It's a shame that the focus is always on the capital outlay and not on the cost benefit potential to be realized (both economic and non-economic). This sort of spending should always be seen as an investment.
For instance, modern/improved signaling and train control technology will allow you to run rolling stock at greater speeds with more frequency, requiring less on-track maintenance. In other systems, undergoing recent upgrades (for example) you can run a train every 3 minutes as opposed to 6. As a commuter knowing you only have to wait a max (n)minutes as opposed to max 2(n) can be the difference between deciding to take a train or using some other means of transport, especially if you can shave a few minutes off your commute as well.
It gives the operators much more control over how they design services and run their business. It's a key enabler.
> It's a shame that the focus is always on the capital outlay and not on the cost benefit potential to be realized (both economic and non-economic). This sort of spending should always be seen as an investment.
Every major city hires economists, often from universities, to do cost/benefit analysis of major capital projects. To say the focus is always on cost is nonsense. I've had to do cost-benefit analysis work before on earmarks. One of my professors did cost/benefit in Nashville for bringing the Titans to town in the late 90s. He recommended against it, in fact I think most economists on the board did...but they ignored it because cost is more often ignored or understated (by politicians,) contrary to your post. Look at the "big dig" in Boston for instance, or the California high speed rail, both exploded over 5x their expected budget.
Those are just examples, there are many others. I am willing to bet this number is a low ball, especially when contractors, regulators, etc get involved.
I think he's talking about the media/politicians/pundits that talk about it, not the people actually responsible for making and analyzing the decisions.
>Every major city hires economists, often from universities, to do cost/benefit analysis of major capital projects.
To be clear I was referring to how the greater public are informed on such matters by the media / politicians.
I'm well aware of the projects you mention. I'm a consultant on capital program / project governance but not sure I understand the relevance, I wasn't really talking about the validity of estimates at any stage, just the focus on them.
If you're interested in how we can avoid this happening, I can't talk to the US, but in other jurisdictions governments and authorities (and some private sector giants) are slowly adopting more mature governance approaches. Implementing a Benefits Realization methodology [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_realisation_managemen...] in their Portfolio for instance, Alliance contracting procurement models and Integrated Project Delivery to more fairly apportion risk and accountability. I'm cautiously optimistic.
When originally approved in 2008 the estimate was $40 billion.[1] The 2018 estimate for both phases is, I think, roughly $100 - $120 billion (low and high).[2] That's 2.5x - 3x.[3] These numbers are actually in line with opposition figures[4], and for other reasons it's reasonable to expect these are solid upper limits unless people continue to sabotage the project.
It's also worth pointing out that $120 billion is still significantly less than estimated costs for the alternative of expanding the highways and airports--$156-186 billion.[5] Note that those alternative costs are likely optimistic like the original HSR costs, particularly airport expansion and urban highway expansion.
One of the biggest reasons for the cost inflation is the political opposition. Some of the construction contracts have actually come in significantly under budget.[6] The real killer so far is land acquisition.[7] The authority is effectively trying to bribe farmers with huge payouts (clearly beyond market prices) in order to mitigate political pressure in Sacramento. All the political and legal fighting causes expensive delays. (Time is very costly in construction because there are fixed costs in keeping labor and equipment mobilized, plus huge costs in having to re-orchestrate schedules. Lots of interdependent moving parts.) But political pressure wouldn't be so strong if discourse was more honest and less tribal.
The opposition is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly with the hyperbole and sabotage. By all means fight for transparency, but civic responsibility means we all need to check ourselves.
[3] I think both numbers are year-of-expenditure, which means each sub-project is separately inflation adjusted to the midpoint year of scheduled construction.
> As a commuter knowing you only have to wait a max (n)minutes as opposed to max 2(n) can be the difference between deciding to take a train or using some other means of transport
Agreed. In my mind, the most important step to make is to increase frequency to the point where passengers think of trains in terms of frequency of arrivals, not by a specific timetable.
At longer wait times, you plan around getting to the station early, hoping the train isn't late, hoping it's not too overcrowded, etc., each of which is a mental barrier to taking the train.
At shorter wait times, all of these concerns disappear because "oh well, there's another one in 3 minutes".
If I have to leave home 15–20 minutes earlier just because it is _very_ likely that the train gets stuck in a tunnel due to signal malfunctions, or crawls from one stop to the next, I might as well use alternative means (i.e., a car).
While I mostly agree with you, I think it's right to focus on capital outlay on one level: getting to the bottom of why it's so huge. Comparable cities like London and Paris complete large projects spending a fraction of the money, and they have to contend with unions and high rise building just like New York does. Increasingly it seems like New York State politics are corrupt to the core, and the MTA is just a reflection of that.
I'd recommend The Power Broker, which documents how Robert Moses used a toll authority to broker an unprecedented empire of spoils so that he could ram his highways through any opposition. And that was as late as '68.
Not at all. Each actor should extