturbating. Fortunately he got off when the fare enforcement people got on.
I wasn’t in danger but it was gross and really gave my day a lousy start. The guy seemed homeless and was likely on drugs. this is one of those lousy things that happen to women. We should still try to make it as rare as possible and kick people off the train or bus whe. They do this
I don't think it's a lack of grit or will. I don't think it's bureaucratic sclerosis. I definitely don't think it's a handful of overly earnest, naive hippies, as David R. suggests below. It's money. That's why they commission 134 study groups: the appearance of action on a problem that is too expensive to begin solving. This country needs millions of mental health, drug treatment, elder care, and homeless shelter beds. It needs hundreds of thousands of new psychologists, nurses, orderlies, guards, social workers, and probation officers. It is all massively expensive. The money isn't there, there is no constituency demanding that those services be provided, and no one wants to raise the taxes needed to make any of it happen. And we've allowed these problems to become so big, even if we started doing everything we needed tomorrow it would be years before the public effects would be noticeable. Charles Adams wants to round up the crazies, and brags that the governor is providing 50 new beds. 50 beds? It's spitting in the wind.
It seems that requiring (and enforcing) a fare is a good step, anecdotally free public transit tends to attract people who are unpleasant to be near.
A clear means to report antisocial behavior and a quick way to block problem people from using transit would help. "If someone is behaving badly on the train, text us at 888-555-1234" signs. Use cameras to confirm the problem and ban any passes/credit cards problem people might use to access transit.
Definitely not true. If you’re in NYC and antisocial people deter you from taking the train, you’re going to be effectively deterred from leaving your house. The single biggest cause of low ridership is that the trains are slow with long headways and frequent delays. Removing all the homeless people from the NYC transit system would probably have about as much effect as making the trains 3% faster.
There actually is an easy-ish solution. It's a) have a critical mass of riders and b) have effective transit policing (which doesn't mean a cop in every bus or train car; it's more like "enough cops that people know they're around + good emergency response mechanisms)."
And I know it's an easy-ish solution because it was effectively implemented in most American cities with OK-to-good transit - NYC, SF, DC, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia - from about the 1990s until Covid. When Covid happened, ridership plummeted, and it's only partially recovered. Crime went up, and I think you could argue policing has become less effective. So, fewer riders + more crime in general + less effective policing = more antisocial behavior on transit, at least proportionally.
And this was effective, too! At least at first: in most of these cities ridership went up in the 90s and the 2000s, but it stagnated in the 2010s, even though transit was still largely perceived as safe. There are several reasons for this, but I think a big one is that American transit, even in cities with good-by-US-standards transit, actually isn't that good. The low-hanging fruit was gone and operations had to be improved.
In cities outside of those six plus maybe a couple of others, I refer you to point a) above. In Austin or Cleveland or Miami, transit ridership is a rounding error, and skewed towards people who are unable to drive or afford cars, so of course you are going to see proportionally more disorder on transit. Jane Jacobs has her flaws, but the "eyes on the street" thing is a real insight, as anyone who has ever walked down a deserted street at night can attest. So more riders would especially help solve the problem in these cities!
But as someone who rode the NYC subway almost every day for 15 years in the 2000s and 2010s, basically no one outside of very very sheltered people from the outer suburbs and poorly-informed tourists thought of the subway as unsafe. That's not to say that there was literally zero crazy people. But it was - correctly - viewed as not something that one should be concerned about. There were a few times riding the subway when I was made to feel kind of uncomfortable due to a crazy person, but I literally never felt like I was actually threatened.
And increasing reliability. I don’t take public transit in the Bay Area because I’ve been stranded too many times when the bus has just not shown up. How am I supposed to rely on public transit when there’s a one in five chance it won’t arrive or will arrive late?
I agree with everything you've written here, but you've focused, perhaps, on the wrong anecdotal examples in the NY Subway expansion. The choice to tunnel instead of cut-and-cover wasn't the main reason for cost-overruns. Nor was opting for the double-wide station model. These things certainly added costs, but compare them to similar projects in other countries and see that you could have all the things and still avoid the cost-disease in American-style transit.
Case-in-point: the MASSIVE, MULTIPLE-tunnel-digging project that's unfolding to expand several lines of the Stockholm metro as we speak. (One right next to my home and I don't notice it at all). You've already mentioned, I believe, how Swedish rail is roughly 1/10th per km the cost of American rail construction. It's a similar story for the very difficult/expensive work of digging tunnels DEEP underground in the archipelago that is Stockholm, an old city with many of the same issues as NYC, plus far less tolerance for disruptive surface noise. Also, all of these expansion projects have included stations and auxiliary offices/maintenance facilities that are generally larger and nicer than the grubby and cramped NYC Subway. So, how can Sweden extend three separate, really nice and spacious subway lines via tunneling in its biggest city under budget and ahead of schedule?
Clearly there are other reasons that are more salient than the decision to tunnel or not. Chief among them, seemingly, are all the things you've written about previously: entrenched NIMBYism, weaponizing of environmental reviews, multiple-juristiction governance, lack of economies of scale in one-off projects (Sweden is constantly rolling out these projects in modular fashion, leaving an existing production base and experienced labor force), and a budgetary process that is really short-termist and volatile, with constantly shifting priorities and budgets.
My take-away from your (extremely informative, by the way) comment is that, at the end of the day, Sweden **really** values the particular public service in question (and so makes getting it right a massive priority) and America, alas, does not.
One factor that's very consistent with Matt's original essay: The Swedish transit model very much focuses on ridership.
There's an expansive metro system in Stockholm, plus trams, ferries, commuter light rail, and legacy narrow-gauge commuter rail, and buses. Between them, you simply don't need a car anywhere in the city, inner suburbs, or even in many of the outer suburbs/exurbs. That's justified by the relative population density of Stockholm Metro Region. There ridership of all these systems is high and so is the performance. The budget isn't just in the build, either, but also in the maintenance, which helps keep them safe, functional, and decent to use. So people ride them because they're affordable, convenient, and pleasant. Which makes it easier to sell investment and usage of expansions.
Crucially, unlike in the US, national and local transit planning is also very proactive, planning out where the demand will be in the 2030s and 2040s, not where the unmet demand has been for the last few decades that we only now, latterly, meet when it's an emergency. So, Stockholm's current active transit projects will, some of them, not even finish until 2040, serving areas that aren't even developed or upzoned yet.
But Sweden doesn't just have some big government fetish for transit. The investments are prudent and meet actual or reasonably expected future demand. Stockholm's is the country's only underground metro. There isn't one in the country's second- and third-largest cities. Which makes sense, given their smaller populations. These other, smaller cities have trams, light rail, and buses. Which are also optimized by ridership and with performance in mind. Which, again, feeds a positive feedback loop of people riding transit because it works and is affordable.
All is not ideal, though. When it comes to intercity passenger rail, the performance/affordability is merely decent. We have a single high-speed rail line that goes from Stockholm to Oslo, but it's only marginally faster, in practice, than the regular one, for the same reasons as Acela doesn't leave the Northeast Regional in the dust: frequent stops, weather-related delays, relatively high cost, and navigation of multiple jurisdictions (in this case, including crossing an international border). Long-distance rail in Sweden runs into the same demographic/geographic problem as the US, with a huge country and sparse population, especially in its "frontier half" (which here, is the North, rather than the West). Unlike with Amtrak, though, Sweden's public rail system doesn't bother serving areas where there isn't population/demand. You can take the train overnight way up to the Arctic Circle, yes, which is IMO really cool, but only to areas that are relatively heavily populated or touristy. Even there, the passenger performance isn't nearly as good with the more densely-laid systems in the population centers, but, compared to Amtrak, it's a delight. It's not really billed as a commuting alternative to flying because it isn't. Long-distance rail here is not glamorous, but it does the job it's intended to: mostly moving tourists and families around. Conversely, Amtrak tries to please everyone to garner as much interest-group support as possible and ends up pleasing nobody.
Not sure I quite understand your point. The MTA serves something like 13 million New Yorkers—a clear and substantial majority of that state's voters. If improved service were a sufficiently compelling goal for New York voters, this priority could be made clear to politicians in that state (upon pain of losing their jobs). Mostly, this hasn't happened.
Mind you, greater federal support would help. I'd guess the transit operations of Paris/London/Tokyo/Beijing/Stockholm/Berlin/Taipei enjoyed more national government support than any transit system in America does (strictly a guess). But this, too, would require more support from American voters.
At the end of the say, stuff voters don't value tends not to be provided.
New York State is a bigger, richer state than Sweden. There's no reason for New York to expect or need federal assistance with building local transportation infrastructure.
According to CBO, about 1/6th of transit spending in the US is provided by the federal government. I'd be surprised if this proportion was usually lower in other countries. I guess one could make the case that the national government shouldn't spend anything on transportation. But if it does spend money on transportation, it seems extreme to argue *public* transportation should be ineligible for this money.
For national, interstate transportation, there absolutely is a federal role and need, including to override and break local roadblocks from too many warring local levels of govt. Congress even has the power to directly condemn and take private property for the purpose of building national transportation, which it should not be afraid to use.
But for local transit, like subways and buses, there's no need to add further complexity and even more cooks in the kitchen by creating a situation where even the federal stars have to align before a project can be built.
Do candidates for political office in New York (city and state) compete by championing different ideas for projects? Would someone lose re-election because they didn't run the subway well?
Cuomo and De Blasio certainly had their own ideas of how a flashy but low ridership transit project might improve their reputation. (Subway to LaGuardia or light rail along the waterfront respectively.)
If I were dictator of transportation in New York, I'd close LaGuardia and build a new airport somewhere in Westchester County.
My ideal NY transit system would have frequent regional rail running through three suburban hubs (like how Jamaica works for LIRR) with each of those hubs connected to an airport (EWR and JFK plus the new one), with all trains running through Manhattan, so every train passes through two of these three subs and through Penn Station between them. Merge the subway with PATH to cover the area between the three hubs, and have the regional rail go out to the edge of the metro area. Run HSR through NY on the NEC path, and have a junction somewhere in NJ for a line headed west to Cleveland for Chicago, and one in Westchester for a line to Albany (for Toronto and Montreal).
If you can get through-running between NJ Transit and LIRR, then you've connected the airtrain networks at Newark and Jamaica - and I suspect you've improved transportation possibilities for many hundreds of thousands of residents of both suburban areas, which is much more important than the number of people who are going between the airports on any day.
Political control of the subway was take away from New York City during the control board era, I believe. So I don't think so, the MTA is more of a political appointee combined with career government employee service.
Well, NYC voters do also vote in state-level elections, but they only vote Democrat, and the incumbency advantage is steep. However I’m not sure that laying mismanagement of the subway at the feet of the state/city management split has as much explanatory power as one might expect, because City voters are incredibly tolerant of terrible governance.
A big reason the Swedish project is much cheaper is the institutional capacity of Swedish agencies to do design work in-house and only contract out the build, rather than U.S. agencies that rely on contractors for everything.
That seems to be an operative factor. It's not only really expensive to "reinvent the wheel" with every single transit project (that really should be a standard template with some localized configuration), but it's also a big learning curve for every one of the many contractors and subcontractors who get a piece of the action. Just managing all the procurement, contracting, and sub-contracting, itself, adds to the cost.
And why not just cut-and-paste the specs for all these projects? Subways, light rails, and trams are all mature technologies. Even high-speed-rail is mature. Every city in the country doesn't need to have a completely custom, bespoke transit system created from scratch by private contractors with thin experience delivering!
Maximizing ridership is what *should* happen, but two thoughts on what *is* happening:
1. The main cause of low ridership routes is not ‘planners not wanting to be yelled at in a public meeting,’ though of course that does happen. It’s that agencies have formal policies, approved by their governing bodies – which in most places means elected officials – setting out minimums for service coverage and frequency. So the planners have to first cover their entire service area at this minimum level, and only then go back with whatever resources remain and add more service in high-ridership corridors.
2. There’s a real status quo bias in the federal Title VI analysis that any agency has to do before implementing a major service change. Even if the existing network is sub-optimal from a total ridership perspective, reallocating those resources without causing a disparate impact on a particular group of riders can be tough.
I came here to make a similar point. Lawmakers are incredibly bad at creating clear and specific directives. When I was in government, we constantly struggled to interpret laws, rules, and regulations and rarely got any clarification. The postings that did clarify rules were so extremely specific that they really only applied to a few narrow situations.
Many sectors could be improved through focusing on simple, utilitarian goals. Take personal injury law.
People who are injured in accidents that are not their fault need medical care and replacement of lost income. Yet people need these same things regardless of who caused the accident. Any person with bad enough morbidities needs these things! The tort system spends a lot of money trying to distinguish between deserving and undeserving victims. Yet the results are completely arbitrary and don’t provide much security. Get hit by a UPS truck and you will get a significant payout, though you’ll only get 60 cents on the dollar after you pay your lawyer and experts. Get paralyzed by a driver with minimum coverage and you’ll only get $25k even if you lost $3M in future wages. Get screwed by a congenital condition, and you are left to the tender mercies of the welfare state.
The project of distinguishing “deserving” from undeserving victims does have some benefits. It encourages safe driving, discourages corporations from hazardous activities, etc. However, it doesn’t do these things very well. If the tort system were a highly effective way of incentivizing safety, we wouldn’t need DUI prosecutions or speeding tickets or even drivers licenses, an insurance mandate would be sufficient and the market could operate. Lawyers don’t often question the system because we are trained that victims should be made whole and the system is lucrative for established lawyers. My point is that intuitive goals like “make victims whole” are often a) not served very well by the status quo and b) subordinated to the interests of insiders.
>>The carless Americans who also don’t live near good transit are a very marginalized group<<
This one thousand percent.
And the situation brings to mind one of the worst takes of my own political tribe, namely the one that villfires Uber and Lyft.
They're not perfect, but Uber/Lyft are a godsend for folks who, for whatever reason, don't own cars. I remember talking to an Uber driver a few years back in Silicon Valley who informed me (I'd guess truthfully, but who knows?) that a lot of folks in that region were eschewing car ownership, because a car-free life featuring a lot of Uber fares saved money on net once the costs of car ownership were eliminated. Also, as an expat who is contemplating a return to the States, the existence of these services does rather expand the footprint of plausible destinations (how are normal people buying cars these days in the USA? Talk about sticker shock!).
Uber and Lyft prices are in no way stable and seem to be heading nowhere but up. You better be able to do a lot of things on bicycle or public transit. Two ride services to work and back a day at $40 for 225 days a year is $9,000 and you haven't been to the store or dropping kids off or anything.
Yes, but the point is that if you have Uber and Lyft available, then you only need to be able to do 95% of trips on bike or transit, while without them you need to be able to do 100% of trips that way. Those last 5% are often really hard to eliminate, so this can be a huge help.
You’re thinking about that wrong. When I was in graduate school, I lived in Seattle without a car. Overall public transit in Seattle is okay. It’s easy to use to get to class at UW or to commute downtown, but it’s often hard to get other places. So I would take the bus to and from class everyday, but take a couple Ubers a week to things like doctor’s appointments, big box stores, visiting friends, etc. Without Uber, I would have simply bought a car, because I’m not willing to spend an hour each way on two buses to go two miles to visit my friends.
Pretty much experience in 2020, when I was living in Seattle (some of it in U District, as it happens). Walked and took the bus quite a bit, and supplemented with Uber. I'd say that's their sweet spot: they enable people who live in already-pretty-walkable locations to hold out longer in terms of buying a car.
Also in my area $40 is closer to the one-way cost (assuming you tip, because of *course* we had to introduce tipping to ride services…) for, like, a 5 mile journey, which just makes the option of forgoing car ownership that much less attractive.
Yeah I really enjoy my car-free life.... as a 25-year old single dude living in New York City who loves walking. Not sure Uber/Lyft can ever be expected to make the lifestyle viable for people in areas with less ubiquitous public transit, particularly since these areas likely tend to also be ones where Uber/Lyft are least cost effective
Uber and Lyft can make a big difference for peoples health too. In some places Medicaid and Medicare were paying for Uber or Lyft rides to get people to their doctors appointments. It was a win-win
>>But slow, expensive projects don’t become unbearably slow and unbearably expensive thanks to one big bad call <<
I'm a frequent reader of well-known California-based pundit Kevin Drum (I believe he and Matt are acquainted). IIRC, Drum is more or less of the opinion that there was indeed "one big bad call" that doomed California's HSR from the get-go: the project, because of horrendous engineering challenges flowing from the region's geography (something about a mountain pass in the path of the only route between LA and SF that really makes economic sense), was simply never very viable.
I don't possess the engineering chops (to say the least) to assess this claim, but in full disclosure I'm a big fan of bullet trains, and every time I ride one (vastly more comfortable and fun than flying; and they're miraculously conducive to napping) I think to myself "My fellow Americans don't know what they're missing."
But even the HSR-obsessed Chinese mostly don't build them where the engineering problems are excessive, I reckon.
Mountain passes aren't necessarily an impossible problem (there are four different HSR routes under the Alps either built or under construction: Mont d'Ambin, Lotschberg, Gotthard, Brenner).
The problem with CAHSR is mostly that there is a political imperative to build something, rather than one to move passengers between LA and SF, so Bakersfield-Merced makes sense, because that's the easy bit and the politicians get to cut a ribbon and say "look what we built".
If you look at a difficult-terrain line built by someone competent, well: let's look at the French-Italian line from Lyon to Turin. The only bit under construction at the moment is the Mont d'Ambin (Monte d'Ambino in Italian) tunnel. That's because that will take far longer than the rest of the line, so there is no point starting anything else until the tunnel is well progressed. The comparatively easy bits above ground from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Lyon and Susa to Torino are mostly planned, but there are still some disputes around Susa on the Italian side.
If you look at the CAHSR project, the hard bits that will take a long time to build are the two mountain crossings, one from SF/SJ to the Central Valley and one from LA to the Central Valley, and possibly an urban tunnel into Los Angeles Union Station (San Francisco can be entered along the Caltrain corridor). None of those are even planned, much less under construction. Instead, they have massively overspent on the "easy" bit, from Bakersfield to Merced along the Central Valley and they aren't even trying to do the hard bits.
This means that politicians will get to cut a ribbon on something in 2030 or so - and those politicians are unlikely to much care what they cut the ribbon on. If they had started by agreeing the routes into SF and LA, they'd have to make hard decisions, like whether to run the line to SF via San Jose, or to take a shorter mountain crossing by coming up the Valley to Modesto or Stockton, whether to serve the East Bay at all, or to expect passengers to ride BART to the Transbay Terminal. At the LA end, whether to come in via the I-5 route through Santa Clarita, to come through Palmdale, or to take the easiest mountain crossing around San Bernadino. Also, do you build new track all the way to LAUS, or can the HSR share track with Metrolink in the LA area?
All of those decisions will annoy people, whether that's residents who will end up living near a railroad line and dealing with noise, or people who will have to live next to a construction site, or people who want to use one route and not the other route - e.g. if you live in the East Bay, you probably would prefer to have a station in (probably) Fremont or Hayward than have to ride BART to the Transbay terminal or San Jose. If you live in San Jose, you'd prefer all the trains to come through San Jose rather than being on a branch line off the main route through the East Bay and get half as many trains as if it went direct. But it's not possible to do both, so a politician would have to decide. At the Los Angeles end, the Santa Clarita route is the shortest and fastest, but wouldn't stop between Burbank and Bakersfield; the Palmdale route serves Palmdale, and also is a much more natural fit with a potential line to Las Vegas. Victorville/San Bernadino is the route to LV if that was all you were building, so would make sense if LA-LV had been built first and then LA-SF was being connected off the back of it. It also serves more intermediate spots, but omits Burbank and also is both slower and costs more. Then there are questions on whether these lines will be above ground or in tunnel through the LA metro area. Can they run on Metrolink track, can they parallel Metrolink track, do we have to build underground platforms at LAUS? Until the route into LA Union Station is defined, planning can't start on the line out of it (through Orange County to San Diego), so all of that is completely on hold.
Merced-Bakersfield is the maximum line that can be built without making any of these decisions. So that's what they are actually building, because it lets them duck these decisions, pass them on to the next governor, the next mayor.
These aren't unsolvable engineering problems. The Chinese built an HSR line in Tibet. The Europeans are building four tunnels through the Alps. What they require, though, is a politician who will actually make a decision, take the criticism of the people left out and the people disrupted on the chin and build the actual track. Instead, they've taken the budget for the actually expensive bits of the line and spent it on buying off complainants on the bits of the line that should have been cheap. Much of it is being built on viaduct that could have been on the level, for instance. And now there is no money left to build the two mountain tunnels that should have been the first items on the budget.
As an aside, one of the design problems is what they do when the rail route splits a farm.
To give a simplified example, suppose you have two farms each with two fields, the farms are A and B, and they look like this:
A1 A2
B1 B2
The rail route runs up the middle of that.
If you build a ground-level line, then the farms are now disconnected, and the farmer has to travel to the nearest crossing (which, for a high-speed line, means a bridge, as level crossings are unsafe at high speeds) to cross over to the other half of his farm.
The CAHSR solution: build on a viaduct so the farmer can cross under the viaduct.
UK's HS2's solution: build a bridge for each farm (cheaper).
The French LGV solution: make the farmers do a land-swap, so one farmer ends up with A1 and B1, and the other with A2 and B2. Now they don't need to cross the tracks (cheapest).
AIUI, the Chinese solution is just to not care about the farmer whose land is split. If they want to do a land-swap, they can, but China isn't going to care one way or the other.
>>Mountain passes aren't necessarily an impossible problem<<
For sure. I don't think anyone's suggesting that the hard bits in question (I looked it up after I posted; it's the Tehachapi passage I was thinking of) are literally not solvable from a an engineering standpoint, just that they're catastrophically expensive. In the case of Tehachapi passage, the claim some are making is that seismic risk is what is adding an extra dimension of unaffordability.
Anyway, if the extension to LA is cancelled because it ends up being a tunnel too far in terms of cost, the project will go down in history as wasteful on a colossal scale (there's zero reason to build HSR in California is that state's largest city isn't served). My takeaway is: given the extreme difficulty of building any kind of transport infrastructure in America, a less technically demanding (ie cheaper) project should have been the country's first major effort in this regard. Somewhere with flatter terrain and and also less NIMBYism (Texas comes to mind).
Agreed that if you can't get to LA, then the whole thing is a waste of time. Which is why that should be the first bit to get built, not the last.
The alternative approach is run a train on the slow line, then build fast lines a piece at a time and then the train can use the slow line for the pieces where there isn't yet a fast line. If you can't go through Tehachapi, then you go over it, slowly, and it's fast everywhere else.
Seismic risk is something I'm not used to dealing with (the parts of Europe with high-speed rail don't really have much in the way of seismology) and I don't really have any sense of how much that will add to cost.
I know that Istanbul opted for a submerged tunnel rather than an undersea tunnel for Marmaray because of seismic risk; other than that, only Sicily, Greece and Portugal have much in the way of seismic activity, and none of those have any high-speed rail as yet.
These all would have been good questions to ask about CAHSR before the first shovel broke ground. But instead we got Jerry Brown who had this vision of the California of the future deciding that by god he wanted this thing and as a very powerful governor no one could say no to him so we all got trapped in this godforsaken boondoggle.
Italy built a high speed line from Florence to Bologna over the Apennines. The pass isn’t quite as high as those surrounding LA, but then again the combined populations of LA and the bay area are greater than those along the Rome-Milan axis.
That’s my understanding as well. This project is a legendary cautionary tale in the planning world. Also Annie Duke discussed this in her recent book “Quit.”
A lot of people complain about the route entering the Bay Area through the Pacheco pass (near Gilroy) rather than the Altamont pass (near Fremont), and a lot of people complain about the route entering the LA area through the Tehachapi pass (taking the dogleg through Palmdale) rather than the Grapevine (coming through Santa Clarita).
It’s probably true that both of these are significant issues, but there are plenty of additional ones.
Sure, but it's not just that the route decisions are bad, it's that they still aren't final! No actual money is committed to building those routes, and it's still possible to build the other routes and connect to Merced and Bakersfield.
That’s pretty interesting, I hadn’t heard that before - I’d had the vague impression that there was an older proposed route that didn’t go through the Central Valley, and re-routing it there (in an attempt to get buy-in from Central Valley lawmakers) was the “big bad call”, but I’m not 100% certain that I’m right about this.
I tried to google up a link or two before I composed that comment, and didn't find any money quote from Drum. But he's probably the most well-known lefty opponent of the project, and, after reading myriad rants about it, he finally wore down my resistance. It's possible the "engineering challenges" stuff was something I picked up in his comment threads.
For the record I remain a big fan of HSR. Indeed I might take a trip down to Shanghai next month, and I'll definitely check train fares before I look into flights. I like watching the countryside go by, and if I'm not time-constrained, I really do prefer the train. It's cheaper, it's more fun, and (as I wrote above) it's really comfortable: no turbulence and MUCH more leg room. I usually splurge on first class (but second class is perfectly nice). I'd love to see the USA one day implement the vision of those continent-spanning HSR fantasy maps we've all seen. But you've gotta plan routes that make sense! (Including ridership, of course, not just engineering viability.)
The best money quote I could find for it from Kevin in 2011:
"Look, I’m sorry, HSR lovers. I love me some HSR, too, but this project is just a fantastic boondoggle. It didn’t even make sense with the original cost estimates, and it’s now plain that it’s going to cost three or four times more than that. What’s more, the ridership estimates are still fantasies, and it won’t be able to compete with air travel without large, permanent subsidies. This is just too much money to spend on something this dumb. It’s the kind of thing that could set back HSR for decades. Sacramento needs to pull the plug on this, and they need to pull it now. We have way better uses for this dough."
And then a few months later, he quotes the LA times when discussing the ridership estimates:
"The rail authority has relied heavily on New York-based Parsons Brinkerhoff, a contractor that helped fund the political campaign for the $9.9-billion bond measure passed by voters in 2008….In October, Parsons submitted the analysis that came up with the $171 billion, a number that initially appeared in the authority’s draft business plan released Nov. 1. In the study, Parsons first estimated how much passenger capacity the system would have at completion in 2033 and then calculated the cost for providing the same airport and highway capacity.
Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with !!!1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year.!!! The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average."
Thanks. I did some searching around, too, after my initial comment (which was relying on memory) and I conclude now that the detail about the "mountain pass" was information provided by some of his commenters, not Drum himself. His take, I think, is largely supportive of Yglesias's thesis.
OK, yes, those estimates are farcical on the numbers that would travel between SF and LA.; the capacity is technically possible, but there's no way that many people ride it: 1000 seats is normal for a 16-car 400m train, and 12tph (a train every five minutes) is a relatively light load for a HSR line - Tokaido Shinkansen and Paris-Lyon LGV both have more than that, probably some in China too (the physical capacity of modern signalling is 20 tph, but you'd never schedule that because you can't catch up if there are any delays; 16 is a reasonable operational approach).
Not completely outside the bounds for what would be possible as the total traffic with a normal 16tph service with multiple destinations in both north and south, which should be achievable, but that's a vastly bigger project.
That's a three-headed line in the north (SF/SJ/Sac), and a line through LA to San Diego in the south, plus a branch to Vegas coming off in the Valley (so you can use the CAHSR line to get from SD/LA or any of the three northern termini to Vegas, and the Vegas line doesn't have to cross mountains). Total passenger numbers might well be in that kind of range, but that's for all possible journeys (ie including trains to Vegas, SD-LA trips, SF-Sacramento trips, and trains from all three northern termini to Los Angeles). SF-LA would be half of the total traffic at most. It might even be a lot less than that depending how busy SD-LA gets - it shouldn't be more than an hour, you can easily run as a 5 minute service (run every train to LA from the north or from Vegas through to SD) and those are both plenty big cities; that could end up being the single most popular route. Especially because you can't get away with charging as much for 100 miles as for 300 (even though it costs nearly the same).
Absolutely agree with the second para. I also had an attempt to work out what Drum had to say and found lots that assumed you already knew what the problem was rather than explaining it (which probably means I didn't go back far enough).
The core problem is that Proposition 1A, the 2008 referendum that voters approved, imposes a series of requirements on CAHSR:
1. It has to take less than 2 hours, 40 minutes between SF and LA, and 2:10 between San Jose and LA
2. It has to have a top speed of 320km/h or higher
3. It has to stop in Merced and Gilroy
4. It has to run at less than 5 minute headways
5. It has to be financially self-sustaining
etc
The reality is that these requirements are just going to make the train extremely expensive and slow to build. It's going to require around 80 km of tunnels through mountains that we have no experience tunneling. Even the Central Valley segments will require lots of expensive land acquisition.
I might point out that many of these requirements were added precisely because the architects of the projects were trying to (drum roll) maximize ridership! A 4 hour LA-SF train could have been constructed much much cheaper, but would not be competitive with flying.
Those are very much "maximise ridership" goals and should be plausibly achievable, though the costs were unrealistic. But you then will want to avoid doing much in the way of gold-plating: if you want to make it financially self-sustaining, you need to run it as directly as possible, you want to minimise the tunnel lengths, you want to avoid as much viaduct as possible and just keep it on the ground, and you want to find sensible ways of doing the land acquisition.
Though 3 and the SJ-specific bit of 1 are not well designed, and 4 could be good or bad depending on how it's interpreted (if it means 12tph SF-LA, then it's bad, that's twice the needed service; if it means 12tph on the main spine of the service, then it's good, force them to actually use the infrastructure). Gilroy forces you to take a route that serves Gilroy at the expense of the East Bay, Modesto, Stockton and Sacramento. I'm not qualified to say whether the Altamont Pass route that it precludes is more or less difficult in engineering terms, but it's definitely superior in transportation terms. The right route from Merced is to continue up the Central Valley, come through the Altamont Pass to Fremont, and then either swing through San Jose to San Francisco, or cross the bay (reinstate the old Dumbarton Rail Bridge) and serve SF and SJ with alternate trains. At 12 tph, you can give both cities 10 minute service, shorten the distance enough you can afford one more stop in the Central Valley, and save money by building less track. The Bay Area line will come off the Valley somewhere around Modesto, and that would mean a relatively short run on pretty easy terrain up to Sacramento, rather than having to build a line all the way from Merced. The connectivity created by doing it this way (which would create SF-Sacramento, SJ-Sacramento and SF-SJ services in addition to the SF-LA and Sacramento-LA service).
Really, they should just do everything. Electrify and upgrade ACE, Capitol Corridor, and San Joaquins, and also get started the Pacheco pass tunnel. Get those learning curves bending by building a lot; there's really no reason to be stingy on this.
"A 4 hour LA-SF train could have been constructed much much cheaper, but would not be competitive with flying."
It looks like a LAX-SFO direct flight is 1:22. With two hours early arrival at the airport, a four hour train ride doesn't seem bad. If the train makes maybe three desirable stops in the two metro areas, door-to-door time for a 4:00 train could beat aircraft for many people.
LAX to SFO is 45 minutes in the air. A normal business traveler arrives at the airport 10 minutes before boarding. Not two hours (unless you just intend to work from the lounge). (Source: I fly over 100 segments a year.)
Gate-to-gate time. TSA recommends 2 hours before flight, I (frequent flyer) aim for 80 minutes at minimum. Arriving at the airport 10 minutes before boarding is very risky and not how 99% of people fly.
Even with Clear and PreCheck, and flying carry-on, if you're not actually at the boarding gate 10 minutes before departure, airline staff will give your seat to a standby passenger, close the door, and turn you away. I say this as someone who, myself, got turned away at the gate 8 minutes before departure.
To be safe, you really need to plan on arriving at the gate a minimum of 15-20 minutes before departure. Add 5-10 minutes of walking, plus another 5-10 minutes to get through security (even with Clear and PreCheck, there will still be a few people in front of you), and you had really better be walking into the airport terminal at least 45 minutes before departure.
Then, of course, LAX and SFO are both notorious for bad traffic, so in order to ensure that you arrive at the airport 45 minutes before the flight even in bad traffic, you have to leave early enough to get there 1:15 before in good traffic., etc.
The only way you can possibly walk into an airport 10 minutes before a flight and expect to get on (absent a flight delay) is if you're boarding a private plane, chartered just for you, a luxury that almost nobody can afford.
One really easy way to improve ridership on transit would be to go back to not letting people smoke crack on the train. I was on the train at about 6:45 this morning and, in addition to the piles of garbage, sticky floors and seats, and abundant suicide-related ads, there were people smoking, doing drugs, and drinking on the train. For the first time in ages, transit police actually did hop on and made them get off. I would guess that they got off and then got on the next train. This isn’t rocket science. We don’t need to hire legions of consultants or create a whole management layer at the transit agency to create a pilot program for crack smoking strategy innovation. We had this figured out ten years ago, and decided we didn’t want to know how to deal with it anymore.
I partially buy it. and speaking here in my personal capacity as an advocate for MD's Purple Line. I'd say right now transit advocates are largely incentivized to make arguments based on the multifaceted political benefits of a projects, e.g. jobs including during construction, small business benefits, etc., with ridership as perhaps the most important factor but typically one part of a three part argument.
Meanwhile, the transit skeptical, if not looking to just kill projects, are looking to save money in absolute terms, not in per rider. For example, a cut to the MD Purple Line cost engineering was going from 6 minute headways to 7.5. Thankfully this is highly fixable, but would definitely fail the ridership test. Similarly, I think Matt's cafe car example is incomplete. A ridership oriented answer would be thinking about how to more cost effectively deliver something riders clearly want. Maybe that's a cart or better setting up to sell bento box equivalents in the stations. NARP and I wouldn't love it, but that seems to be the solution that other countries have settled on.
But I feel like the organizational and permitting part to this is probably an equal part of the problem. Like a huge cost driver on the Purple Line was a lawsuit exploiting the NEPA process and an activist transit skeptical judge forcing a year of delays (also probably underbidding re: stormwater management, CSX being uncompromising, and allegedly slow property acquisition on MD's part). On top of that, the P3 model meant to save costs didn't do enough to resolve conflicts and resulted in an aggressively bidding builder exploiting a poorly chosen clause to walk off the job.
Gov. Hogan made some dubious choices, but he would argue that the P3 would have helped the cost/rider. I think emphasizing cost/rider would greatly help on the incentives front but it will still be a highly painful process with any number of mistakes made in pursuing it. I think we need a handbook of what effective implementing approaches look like from comparative studies. The Eno center does some interesting work here https://www.enotrans.org/article/eno-releases-major-report-on-u-s-transit-costs-and-project-delivery/
The actual solution to the cafe car proposal is (a) longer trains and (b) more frequent trains.
German ICE trains have full-on restaurant cars with waiter service, but they run (or ran before DB had a complete organisation melt-down during covid from which they still haven't recovered) frequently enough that supply was reasonably close to meeting demand.
If you put the cafe car at the end of the train. you don’t even need to lengthen platforms. you just have to tell the diners to move forward before exiting
That would certainly be my preferred solution, I love cafe cats and dining cars and long haul trains that are part of the vacation. I donate to NARP and from the perspective Matt's arguing here I'm probably part of the problem.
WWW
Carts or bentos are a second best solution to me, but it's one a lot of countries have landed on that have much better rail service than the US, admittedly often over more compact regions, e.g. Japan or South Korea, but also any of the Chinese trains I rode in 2007.
Most European long-distance trains have cafes that are less than a whole car - just a counter for service and you take the food back to your seat to eat/drink. Having a second seating area for people eating in addition to their ticketed seat does happen (ICE, as mentioned, some French TGVs, I've seen them in Sweden as well), but is not the normal case.
One thing about any subsidised service is that they have very little excess money. This means that when half or more of the passengers disappear (as in COVID), they don't have any headroom to deal with the problem - if they had a ton of reserves in the bank, then they'd find it easy to just ride it out and get back to normal.
The only difference between non-existent public transport and crap public transport is that the latter will cost a lot of money to deliver and serve only slightly more people than the former. The sigmoid function usefully describes this phenomenon, and is used to model expected public transport usage at a given level of service. You need high quality provision to deliver decent ridership.
The tragedy of bad public transit projects is that it ruins the idea that the government can provide good quality public services. When you see the government sending vast resources to stupid, failed projects like California HSR you realise this. I mean, I read they want to try running battery operated trains pending construction of new electrical infrastructure, which is laughable (https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/05/california-high-speed-rail-standoff/).
From a somewhat more internal perspective, I will say the concern is less about getting yelled at in meetings (though that sucks quite a bit) than it is about trying to complete the project and actually build it, rather than finish a proposal and then being stuck in litigation for a million years (or even just briefly, litigation sucks for the people involved, even the lawyers, usually).
If you've been working on a project long enough to get to litigation, you probably believe in it a fair amount and want it to happen, even if only so the last X months/years of your life haven't been wasted. And annoying the neighbors is an absolutely certain way to ensure that instead of building a project, you spend the next X months/years of your life justifying to a lawyer and then to judges why you annoyed the neighbors.
Yeah, getting yelled at in meetings sucks, but everyone knows it’s part of the deal. This and not getting sued make up a large proportion of a planner’s work.
And yet some of my non-planner friends think this is a cool/fun job!
Amtrak runs the long-distance trains because they are congressionally mandated to. They run the regional corridors (except NEC) in partnership with states. The money from the infrastructure bill for short-distance, high-ridership routes *must* be applied for by states, not Amtrak.
Amtrak does a lot of things wrong, but this is not really a decision they're making.
The more I read MY, the more I settle in to an opinion that an active and well funded state is a good idea in countries where public agencies are well run, like in many countries in Europe and some in Asia.
But at the same time, I get more and more skeptical of giving money to US government agencies. I give MY huge credit for actually calling out and grappling with the problems, but I am not at all persuaded that these issues are fixable.
Is there an example where some set of reforms have turned around a wasteful and unfocused US government effort into an effective one? The only examples I can think of involve the military or wartime mobilization efforts, which don't seem to provide much guidance.
The US Postal Service is an absolute wonder. I have lived on three continents, in a dozen countries (including high-state-capacity places like Ireland and Sweden), and NOWHERE can you send a letter or parcel as fast or affordably to the edges of what is, effectively, a globe-spanning empire-as-nation-state. To your door, even! That's just amazing. And they've been doing it for a century-and-a-half. Against the concerted anti-government instincts of the neoliberal age, which, bizarrely, forces the USPS to both "turn a profit" (despite being a public service) and even to pre-fund its future personnel costs (something that no other public or private entity does).
Another example: The US State Department, including and especially the Passport Agency. They have no budget. Get no love from politicians or the public. And, yet, you can get a US Passport within 24 hours nearly anywhere in the world. And they accomplish it with a smile. I've had to do this many times and I am left in awe of how quietly functional and professional this organization is.
Two years ago, I would have disagreed very strongly. In Sweden, it used to be super convenient to do either a renewal or to get a first time application. You'd get your passport in days, not weeks. And in an emergency it was even better, you could get to the airport, realize your passport had expired, and get an emergency one issued within an hour.
For reasons unknown to me, the whole system collapsed in the past two years, though. Now it is a nightmare. So I'll give the US State Department half credit here. It works fine. But it certainly could work much better.
I'm a dual-citizen (again of a high-state-capacity country) and this is absolutely NOT normal. Overseas consular services for Europeans, even, are generally terrible. And getting a passport or something last-minute takes much longer.
State level agencies generally do a much better job than federal agencies. The exceptions to this are places that are essentially single-party nations: NY and CA.
I'm familiar with state agencies in MA, IN, FL, NJ and they were all pretty good, though to varying degrees. NJ was the worst, but I think that is more the fault of their unusually high number of towns with separate governments.
Shorter: We should push more to the states and less at federal level.
I work for the Federal Government (health) and this resonates with what I see. Government staff are buried under dozens of process requirements (like Small business requirements) and leadership measures success as no one yelled at us, not “did we objectively improve things.”
Exactly. It all comes down to too much community/advocacy/etc. input. To get stuff done well, you need to be able to tell a lot of nice folks to pound sand, even when they ask for stuff that, on its own, is reasonable.
In private sector management, it's understood that goals need to be simple, hard to "game", and focused (i.e. not too many.) In the public sector, however, a new goal is added at every meeting with the groups/advocates/community members, and no one thinks through the tradeoffs to the other 500 goals already on the books. No dare objects, because the culture of those groups is to bite your head off if you do, and most of them haven't managed anything with clear deliverables so don't really understand the trade-offs themselves. Also, most people in government are progressives themselves, so don't want to get on the wrong side, socially, of any particular progressive pet issue.
A lot of these problems are downstream of not having a non-progressive party that cares about government service provision. Most "moderates" don't care enough about government to get involved, so you either align with the groups, or you align with the party that just wants to drown you in a bathtub.
I'll say, I think this overestimates social pressure and underestimates legal pressure. The concern I hear is not usually 'people will be mad at us' but 'mad people sue and I want to get this project done, not sit in court.'
The solution to that is the solution to a lot of other problems: make courts more efficient so people are more afraid of losing in court and less afraid of being sued.
If "sit in court" means "go down to court for two days in a couple of months, explain why they are wrong and the court will agree with you and throw the case out" then people would be much more prepared to go to court.
IMO the story here is that society should be defining the goal via democracy, and government should execute on that goal. The problem is that we leave execution up for political debate as well.
Or...just pick leaders by democracy and let them work. Basically the system as it was envisioned (I think, I'm no historian...)
Yep, you both are describing the micro dynamics of why a government monopoly on rail travel sucks. I agree 100%. But also don’t know anyone looking to get into that business so not sure the options.
And I agree, we could use a labor party to help fix shit like this. We never would’ve been landed with Trump if those interests had been minded anyway.
Very astute observation
Isn't having a party whose basic outlook is premised on handwaving away the existence of inconvenient externalities and minimizing regulatory burdens kind of an odd conceptual fit for urban America? Cities are pretty much externality factories, and leaving the innumerable interpersonal disputes they create up to the court system instead of an ex ante regulatory regime seems like it might even be worse than the regulatory regime itself. Meanwhile mass transit isn't conceptually impossible to privatize but at a minimum has an awful lot of both dependence on public infrastructure and characteristics of a natural monopoly, whereas Libertarianism generally looks askance at the public sector at large.
Note that I'm not saying I don't want an alternative to the urban Democratic machine (bring back the Rockefeller Republicans, I guess?) so much as that I find the Libertarian party / brand to be a particularly unusual proposed standardbearer for one, even if on the margin a great deal of regulatory reform or rollback of public sector over-provisioning would be in line with the Libertarian ethos.
I’m convinced the Republican brand is toast in most cities and that that this could be the doorway for a moderate conservative party to emerge.
Tell us specifically what a 'moderate Conservative party' wants. I bet it would be pretty unpopular. Much like libertarians are outside their little bubble.
In a pure urban government ecosystem, you want the main party competition to be between a technocratic party that concentrates on effective delivery of government services and a "don't forget minority X" party, because that's the main failure mode of technocracy; the second party can be pretty patronage/clientelist because the technocratic party can counter that problem.
Yeah, at least in New York City (and from what I gather this is pretty ubiquitous in urban Democratic politics across the states) clientelism is pretty much in the position of telling technocratic effectiveness to stop hitting itself.
Does anyone know if the various branches of the military operate in a similar way or are they more efficient (e.g., goals more defined, leadership hierarchy more established)? I feel like the Army Corp. of Engineers has a strong reputation -- what's their secret?
Yes and no, largely depending on what the military is doing. The hierarchy is very established and is generally meritocratic (not perfect, but pretty good as large organizations go). You have a pretty clearly-defined set of interests, and these exist to support the primary goal of training readiness or application of foreign policy when deployed. Logistics, communications, etc. are all subservient to the ultimate goal of applying force in one way or another. There are regulations for most anything, which is where I suspect that the Engineers do well--the Army does a pretty good job of collecting and codifying best practices so that most parts of the Army are interchangeable.
Where I think things go off the rails a bit is where each of those supporting functions intersects with the rest of the government, particularly in terms of acquisitions. I was in Army logistics and 80% of my mental energy was spent playing whack-a-mole with whatever the outrage of the day was over.
The systems for getting stuff and using it (mostly repair parts) just isn't very efficient, and the vendors are neither reliable nor fast. Buying stuff commercial off the shelf (COTS) was a nightmare, and required us to prioritize veteran vendors, "green vendors", etc. There was someone always digging about why we hadn't fixed some vehicle that was missing a backordered part for 120 days, as if I could just yell at the vendor and get them to go faster. Lots of wondering why stuff doesn't work when it's brand-new out of the box, or why a random part like a tire costs multiple times what one would expect given its quality. There's basically nothing that can be done about that at the operational level where things actually happen, so you're kind of beholden to this lumbering inefficient system for getting stuff purchased, fixed, disposed of, etc.
Basically it works overall, but there was a lot of wasted energy on busy work that probably didn't materially improve our readiness or efficiency. That's ultimately an intentional tradeoff to create repeatability and interchangeability and generally seems better than other parts of the government, but it's still not great.
Yup, totally agreed. I think they’re an example of where generally competent meritocracy and codified best practices are a really powerful combination. My own experience was in an infantry BCT, just the regular operational Army.
Yup, my time in the Army was the same way. Make trackers green, don't get yelled at by somebody at division, and remember to only buy things from one of the six special interest groups who charge us 1,000% what something should actually cost.
That's clearly better than alternative models (see the Russian military), but surely we can do better.
The trick (for the regulator, not the implementor) for those sorts of purchasing rules is to write in how much of a price premium you pay for them.
I know UK rail franchising had rules where meeting certain criteria would let you treat the bid as being 5% or 10% less than the actual price. These were combined multiplicatively (so if you got 10 of the 10% discounts, it wasn't treated as -100%, ie free, but -65%, ie (0.9)^6). I'm sure that other sorts of purchasing have these same sorts of rules, but rail franchising is one I have actually looked at. Rail franchising was ended because it collapsed over COVID, so these specific rules don't apply any more, but the general system is used in quite a lot of procurement.
If you say "must prioritise veteran/minority suppliers" then they can crank the price up hugely, but if you say "veterans can change 20% more than non-veterans" or whatever, then they know how much they can get away with.
> And importantly, telling agencies to try to hit a half-dozen different goals … doesn’t ensure that all those things will be done simultaneously. What it ensures is that, with no principled way to evaluate projects or say no to things, costs explode.
The cynic in me wants to believe that agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance. If they are solely evaluated by ridership/dollar-spent then they could fail to improve on that metric and be charged with bad decision making. In contrast, if they claim to be balancing numerous unquantifiable objectives, then it’s much harder to criticize their performance. For example, if we point out the low ridership volume then they can point to their progress in expanding access and creating good paying jobs.
And I think there is a general tendency for all leaders and workers to resist objective evaluation. For example, I've seen this criticism applied to the anti-testing movement in education where it is alleged that poor teachers simply want to evade detection.
I’ve also seen this aversion to performance evaluation within the tech industry, particularly within discussions on the tech forum Hacker News. While there are many poor approaches to measuring software developer performance (e.g., lines of code count), there still need to be some objective evaluation. Quality measures can include annual peer review using a rubric of dimensions.
Yet there is commonly fierce objection to any evaluation of software engineers within such discussions. Numerous excuses are given for any proposal, while no alternatives are offered. It seems software engineering is conceived as some impalpable art that cannot be evaluated, even by fellow artists. And this extends to strategies and criteria for interviewing prospective engineers. All commonly used methods, such as whiterboarding code exercises, are castigated as inadequate to measure the intangible brilliance and abilities of engineers.
I just think we all have some natural aversion to being evaluated for fear of failure. Therefore our institutions, both public and private, need to be designed to counteract that tendency.
But finding objective performance metrics is extremely difficult. In sport, we have a perfect record about what a player did in a game. It is still difficult to determine through objective means how well a player did.
In soccer, a player could screw up receiving a pass, but what if the player that passed the ball was more at fault for making a bad pass? What about a forward that scores fewer goals than another forward, but was better off the ball and in defensive play? Statistical techniques are still improving. I recall the book Moneyball stating that baseball fielding didn't matter, which seemed like nonsense then and we now know is definitely nonsense.
In software, there are many things that determine how well a worker did. Subjectively, you know Bob is better than Alice, but how do you know that? What objective criteria can you use?
As a former manager, I’ve spent a lot of time on rubrics for peer review of technical workers. Here’s a recent article from Gergely Orosz about the topic that I generally agree with, “Performance Reviews for Software Developers”, https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/performance-reviews-for-software-engineers/
Off the top of my head, here are some dimensions I’ve commonly seen used
* Technical Skills - At each Eng level, what are the expected capabilities?
* Impact - What degree of contribution is expected for each level?
* Mentorship - For higher levels, the mentorship responsibilities
* Leadership - Again, higher levels, the degree that they should drive the team and interact with other teams
* Collaboration - How well do they help other people get stuff done?
* Interview - For higher levels, how involved should they be in interviewing? How well are their decisions calibrated against other interviewers for the same candidates?
For each dimension, an engineer will be ranked on a scale of 0-5. The rubric will include criteria and examples for each score.
On an annual basis, each team member will review other team members as assigned by their manager. Only the manager sees the results of each review and they combine multiple reviews to create an aggregated performance evaluation. That can then be shared with the team member to learn how well they are performing against expectations and their progress towards promotion.
While never perfect, the rubric is regularly revised in an iterative process using feedback from all team members. The result is a clear description of expectations and current performance for all members on the team.
Frankly, these are solved problems. Sports analytics people have done a ton of work to quantify the value of individual soccer players. You can argue there’s more to do because those evaluations aren’t perfect, but the specific problem of distinguishing a good player on a bad team is not intractable at all.
Same goes for software. Most tech companies I’m familiar with have some form of goal-setting and tell engineers “your job is to move us towards the goal, and that means prioritizing working on impactful projects rather than vanity engineering projects.” Now this won’t work perfectly in every case but it would certainly fit a network-effect business - and if there’s a better example of a network-effects business than a *transit system* then I don’t know what it is.
If a team's job is to reduce a certain kind of defect, and that defect rate actually went up, then everyone on that team is objectively incompetent and they should all be fired. Right?
Not really. You're interested in counterfactuals. What would the defect rate have done without that team? What would the defect rate have done with a newly hired replacement team?
In tech we do some amout of A/B testing, but that's usually on the external-facing product level, and causal inference is not simple to get right.
This boils down to the distinction between “not simple to get right” and “extremely hard to even do”. I’m going to say that it is true that getting this right requires some work but it is eminently doable, particularly for the government given where it’s starting.
Not irrelevant, but much less important than previously thought and hard to measure. The best batter is probably ten wins better than the worst; the best fielder is more like three, so you can live with some really bad fielding to get great batting (which was the insight of that era, if not how Michael Lewis put it in the book).
But we got a lot better at measuring fielding than we were in 2003, which means we can actually tell which fielders are three wins better than the others; when Moneyball was written, we could measure fielding so badly that it took multiple seasons of data to realise that Derek Jeter was a below-average shortstop. Now, we'd know within half a season and he'd have been moved to third base.
But I think it is still fair to criticize the stats that are being gathered. And the measurement of performance as a result of bad stats, bad counting, etc becomes far less useful. In baseball the frame rate is one of the lousiest measures of defensive efficiency and it has been given far more credence than the catcher’s ability to hold runners, call a good game etc. it’s gotten several catchers paid far more than they deserve. You could only discover this when you get to see the pattern of strike/ball calls by umpire (most umps miss badly behind the plate and it doesn’t matter who is catching).
EPA and DVOA measures (don’t get me started on o line stats) are really weak in pro football because the way a defense or offense play against one another naturally ends up being a path dependent game…so we lose repeatability.
Most of these issues revolve around an attempt to quantify the individual allocation to teamwork…I used to be a big fan of the use of these statistics but over time I’ve found them lacking over and over again as opposed to just using your lying eyes.
I’m not sure if there are lessons elsewhere other than that the workers in this case don’t generally make the stats…but maybe that doesn’t help in terms of objective measurement?
Slight tangent but there seem to be pockets emerging of individual win/loss match-ups within team games that are very predictive. For example, the shoulder pad accelerometer data is very predictive for wide receiver 1:1 separation and NFL scouting depts. have this for their teams + most power 5 conferences.
When you work in sales like I do however, there are absolutely no problems with evaluating performance, and there's no way to hide from the evaluation either haha. Your numbers are your numbers- it's crystal clear for both you and management- really anyone could glance at the leader board and see exactly how good everyone is
To be clear- I'm talking retained executive search where the board engages us, pays us a retainer up front, then we look through our network of C-level executives. I'm *not* talking about run-of-the-mill recruiting where they just spam out a bunch of messages for a lower-level position. Retained executive search is like a totally different (and vastly more respected) field than 'regular' recruiters like Robert Half or Aerotek or CyberCoders or whoever
I do executive recruitment now, for CTOs and CIOs and whatnot. In the past I sold commercial real estate
This is certainly something I’ve seen in the private sector. At my large tech company, almost all teams have measurable goals against which they’re judged and held accountable. But one team I worked on explicitly (and successfully) resisted setting goals, citing “we don’t have enough control over the outcomes” as justification. But in retrospect it became clear that setting goals would have meant the team would have been scrapped; the lackeys like us working on that team would have found new jobs in the company, but the leadership would certainly have gotten laid off. Any goals they would have set would have been so ludicrously far off from success that they would constitute an indictment of the leadership of the team.
I think you’ve hit a valid human tendency here.
But also, when this organization is run from the outside, with 1001 interests screaming at you, you tend to serve those interests and do what it takes to balance making everyone happy that’s screaming at you.
What’s required to make this service more appealing is some risk taking and experimenting. This will necessarily piss some people off, so its not well executed by government. You need a profit motive driving or else its necessarily going to be catering to everyone. And as is sadly the case in my experience, nearly everyone has an astonishing lack of vision and appetite for trying new solutions.
I think you're right, the 1 clear metric is actually an advantage in this case though. Every transit official can now shrug their shoulders at all the local screamers and say "sorry it doesn't increase ridership, that goal was set with someone above me, take it up with them."
Tech executives are looking for simple, objective metrics that they can evaluate mechanically at scale. If you had a panel of subject matter experts review each one of your changes in depth, in light of its context, then you could do a pretty good job evaluating SWEs. In practice nobody’s going to pay for that. The closest you can get is asking people about their coworkers. But they don’t want to ask you about your coworkers. They want a report they can run across thousands of people overnight without any judgement calls, arguing, or potential bias. The SWE community rightly contends that there is no such report that would be even vaguely aligned with how practitioners understand being good at their jobs.
Things are a little less dire at the team level since you can check if the product a) was built, b) works well, or c) has the intended effect on the business. However an and b run dangerously close to asking “was the estimate accurate / budget sufficient”? Estimation is a different craft from engineering, and most of us are pretty pessimistic about the possibility of estimating well unless you have already done a very similar thing (in which case why don’t you just reuse it?). Poor quality happens when you are pressured to cut corners to meet an underestimated deadline. And products can fail to make make business impact because they are badly implemented, but more often they fail because they were bad ideas in the first place. You want to hold SWEs accountable for, what, not quitting a team in protest because the product manager’s idea was bad?
I agree with you that "(transit) agency leaders would like to avoid a simple and objective measure of performance", but for a much simpler reason: these investments are rarely justifiable based on that metric. Here in Los Angeles there's huge political will to build out a public transportation system (we voted to raise sales tax to pay for expansion). What we don't have is people willing to ride the trains once they're built. Our newest subway line is estimated to take $435 in upfront spend per trip, per year, which puts the payback period at 300 years for a $1.50 ticket.
If you're in charge of a transit agency, you have your peers saying that LA would be a much better city if it had a public transit network. The people of Los Angeles, to who you're ultimately accountable to, are saying they want trains built (for other people to ride). Even if you were the world's greatest transit genius and could lower costs by 90% to sub-Euro levels, it's still not a great payback on investment.
So what do you do? Pack it up and say it's not worthwhile? Tell the city council to get back to you in 50 years when NIMBY issues have been solved and there's enough density? Nope! You, I, and anyone else hired would do the same thing - build what you can then invent enough new metrics to justify the spend post-hoc.
Just astounding to me there isn’t enormous appetite for those trains with all that infuriating LA traffic
Not enough density, and the density that exists is spread over multiple office and residential hubs which makes each additional route low value-add.
It's relatively easy somewhere like NYC where (pre-COVID) all the jobs were in Manhattan and cheap(er) housing was in Brooklyn or Queens, so you can have a hub & spoke system in downtown. LA doesn't have that center of gravity since jobs are spread out in Santa Monica, Century City, DTLA, El Segundo etc.
Watch - the transit stops will make centers of gravity around them.
I think its a really great investment but will require some of that LA advertising salesmanship to get people rolling into it.
I don’t think this is right. Implicit in building this is a subsidy. The true value of a ride to a given rider is clearly less than $1.50.
The question is: if the true value is $10, is the construction worth it? The fact that it receives an 85% subsidy is kind of irrelevant.
Really excellent point.
I fall into the same thinking often when considering government services and policy, my biz brain I guess. But these are most often not meant to function like a profitable business, but rather to provide for common good…for overall lower costs for society, promotion of unity and order and prosperity too.
Trump and gang tried to push this same thing in terms of the Post Office, and I thought that was/is tremendously short sighted especially as to the speed of commerce for our nation with so much payment and billing still executed by mail.
So the question really becomes, will the cost of construction+ operation cause enough usage to displace the costs of other transit displaced. So costs to consider against that “$10” include fuel+vehicle depreciation+road depreciation+ externalities of carbon pollution from driving+ benefit of reduction of congestion on highways (maybe) +\- commute time benefits for riders.
You're right, it is subsidized - prices probably should be closer to NYC / SF ($2-$3+) level to account for operating costs. Part of that $8.50 is the consumer surplus though, you can't capture all of that.
I believe this has been addressed a couple of times in other slow boring articles but the LA Transit buildout is coming with nearly zero land use changes and this is causing a lot of problems. There's absolutely zero effort going into upzoning around stations, building TOD or doing land value capture for future funding like BART has spent the last decade doing.
It sort of fits into the theory that one reason government is more dysfunctional than it needs to be is that modern GOP has become so hostile to government itself. Famous example is FEMA and "heckava job Brownie". But without buy in from both parties, you get a situation where one party ends up being able to pander to all of its interest groups with impunity with resulting excessive cost overruns.
Classic example and maybe most impactful example is environmentalism (which is obviously related to public transport). Pre 1990, GHWB administration was able to find a more economically efficient way to deal with acid rain because in part they actually believed acid rain is a problem and said government can play a role in solving it. Today, in theory GOP should be the loudest voices in favor of eliminating or reforming zoning or limiting delays caused by environmental impact studies. But instead because of their stance towards government in general, there is this missing voice for reform.
>If Dems are the only ones pulling for transit and applying to work at the agencies
I disagree entirely. This assumes rail is not a huge factor in commerce and freight, which it is, having worked in beverage, it is essential for low-cost density item transportation. Rail is not wholly pushed by Democrats. And the workers of Amtrak, while perhaps skewing urban and low income and therefore lots of minorities, are not wholly Democrats either not by a long shot. I would venture a large majority of Amtrak workers didn’t vote in 2022 elections, but admittedly have as little data as you do on this
I might agree that the cure is worse than the disease, but let's not pretend that the reason that there are a billion forms and reviews is right wing groups nutpicking. Historically there has been a lot of corruption in government and progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s ran repeatedly on campaign promises to clean up government by getting rid of corruption. Similarly in the 60s and 70s, progressives were the driving force behind limiting government power to bulldoze communities by instigating environment and community reviews. They were the instigating force behind these requirements far more than right wing groups.
I’ll generally agree with this. My general conclusion (when I was a government employee) was that the many measures in place to stop very low level fraud actually were more expensive than the potential fraud they were combatting.
I think its perfectly fine to get mad at right wing groups for lots of things. But this doesn't make sense to me. Most right wing groups generally don't want more red tape, they want government to get out of it entirely - often foolishly!
But its progressives who use forms and procedures to rationalize or defend government action.
Many of the places where this is the worst are places where right wing groups have no power at all. If they were behind this at all, it wouldn't be AS bad there. But since this is primarily driven by progressives - its the worst where they have the most power.
Reducing antisocial behavior on public transit would probably increase ridership.
I think you can make a case that this is also about ridership. I like the Jane Jacobs theory that the best way to police antisocial behavior is to have lots of people around. A subway car with 1 crazy person and 90 not-crazy people feels much safer than a car with 1 crazy person and 10 not-crazy people.
yes but having 0 crazy people is a reasonable goal (planes seem to do *okay* at this)
Planes are a terrible enough comparison so as to be useless. You literally need to go through a security screen to get on a plane.
Do you have a lot of experience riding transit? I really do not mean this as a slight, but if that comparison even occurs to you, it makes me think you are not someone who has ever used transit regularly. It's just not the same thing at all.
I suspect this is a reason that light rail ridership in Los Angeles refuses to take off. The ratio of unpleasant people to normal commuters is just too high and that deters other potential commuters from giving it a try and thus changing that ratio for the better.
This is the classic feedback loop of a social network: the antisocial person reduces ridership, which causes fewer people to be around, which amplifies the ridership-reducing effects of the antisocial person. There’s a reason social/commercial network businesses tend to focus on user growth above all else (including revenue/profit more often than not): once you’re in that downward spiral you’re in trouble. Conversely if you can sustain an “upward spiral” you can make enormous money.
There has been considerable debunking of the Kitty Genovese story: https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/how-the-false-story-of-kitty-genovese-s-murder-went-viral.html
I think this would be particularly effective on the west coast. Once Covid hit the busses were filled with homeless people. The people who cleaned the busses were finding lots of dirty needles. The number of discarded needles declined significantly… because people switched to fentanyl. And people smoking fentanyl on transit became a thing.
One thing that was very frustrating was that these perfectly rational concerns were dismissed as the obsessions of the privileged. And we should just ignore it because the people doing stuff linke that must be desperate. Except that the people who were most upset about this were not affluent. Often they weren’t white. And the people excusing this antisocial behavior tended to be people who didn’t take transit.
This is the biggest issue reducing ridership and there's no easy solution.
I agree its an issue, but the biggest? I would say poor frequency and bad routes are a much bigger issue in reducing ridership than anti-social behavior. Not to mention antisocial behavior becomes less of a problem with higher ridership- more of a buffer.
It certainly could be a problem in some cities.
There are easy solutions, but those solutions aren't supported by voters where public transit is prevalent.
what are those easy solutions though?
Cops on every bus --> super expensive and police state-ish
Fewer antisocial people --> mass incarceration is worse
Some social credit situation --> administrative/logistical overhead
Higher prices for fares --> lower ridership overall
CCTV on buses is much cheaper than cops on buses. And having the ability to spot trouble and route a cop to the bus and have CCTV as undisputable evidence goes a long way. Every bus in London has CCTV, for instance.
Also provide an easy, fast, anonymous way for people to report antisocial behavior. When a report is received, footage from the time and vehicle can be viewed to figure out who caused the problem and their pass/credit card/email can be blocked from future use.
Definitely--on the L in Chicago, you have to get up and press an obvious "help" button. Good luck not becoming the latest object of attention for whatever crazy shit is happening on the train!
Some mix of 1, 2 & 4. They are easy, but not supported.
that's the problem -- reducing antisocial behavior isn't an idea, it's a solution. How you actually do that seems impossibly hard.
You put some people in housing (we need more housing) other people in mental health care facilities and others in prison. All of the anti social behavior I have seen on public transit comes from mentally ill or drug addicted (or both) homeless people. So much doesn’t get fixed until the American metro areas with massive homeless problems deal with the issue directly and not commission the 134th “study group” to analyze the issue and do nothing. I’m sick and tired of people saying it’s too hard to solve. It’s not, it just requires some grit and willpower y’all. That’s true of a lot of problems in America.
I was about to write exactly this, then read down.
Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
They should have rotten fruit thrown at them every goddamned time they dare to open their imbecilic, ignorant mouths.
Only once that entire set of beliefs is a social net negative and not some kind of post-scarcity, status-elevating hipster stance, will people stop holding it.
>>Start shunning the (universally privileged and often white) faction who regard the basic maintenance of law and order as a sin.
Yes, it's incredibly annoying that a certain section of people treat tolerating antisocial behavior on transit as a badge of city life authenticity...but they're not themselves the ones who are the problem
I don't mean those folks, except insofar as they overlap with the ones who actively believe the police enforcing the law is bad and the very concept of coercion is illegitimate regardless of what it's in service of.
In NYC, at least, Plenty of antisocial behavior is *also* engaged in by unusually able-bodied young men who do acrobatics to music. This is a combination of “not enough cops” as well as the (usually extremely minor, IME, I don’t get the impression it’s especially lucrative, but it’s probably a lot more fun for the doers of it than working in an Amazon warehouse) financial support of a small number of riders for it.
I like buskers; I don't think their behavior qualifies as anti-social.
I want to just sit (or, more likely, stand) and listen to my audiobook in peace instead of being involuntarily subjected to shitty loud music (also, I prefer to not to risk being kicked in the face). This is, conveniently, also the societal consensus and unambiguous law. I'm pretty sure "breaking the law against doing exactly what you're doing in order to cause a nuisance for a car full of people who didn't ask for it in hopes of maybe getting a few dollars" counts as anti-social behavior.
(Also, I don't think "Showtime" belongs in the same conceptual bucket as sitting-with-a-guitar busking.)
A couple months ago I was on the Seattle light rail at 7 am and a man was staring at me and masturbating. Fortunately he got off when the fare enforcement people got on.
I wasn’t in danger but it was gross and really gave my day a lousy start. The guy seemed homeless and was likely on drugs. this is one of those lousy things that happen to women. We should still try to make it as rare as possible and kick people off the train or bus whe. They do this
I don't think it's a lack of grit or will. I don't think it's bureaucratic sclerosis. I definitely don't think it's a handful of overly earnest, naive hippies, as David R. suggests below. It's money. That's why they commission 134 study groups: the appearance of action on a problem that is too expensive to begin solving. This country needs millions of mental health, drug treatment, elder care, and homeless shelter beds. It needs hundreds of thousands of new psychologists, nurses, orderlies, guards, social workers, and probation officers. It is all massively expensive. The money isn't there, there is no constituency demanding that those services be provided, and no one wants to raise the taxes needed to make any of it happen. And we've allowed these problems to become so big, even if we started doing everything we needed tomorrow it would be years before the public effects would be noticeable. Charles Adams wants to round up the crazies, and brags that the governor is providing 50 new beds. 50 beds? It's spitting in the wind.
It seems that requiring (and enforcing) a fare is a good step, anecdotally free public transit tends to attract people who are unpleasant to be near.
A clear means to report antisocial behavior and a quick way to block problem people from using transit would help. "If someone is behaving badly on the train, text us at 888-555-1234" signs. Use cameras to confirm the problem and ban any passes/credit cards problem people might use to access transit.
Definitely not true. If you’re in NYC and antisocial people deter you from taking the train, you’re going to be effectively deterred from leaving your house. The single biggest cause of low ridership is that the trains are slow with long headways and frequent delays. Removing all the homeless people from the NYC transit system would probably have about as much effect as making the trains 3% faster.
There actually is an easy-ish solution. It's a) have a critical mass of riders and b) have effective transit policing (which doesn't mean a cop in every bus or train car; it's more like "enough cops that people know they're around + good emergency response mechanisms)."
And I know it's an easy-ish solution because it was effectively implemented in most American cities with OK-to-good transit - NYC, SF, DC, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia - from about the 1990s until Covid. When Covid happened, ridership plummeted, and it's only partially recovered. Crime went up, and I think you could argue policing has become less effective. So, fewer riders + more crime in general + less effective policing = more antisocial behavior on transit, at least proportionally.
And this was effective, too! At least at first: in most of these cities ridership went up in the 90s and the 2000s, but it stagnated in the 2010s, even though transit was still largely perceived as safe. There are several reasons for this, but I think a big one is that American transit, even in cities with good-by-US-standards transit, actually isn't that good. The low-hanging fruit was gone and operations had to be improved.
In cities outside of those six plus maybe a couple of others, I refer you to point a) above. In Austin or Cleveland or Miami, transit ridership is a rounding error, and skewed towards people who are unable to drive or afford cars, so of course you are going to see proportionally more disorder on transit. Jane Jacobs has her flaws, but the "eyes on the street" thing is a real insight, as anyone who has ever walked down a deserted street at night can attest. So more riders would especially help solve the problem in these cities!
But as someone who rode the NYC subway almost every day for 15 years in the 2000s and 2010s, basically no one outside of very very sheltered people from the outer suburbs and poorly-informed tourists thought of the subway as unsafe. That's not to say that there was literally zero crazy people. But it was - correctly - viewed as not something that one should be concerned about. There were a few times riding the subway when I was made to feel kind of uncomfortable due to a crazy person, but I literally never felt like I was actually threatened.
There is absolutely an easy solution.
And increasing reliability. I don’t take public transit in the Bay Area because I’ve been stranded too many times when the bus has just not shown up. How am I supposed to rely on public transit when there’s a one in five chance it won’t arrive or will arrive late?
I agree with everything you've written here, but you've focused, perhaps, on the wrong anecdotal examples in the NY Subway expansion. The choice to tunnel instead of cut-and-cover wasn't the main reason for cost-overruns. Nor was opting for the double-wide station model. These things certainly added costs, but compare them to similar projects in other countries and see that you could have all the things and still avoid the cost-disease in American-style transit.
Case-in-point: the MASSIVE, MULTIPLE-tunnel-digging project that's unfolding to expand several lines of the Stockholm metro as we speak. (One right next to my home and I don't notice it at all). You've already mentioned, I believe, how Swedish rail is roughly 1/10th per km the cost of American rail construction. It's a similar story for the very difficult/expensive work of digging tunnels DEEP underground in the archipelago that is Stockholm, an old city with many of the same issues as NYC, plus far less tolerance for disruptive surface noise. Also, all of these expansion projects have included stations and auxiliary offices/maintenance facilities that are generally larger and nicer than the grubby and cramped NYC Subway. So, how can Sweden extend three separate, really nice and spacious subway lines via tunneling in its biggest city under budget and ahead of schedule?
Clearly there are other reasons that are more salient than the decision to tunnel or not. Chief among them, seemingly, are all the things you've written about previously: entrenched NIMBYism, weaponizing of environmental reviews, multiple-juristiction governance, lack of economies of scale in one-off projects (Sweden is constantly rolling out these projects in modular fashion, leaving an existing production base and experienced labor force), and a budgetary process that is really short-termist and volatile, with constantly shifting priorities and budgets.
My take-away from your (extremely informative, by the way) comment is that, at the end of the day, Sweden **really** values the particular public service in question (and so makes getting it right a massive priority) and America, alas, does not.
One factor that's very consistent with Matt's original essay: The Swedish transit model very much focuses on ridership.
There's an expansive metro system in Stockholm, plus trams, ferries, commuter light rail, and legacy narrow-gauge commuter rail, and buses. Between them, you simply don't need a car anywhere in the city, inner suburbs, or even in many of the outer suburbs/exurbs. That's justified by the relative population density of Stockholm Metro Region. There ridership of all these systems is high and so is the performance. The budget isn't just in the build, either, but also in the maintenance, which helps keep them safe, functional, and decent to use. So people ride them because they're affordable, convenient, and pleasant. Which makes it easier to sell investment and usage of expansions.
Crucially, unlike in the US, national and local transit planning is also very proactive, planning out where the demand will be in the 2030s and 2040s, not where the unmet demand has been for the last few decades that we only now, latterly, meet when it's an emergency. So, Stockholm's current active transit projects will, some of them, not even finish until 2040, serving areas that aren't even developed or upzoned yet.
But Sweden doesn't just have some big government fetish for transit. The investments are prudent and meet actual or reasonably expected future demand. Stockholm's is the country's only underground metro. There isn't one in the country's second- and third-largest cities. Which makes sense, given their smaller populations. These other, smaller cities have trams, light rail, and buses. Which are also optimized by ridership and with performance in mind. Which, again, feeds a positive feedback loop of people riding transit because it works and is affordable.
All is not ideal, though. When it comes to intercity passenger rail, the performance/affordability is merely decent. We have a single high-speed rail line that goes from Stockholm to Oslo, but it's only marginally faster, in practice, than the regular one, for the same reasons as Acela doesn't leave the Northeast Regional in the dust: frequent stops, weather-related delays, relatively high cost, and navigation of multiple jurisdictions (in this case, including crossing an international border). Long-distance rail in Sweden runs into the same demographic/geographic problem as the US, with a huge country and sparse population, especially in its "frontier half" (which here, is the North, rather than the West). Unlike with Amtrak, though, Sweden's public rail system doesn't bother serving areas where there isn't population/demand. You can take the train overnight way up to the Arctic Circle, yes, which is IMO really cool, but only to areas that are relatively heavily populated or touristy. Even there, the passenger performance isn't nearly as good with the more densely-laid systems in the population centers, but, compared to Amtrak, it's a delight. It's not really billed as a commuting alternative to flying because it isn't. Long-distance rail here is not glamorous, but it does the job it's intended to: mostly moving tourists and families around. Conversely, Amtrak tries to please everyone to garner as much interest-group support as possible and ends up pleasing nobody.
Gothenburg metro has a population slightly over a million, less than the population of tucson or Oklahoma City, and a good chunk less than colombus
New York has a multi billion dollar agency whose main job is running the system and developing projects. Who else should be valuing this stuff?
Not sure I quite understand your point. The MTA serves something like 13 million New Yorkers—a clear and substantial majority of that state's voters. If improved service were a sufficiently compelling goal for New York voters, this priority could be made clear to politicians in that state (upon pain of losing their jobs). Mostly, this hasn't happened.
Mind you, greater federal support would help. I'd guess the transit operations of Paris/London/Tokyo/Beijing/Stockholm/Berlin/Taipei enjoyed more national government support than any transit system in America does (strictly a guess). But this, too, would require more support from American voters.
At the end of the say, stuff voters don't value tends not to be provided.
New York State is a bigger, richer state than Sweden. There's no reason for New York to expect or need federal assistance with building local transportation infrastructure.
According to CBO, about 1/6th of transit spending in the US is provided by the federal government. I'd be surprised if this proportion was usually lower in other countries. I guess one could make the case that the national government shouldn't spend anything on transportation. But if it does spend money on transportation, it seems extreme to argue *public* transportation should be ineligible for this money.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57940
For national, interstate transportation, there absolutely is a federal role and need, including to override and break local roadblocks from too many warring local levels of govt. Congress even has the power to directly condemn and take private property for the purpose of building national transportation, which it should not be afraid to use.
But for local transit, like subways and buses, there's no need to add further complexity and even more cooks in the kitchen by creating a situation where even the federal stars have to align before a project can be built.
Do candidates for political office in New York (city and state) compete by championing different ideas for projects? Would someone lose re-election because they didn't run the subway well?
No, Cuomo resigned because of his penchant for sexual harassment rather than because he faced an electoral risk from running Andy Byford out of town.
Cuomo and De Blasio certainly had their own ideas of how a flashy but low ridership transit project might improve their reputation. (Subway to LaGuardia or light rail along the waterfront respectively.)
The subway to LaGuardia wasn't even abstractly a stupid idea. The route just made no sense!
Q70 bus!
If I were dictator of transportation in New York, I'd close LaGuardia and build a new airport somewhere in Westchester County.
My ideal NY transit system would have frequent regional rail running through three suburban hubs (like how Jamaica works for LIRR) with each of those hubs connected to an airport (EWR and JFK plus the new one), with all trains running through Manhattan, so every train passes through two of these three subs and through Penn Station between them. Merge the subway with PATH to cover the area between the three hubs, and have the regional rail go out to the edge of the metro area. Run HSR through NY on the NEC path, and have a junction somewhere in NJ for a line headed west to Cleveland for Chicago, and one in Westchester for a line to Albany (for Toronto and Montreal).
If you can get through-running between NJ Transit and LIRR, then you've connected the airtrain networks at Newark and Jamaica - and I suspect you've improved transportation possibilities for many hundreds of thousands of residents of both suburban areas, which is much more important than the number of people who are going between the airports on any day.
Political control of the subway was take away from New York City during the control board era, I believe. So I don't think so, the MTA is more of a political appointee combined with career government employee service.
Well, NYC voters do also vote in state-level elections, but they only vote Democrat, and the incumbency advantage is steep. However I’m not sure that laying mismanagement of the subway at the feet of the state/city management split has as much explanatory power as one might expect, because City voters are incredibly tolerant of terrible governance.
A big reason the Swedish project is much cheaper is the institutional capacity of Swedish agencies to do design work in-house and only contract out the build, rather than U.S. agencies that rely on contractors for everything.
That seems to be an operative factor. It's not only really expensive to "reinvent the wheel" with every single transit project (that really should be a standard template with some localized configuration), but it's also a big learning curve for every one of the many contractors and subcontractors who get a piece of the action. Just managing all the procurement, contracting, and sub-contracting, itself, adds to the cost.
And why not just cut-and-paste the specs for all these projects? Subways, light rails, and trams are all mature technologies. Even high-speed-rail is mature. Every city in the country doesn't need to have a completely custom, bespoke transit system created from scratch by private contractors with thin experience delivering!
Maximizing ridership is what *should* happen, but two thoughts on what *is* happening:
1. The main cause of low ridership routes is not ‘planners not wanting to be yelled at in a public meeting,’ though of course that does happen. It’s that agencies have formal policies, approved by their governing bodies – which in most places means elected officials – setting out minimums for service coverage and frequency. So the planners have to first cover their entire service area at this minimum level, and only then go back with whatever resources remain and add more service in high-ridership corridors.
2. There’s a real status quo bias in the federal Title VI analysis that any agency has to do before implementing a major service change. Even if the existing network is sub-optimal from a total ridership perspective, reallocating those resources without causing a disparate impact on a particular group of riders can be tough.
I came here to make a similar point. Lawmakers are incredibly bad at creating clear and specific directives. When I was in government, we constantly struggled to interpret laws, rules, and regulations and rarely got any clarification. The postings that did clarify rules were so extremely specific that they really only applied to a few narrow situations.
+1. Planners rarely get to actually plan anything; these decisions are virtually always driven by agency/electoral politics.
Many sectors could be improved through focusing on simple, utilitarian goals. Take personal injury law.
People who are injured in accidents that are not their fault need medical care and replacement of lost income. Yet people need these same things regardless of who caused the accident. Any person with bad enough morbidities needs these things! The tort system spends a lot of money trying to distinguish between deserving and undeserving victims. Yet the results are completely arbitrary and don’t provide much security. Get hit by a UPS truck and you will get a significant payout, though you’ll only get 60 cents on the dollar after you pay your lawyer and experts. Get paralyzed by a driver with minimum coverage and you’ll only get $25k even if you lost $3M in future wages. Get screwed by a congenital condition, and you are left to the tender mercies of the welfare state.
The project of distinguishing “deserving” from undeserving victims does have some benefits. It encourages safe driving, discourages corporations from hazardous activities, etc. However, it doesn’t do these things very well. If the tort system were a highly effective way of incentivizing safety, we wouldn’t need DUI prosecutions or speeding tickets or even drivers licenses, an insurance mandate would be sufficient and the market could operate. Lawyers don’t often question the system because we are trained that victims should be made whole and the system is lucrative for established lawyers. My point is that intuitive goals like “make victims whole” are often a) not served very well by the status quo and b) subordinated to the interests of insiders.
>>The carless Americans who also don’t live near good transit are a very marginalized group<<
This one thousand percent.
And the situation brings to mind one of the worst takes of my own political tribe, namely the one that villfires Uber and Lyft.
They're not perfect, but Uber/Lyft are a godsend for folks who, for whatever reason, don't own cars. I remember talking to an Uber driver a few years back in Silicon Valley who informed me (I'd guess truthfully, but who knows?) that a lot of folks in that region were eschewing car ownership, because a car-free life featuring a lot of Uber fares saved money on net once the costs of car ownership were eliminated. Also, as an expat who is contemplating a return to the States, the existence of these services does rather expand the footprint of plausible destinations (how are normal people buying cars these days in the USA? Talk about sticker shock!).
Uber and Lyft prices are in no way stable and seem to be heading nowhere but up. You better be able to do a lot of things on bicycle or public transit. Two ride services to work and back a day at $40 for 225 days a year is $9,000 and you haven't been to the store or dropping kids off or anything.
Yes, but the point is that if you have Uber and Lyft available, then you only need to be able to do 95% of trips on bike or transit, while without them you need to be able to do 100% of trips that way. Those last 5% are often really hard to eliminate, so this can be a huge help.
You’re thinking about that wrong. When I was in graduate school, I lived in Seattle without a car. Overall public transit in Seattle is okay. It’s easy to use to get to class at UW or to commute downtown, but it’s often hard to get other places. So I would take the bus to and from class everyday, but take a couple Ubers a week to things like doctor’s appointments, big box stores, visiting friends, etc. Without Uber, I would have simply bought a car, because I’m not willing to spend an hour each way on two buses to go two miles to visit my friends.
Pretty much experience in 2020, when I was living in Seattle (some of it in U District, as it happens). Walked and took the bus quite a bit, and supplemented with Uber. I'd say that's their sweet spot: they enable people who live in already-pretty-walkable locations to hold out longer in terms of buying a car.
Also in my area $40 is closer to the one-way cost (assuming you tip, because of *course* we had to introduce tipping to ride services…) for, like, a 5 mile journey, which just makes the option of forgoing car ownership that much less attractive.
Yeah I really enjoy my car-free life.... as a 25-year old single dude living in New York City who loves walking. Not sure Uber/Lyft can ever be expected to make the lifestyle viable for people in areas with less ubiquitous public transit, particularly since these areas likely tend to also be ones where Uber/Lyft are least cost effective
Uber and Lyft can make a big difference for peoples health too. In some places Medicaid and Medicare were paying for Uber or Lyft rides to get people to their doctors appointments. It was a win-win
Great points, but really bad for my mood.
It was tremendously frustrating to see Washington Metro spend $45 million on free bus service when frequency and route availably are more important.
>>But slow, expensive projects don’t become unbearably slow and unbearably expensive thanks to one big bad call <<
I'm a frequent reader of well-known California-based pundit Kevin Drum (I believe he and Matt are acquainted). IIRC, Drum is more or less of the opinion that there was indeed "one big bad call" that doomed California's HSR from the get-go: the project, because of horrendous engineering challenges flowing from the region's geography (something about a mountain pass in the path of the only route between LA and SF that really makes economic sense), was simply never very viable.
I don't possess the engineering chops (to say the least) to assess this claim, but in full disclosure I'm a big fan of bullet trains, and every time I ride one (vastly more comfortable and fun than flying; and they're miraculously conducive to napping) I think to myself "My fellow Americans don't know what they're missing."
But even the HSR-obsessed Chinese mostly don't build them where the engineering problems are excessive, I reckon.
Mountain passes aren't necessarily an impossible problem (there are four different HSR routes under the Alps either built or under construction: Mont d'Ambin, Lotschberg, Gotthard, Brenner).
The problem with CAHSR is mostly that there is a political imperative to build something, rather than one to move passengers between LA and SF, so Bakersfield-Merced makes sense, because that's the easy bit and the politicians get to cut a ribbon and say "look what we built".
If you look at a difficult-terrain line built by someone competent, well: let's look at the French-Italian line from Lyon to Turin. The only bit under construction at the moment is the Mont d'Ambin (Monte d'Ambino in Italian) tunnel. That's because that will take far longer than the rest of the line, so there is no point starting anything else until the tunnel is well progressed. The comparatively easy bits above ground from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Lyon and Susa to Torino are mostly planned, but there are still some disputes around Susa on the Italian side.
If you look at the CAHSR project, the hard bits that will take a long time to build are the two mountain crossings, one from SF/SJ to the Central Valley and one from LA to the Central Valley, and possibly an urban tunnel into Los Angeles Union Station (San Francisco can be entered along the Caltrain corridor). None of those are even planned, much less under construction. Instead, they have massively overspent on the "easy" bit, from Bakersfield to Merced along the Central Valley and they aren't even trying to do the hard bits.
This means that politicians will get to cut a ribbon on something in 2030 or so - and those politicians are unlikely to much care what they cut the ribbon on. If they had started by agreeing the routes into SF and LA, they'd have to make hard decisions, like whether to run the line to SF via San Jose, or to take a shorter mountain crossing by coming up the Valley to Modesto or Stockton, whether to serve the East Bay at all, or to expect passengers to ride BART to the Transbay Terminal. At the LA end, whether to come in via the I-5 route through Santa Clarita, to come through Palmdale, or to take the easiest mountain crossing around San Bernadino. Also, do you build new track all the way to LAUS, or can the HSR share track with Metrolink in the LA area?
All of those decisions will annoy people, whether that's residents who will end up living near a railroad line and dealing with noise, or people who will have to live next to a construction site, or people who want to use one route and not the other route - e.g. if you live in the East Bay, you probably would prefer to have a station in (probably) Fremont or Hayward than have to ride BART to the Transbay terminal or San Jose. If you live in San Jose, you'd prefer all the trains to come through San Jose rather than being on a branch line off the main route through the East Bay and get half as many trains as if it went direct. But it's not possible to do both, so a politician would have to decide. At the Los Angeles end, the Santa Clarita route is the shortest and fastest, but wouldn't stop between Burbank and Bakersfield; the Palmdale route serves Palmdale, and also is a much more natural fit with a potential line to Las Vegas. Victorville/San Bernadino is the route to LV if that was all you were building, so would make sense if LA-LV had been built first and then LA-SF was being connected off the back of it. It also serves more intermediate spots, but omits Burbank and also is both slower and costs more. Then there are questions on whether these lines will be above ground or in tunnel through the LA metro area. Can they run on Metrolink track, can they parallel Metrolink track, do we have to build underground platforms at LAUS? Until the route into LA Union Station is defined, planning can't start on the line out of it (through Orange County to San Diego), so all of that is completely on hold.
Merced-Bakersfield is the maximum line that can be built without making any of these decisions. So that's what they are actually building, because it lets them duck these decisions, pass them on to the next governor, the next mayor.
These aren't unsolvable engineering problems. The Chinese built an HSR line in Tibet. The Europeans are building four tunnels through the Alps. What they require, though, is a politician who will actually make a decision, take the criticism of the people left out and the people disrupted on the chin and build the actual track. Instead, they've taken the budget for the actually expensive bits of the line and spent it on buying off complainants on the bits of the line that should have been cheap. Much of it is being built on viaduct that could have been on the level, for instance. And now there is no money left to build the two mountain tunnels that should have been the first items on the budget.
As an aside, one of the design problems is what they do when the rail route splits a farm.
To give a simplified example, suppose you have two farms each with two fields, the farms are A and B, and they look like this:
A1 A2
B1 B2
The rail route runs up the middle of that.
If you build a ground-level line, then the farms are now disconnected, and the farmer has to travel to the nearest crossing (which, for a high-speed line, means a bridge, as level crossings are unsafe at high speeds) to cross over to the other half of his farm.
The CAHSR solution: build on a viaduct so the farmer can cross under the viaduct.
UK's HS2's solution: build a bridge for each farm (cheaper).
The French LGV solution: make the farmers do a land-swap, so one farmer ends up with A1 and B1, and the other with A2 and B2. Now they don't need to cross the tracks (cheapest).
AIUI, the Chinese solution is just to not care about the farmer whose land is split. If they want to do a land-swap, they can, but China isn't going to care one way or the other.
This comment is better than most articles in Trains Magazine or the NY Times.
>>Mountain passes aren't necessarily an impossible problem<<
For sure. I don't think anyone's suggesting that the hard bits in question (I looked it up after I posted; it's the Tehachapi passage I was thinking of) are literally not solvable from a an engineering standpoint, just that they're catastrophically expensive. In the case of Tehachapi passage, the claim some are making is that seismic risk is what is adding an extra dimension of unaffordability.
Anyway, if the extension to LA is cancelled because it ends up being a tunnel too far in terms of cost, the project will go down in history as wasteful on a colossal scale (there's zero reason to build HSR in California is that state's largest city isn't served). My takeaway is: given the extreme difficulty of building any kind of transport infrastructure in America, a less technically demanding (ie cheaper) project should have been the country's first major effort in this regard. Somewhere with flatter terrain and and also less NIMBYism (Texas comes to mind).
Agreed that if you can't get to LA, then the whole thing is a waste of time. Which is why that should be the first bit to get built, not the last.
The alternative approach is run a train on the slow line, then build fast lines a piece at a time and then the train can use the slow line for the pieces where there isn't yet a fast line. If you can't go through Tehachapi, then you go over it, slowly, and it's fast everywhere else.
Seismic risk is something I'm not used to dealing with (the parts of Europe with high-speed rail don't really have much in the way of seismology) and I don't really have any sense of how much that will add to cost.
I know that Istanbul opted for a submerged tunnel rather than an undersea tunnel for Marmaray because of seismic risk; other than that, only Sicily, Greece and Portugal have much in the way of seismic activity, and none of those have any high-speed rail as yet.
These all would have been good questions to ask about CAHSR before the first shovel broke ground. But instead we got Jerry Brown who had this vision of the California of the future deciding that by god he wanted this thing and as a very powerful governor no one could say no to him so we all got trapped in this godforsaken boondoggle.
Italy built a high speed line from Florence to Bologna over the Apennines. The pass isn’t quite as high as those surrounding LA, but then again the combined populations of LA and the bay area are greater than those along the Rome-Milan axis.
That’s my understanding as well. This project is a legendary cautionary tale in the planning world. Also Annie Duke discussed this in her recent book “Quit.”
A lot of people complain about the route entering the Bay Area through the Pacheco pass (near Gilroy) rather than the Altamont pass (near Fremont), and a lot of people complain about the route entering the LA area through the Tehachapi pass (taking the dogleg through Palmdale) rather than the Grapevine (coming through Santa Clarita).
It’s probably true that both of these are significant issues, but there are plenty of additional ones.
Sure, but it's not just that the route decisions are bad, it's that they still aren't final! No actual money is committed to building those routes, and it's still possible to build the other routes and connect to Merced and Bakersfield.
That’s pretty interesting, I hadn’t heard that before - I’d had the vague impression that there was an older proposed route that didn’t go through the Central Valley, and re-routing it there (in an attempt to get buy-in from Central Valley lawmakers) was the “big bad call”, but I’m not 100% certain that I’m right about this.
I tried to google up a link or two before I composed that comment, and didn't find any money quote from Drum. But he's probably the most well-known lefty opponent of the project, and, after reading myriad rants about it, he finally wore down my resistance. It's possible the "engineering challenges" stuff was something I picked up in his comment threads.
For the record I remain a big fan of HSR. Indeed I might take a trip down to Shanghai next month, and I'll definitely check train fares before I look into flights. I like watching the countryside go by, and if I'm not time-constrained, I really do prefer the train. It's cheaper, it's more fun, and (as I wrote above) it's really comfortable: no turbulence and MUCH more leg room. I usually splurge on first class (but second class is perfectly nice). I'd love to see the USA one day implement the vision of those continent-spanning HSR fantasy maps we've all seen. But you've gotta plan routes that make sense! (Including ridership, of course, not just engineering viability.)
The best money quote I could find for it from Kevin in 2011:
"Look, I’m sorry, HSR lovers. I love me some HSR, too, but this project is just a fantastic boondoggle. It didn’t even make sense with the original cost estimates, and it’s now plain that it’s going to cost three or four times more than that. What’s more, the ridership estimates are still fantasies, and it won’t be able to compete with air travel without large, permanent subsidies. This is just too much money to spend on something this dumb. It’s the kind of thing that could set back HSR for decades. Sacramento needs to pull the plug on this, and they need to pull it now. We have way better uses for this dough."
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/californias-hsr-boondoggle-now-even-more-boondoggly/
And then a few months later, he quotes the LA times when discussing the ridership estimates:
"The rail authority has relied heavily on New York-based Parsons Brinkerhoff, a contractor that helped fund the political campaign for the $9.9-billion bond measure passed by voters in 2008….In October, Parsons submitted the analysis that came up with the $171 billion, a number that initially appeared in the authority’s draft business plan released Nov. 1. In the study, Parsons first estimated how much passenger capacity the system would have at completion in 2033 and then calculated the cost for providing the same airport and highway capacity.
Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with !!!1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year.!!! The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average."
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/california-hsr-now-even-more-ridiculous/
I couldn't bold in comments, so added the exclamation points as substitutes.
Thanks. I did some searching around, too, after my initial comment (which was relying on memory) and I conclude now that the detail about the "mountain pass" was information provided by some of his commenters, not Drum himself. His take, I think, is largely supportive of Yglesias's thesis.
OK, yes, those estimates are farcical on the numbers that would travel between SF and LA.; the capacity is technically possible, but there's no way that many people ride it: 1000 seats is normal for a 16-car 400m train, and 12tph (a train every five minutes) is a relatively light load for a HSR line - Tokaido Shinkansen and Paris-Lyon LGV both have more than that, probably some in China too (the physical capacity of modern signalling is 20 tph, but you'd never schedule that because you can't catch up if there are any delays; 16 is a reasonable operational approach).
Not completely outside the bounds for what would be possible as the total traffic with a normal 16tph service with multiple destinations in both north and south, which should be achievable, but that's a vastly bigger project.
That's a three-headed line in the north (SF/SJ/Sac), and a line through LA to San Diego in the south, plus a branch to Vegas coming off in the Valley (so you can use the CAHSR line to get from SD/LA or any of the three northern termini to Vegas, and the Vegas line doesn't have to cross mountains). Total passenger numbers might well be in that kind of range, but that's for all possible journeys (ie including trains to Vegas, SD-LA trips, SF-Sacramento trips, and trains from all three northern termini to Los Angeles). SF-LA would be half of the total traffic at most. It might even be a lot less than that depending how busy SD-LA gets - it shouldn't be more than an hour, you can easily run as a 5 minute service (run every train to LA from the north or from Vegas through to SD) and those are both plenty big cities; that could end up being the single most popular route. Especially because you can't get away with charging as much for 100 miles as for 300 (even though it costs nearly the same).
Absolutely agree with the second para. I also had an attempt to work out what Drum had to say and found lots that assumed you already knew what the problem was rather than explaining it (which probably means I didn't go back far enough).
The core problem is that Proposition 1A, the 2008 referendum that voters approved, imposes a series of requirements on CAHSR:
1. It has to take less than 2 hours, 40 minutes between SF and LA, and 2:10 between San Jose and LA
2. It has to have a top speed of 320km/h or higher
3. It has to stop in Merced and Gilroy
4. It has to run at less than 5 minute headways
5. It has to be financially self-sustaining
etc
The reality is that these requirements are just going to make the train extremely expensive and slow to build. It's going to require around 80 km of tunnels through mountains that we have no experience tunneling. Even the Central Valley segments will require lots of expensive land acquisition.
I might point out that many of these requirements were added precisely because the architects of the projects were trying to (drum roll) maximize ridership! A 4 hour LA-SF train could have been constructed much much cheaper, but would not be competitive with flying.
Those are very much "maximise ridership" goals and should be plausibly achievable, though the costs were unrealistic. But you then will want to avoid doing much in the way of gold-plating: if you want to make it financially self-sustaining, you need to run it as directly as possible, you want to minimise the tunnel lengths, you want to avoid as much viaduct as possible and just keep it on the ground, and you want to find sensible ways of doing the land acquisition.
Though 3 and the SJ-specific bit of 1 are not well designed, and 4 could be good or bad depending on how it's interpreted (if it means 12tph SF-LA, then it's bad, that's twice the needed service; if it means 12tph on the main spine of the service, then it's good, force them to actually use the infrastructure). Gilroy forces you to take a route that serves Gilroy at the expense of the East Bay, Modesto, Stockton and Sacramento. I'm not qualified to say whether the Altamont Pass route that it precludes is more or less difficult in engineering terms, but it's definitely superior in transportation terms. The right route from Merced is to continue up the Central Valley, come through the Altamont Pass to Fremont, and then either swing through San Jose to San Francisco, or cross the bay (reinstate the old Dumbarton Rail Bridge) and serve SF and SJ with alternate trains. At 12 tph, you can give both cities 10 minute service, shorten the distance enough you can afford one more stop in the Central Valley, and save money by building less track. The Bay Area line will come off the Valley somewhere around Modesto, and that would mean a relatively short run on pretty easy terrain up to Sacramento, rather than having to build a line all the way from Merced. The connectivity created by doing it this way (which would create SF-Sacramento, SJ-Sacramento and SF-SJ services in addition to the SF-LA and Sacramento-LA service).
Really, they should just do everything. Electrify and upgrade ACE, Capitol Corridor, and San Joaquins, and also get started the Pacheco pass tunnel. Get those learning curves bending by building a lot; there's really no reason to be stingy on this.
"A 4 hour LA-SF train could have been constructed much much cheaper, but would not be competitive with flying."
It looks like a LAX-SFO direct flight is 1:22. With two hours early arrival at the airport, a four hour train ride doesn't seem bad. If the train makes maybe three desirable stops in the two metro areas, door-to-door time for a 4:00 train could beat aircraft for many people.
LAX to SFO is 45 minutes in the air. A normal business traveler arrives at the airport 10 minutes before boarding. Not two hours (unless you just intend to work from the lounge). (Source: I fly over 100 segments a year.)
Gate-to-gate time. TSA recommends 2 hours before flight, I (frequent flyer) aim for 80 minutes at minimum. Arriving at the airport 10 minutes before boarding is very risky and not how 99% of people fly.
Not risky at all. Clear and pre-check of course.
Even with Clear and PreCheck, and flying carry-on, if you're not actually at the boarding gate 10 minutes before departure, airline staff will give your seat to a standby passenger, close the door, and turn you away. I say this as someone who, myself, got turned away at the gate 8 minutes before departure.
To be safe, you really need to plan on arriving at the gate a minimum of 15-20 minutes before departure. Add 5-10 minutes of walking, plus another 5-10 minutes to get through security (even with Clear and PreCheck, there will still be a few people in front of you), and you had really better be walking into the airport terminal at least 45 minutes before departure.
Then, of course, LAX and SFO are both notorious for bad traffic, so in order to ensure that you arrive at the airport 45 minutes before the flight even in bad traffic, you have to leave early enough to get there 1:15 before in good traffic., etc.
The only way you can possibly walk into an airport 10 minutes before a flight and expect to get on (absent a flight delay) is if you're boarding a private plane, chartered just for you, a luxury that almost nobody can afford.
You must fly through amazingly efficient airports I've never visited, and have super-reliable transportation to them.
One really easy way to improve ridership on transit would be to go back to not letting people smoke crack on the train. I was on the train at about 6:45 this morning and, in addition to the piles of garbage, sticky floors and seats, and abundant suicide-related ads, there were people smoking, doing drugs, and drinking on the train. For the first time in ages, transit police actually did hop on and made them get off. I would guess that they got off and then got on the next train. This isn’t rocket science. We don’t need to hire legions of consultants or create a whole management layer at the transit agency to create a pilot program for crack smoking strategy innovation. We had this figured out ten years ago, and decided we didn’t want to know how to deal with it anymore.
Jesus haploid Christ, what city do you live in? That sounds horrible!
I partially buy it. and speaking here in my personal capacity as an advocate for MD's Purple Line. I'd say right now transit advocates are largely incentivized to make arguments based on the multifaceted political benefits of a projects, e.g. jobs including during construction, small business benefits, etc., with ridership as perhaps the most important factor but typically one part of a three part argument.
Meanwhile, the transit skeptical, if not looking to just kill projects, are looking to save money in absolute terms, not in per rider. For example, a cut to the MD Purple Line cost engineering was going from 6 minute headways to 7.5. Thankfully this is highly fixable, but would definitely fail the ridership test. Similarly, I think Matt's cafe car example is incomplete. A ridership oriented answer would be thinking about how to more cost effectively deliver something riders clearly want. Maybe that's a cart or better setting up to sell bento box equivalents in the stations. NARP and I wouldn't love it, but that seems to be the solution that other countries have settled on.
But I feel like the organizational and permitting part to this is probably an equal part of the problem. Like a huge cost driver on the Purple Line was a lawsuit exploiting the NEPA process and an activist transit skeptical judge forcing a year of delays (also probably underbidding re: stormwater management, CSX being uncompromising, and allegedly slow property acquisition on MD's part). On top of that, the P3 model meant to save costs didn't do enough to resolve conflicts and resulted in an aggressively bidding builder exploiting a poorly chosen clause to walk off the job.
Gov. Hogan made some dubious choices, but he would argue that the P3 would have helped the cost/rider. I think emphasizing cost/rider would greatly help on the incentives front but it will still be a highly painful process with any number of mistakes made in pursuing it. I think we need a handbook of what effective implementing approaches look like from comparative studies. The Eno center does some interesting work here https://www.enotrans.org/article/eno-releases-major-report-on-u-s-transit-costs-and-project-delivery/
The actual solution to the cafe car proposal is (a) longer trains and (b) more frequent trains.
German ICE trains have full-on restaurant cars with waiter service, but they run (or ran before DB had a complete organisation melt-down during covid from which they still haven't recovered) frequently enough that supply was reasonably close to meeting demand.
If you put the cafe car at the end of the train. you don’t even need to lengthen platforms. you just have to tell the diners to move forward before exiting
That would certainly be my preferred solution, I love cafe cats and dining cars and long haul trains that are part of the vacation. I donate to NARP and from the perspective Matt's arguing here I'm probably part of the problem.
WWW
Carts or bentos are a second best solution to me, but it's one a lot of countries have landed on that have much better rail service than the US, admittedly often over more compact regions, e.g. Japan or South Korea, but also any of the Chinese trains I rode in 2007.
Most European long-distance trains have cafes that are less than a whole car - just a counter for service and you take the food back to your seat to eat/drink. Having a second seating area for people eating in addition to their ticketed seat does happen (ICE, as mentioned, some French TGVs, I've seen them in Sweden as well), but is not the normal case.
Yeah DB was still a mess a couple weeks ago. Albeit less so than Amtrak (both of which I’ve been on plenty of times in the past month).
One thing about any subsidised service is that they have very little excess money. This means that when half or more of the passengers disappear (as in COVID), they don't have any headroom to deal with the problem - if they had a ton of reserves in the bank, then they'd find it easy to just ride it out and get back to normal.
The only difference between non-existent public transport and crap public transport is that the latter will cost a lot of money to deliver and serve only slightly more people than the former. The sigmoid function usefully describes this phenomenon, and is used to model expected public transport usage at a given level of service. You need high quality provision to deliver decent ridership.
The tragedy of bad public transit projects is that it ruins the idea that the government can provide good quality public services. When you see the government sending vast resources to stupid, failed projects like California HSR you realise this. I mean, I read they want to try running battery operated trains pending construction of new electrical infrastructure, which is laughable (https://calmatters.org/politics/2022/05/california-high-speed-rail-standoff/).
From a somewhat more internal perspective, I will say the concern is less about getting yelled at in meetings (though that sucks quite a bit) than it is about trying to complete the project and actually build it, rather than finish a proposal and then being stuck in litigation for a million years (or even just briefly, litigation sucks for the people involved, even the lawyers, usually).
If you've been working on a project long enough to get to litigation, you probably believe in it a fair amount and want it to happen, even if only so the last X months/years of your life haven't been wasted. And annoying the neighbors is an absolutely certain way to ensure that instead of building a project, you spend the next X months/years of your life justifying to a lawyer and then to judges why you annoyed the neighbors.
Yeah, getting yelled at in meetings sucks, but everyone knows it’s part of the deal. This and not getting sued make up a large proportion of a planner’s work.
And yet some of my non-planner friends think this is a cool/fun job!
(there are some cool and fun parts)
Matt, "Amtrak staff" doesn't really make the decisions about route selection. The map that you posted is made up of routes suggested by states, not Amtrak: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/amtraks-gardner-asserts-mechanical-ranks-not-thinned-by-furloughs/
Amtrak runs the long-distance trains because they are congressionally mandated to. They run the regional corridors (except NEC) in partnership with states. The money from the infrastructure bill for short-distance, high-ridership routes *must* be applied for by states, not Amtrak.
Amtrak does a lot of things wrong, but this is not really a decision they're making.
The more I read MY, the more I settle in to an opinion that an active and well funded state is a good idea in countries where public agencies are well run, like in many countries in Europe and some in Asia.
But at the same time, I get more and more skeptical of giving money to US government agencies. I give MY huge credit for actually calling out and grappling with the problems, but I am not at all persuaded that these issues are fixable.
Is there an example where some set of reforms have turned around a wasteful and unfocused US government effort into an effective one? The only examples I can think of involve the military or wartime mobilization efforts, which don't seem to provide much guidance.
The US Postal Service is an absolute wonder. I have lived on three continents, in a dozen countries (including high-state-capacity places like Ireland and Sweden), and NOWHERE can you send a letter or parcel as fast or affordably to the edges of what is, effectively, a globe-spanning empire-as-nation-state. To your door, even! That's just amazing. And they've been doing it for a century-and-a-half. Against the concerted anti-government instincts of the neoliberal age, which, bizarrely, forces the USPS to both "turn a profit" (despite being a public service) and even to pre-fund its future personnel costs (something that no other public or private entity does).
I agree. USPS is performing oddly well. Would be worth looking into what led to this, and see what lessons could be learned.
Another example: The US State Department, including and especially the Passport Agency. They have no budget. Get no love from politicians or the public. And, yet, you can get a US Passport within 24 hours nearly anywhere in the world. And they accomplish it with a smile. I've had to do this many times and I am left in awe of how quietly functional and professional this organization is.
Two years ago, I would have disagreed very strongly. In Sweden, it used to be super convenient to do either a renewal or to get a first time application. You'd get your passport in days, not weeks. And in an emergency it was even better, you could get to the airport, realize your passport had expired, and get an emergency one issued within an hour.
For reasons unknown to me, the whole system collapsed in the past two years, though. Now it is a nightmare. So I'll give the US State Department half credit here. It works fine. But it certainly could work much better.
I'm a dual-citizen (again of a high-state-capacity country) and this is absolutely NOT normal. Overseas consular services for Europeans, even, are generally terrible. And getting a passport or something last-minute takes much longer.
State level agencies generally do a much better job than federal agencies. The exceptions to this are places that are essentially single-party nations: NY and CA.
I'm familiar with state agencies in MA, IN, FL, NJ and they were all pretty good, though to varying degrees. NJ was the worst, but I think that is more the fault of their unusually high number of towns with separate governments.
Shorter: We should push more to the states and less at federal level.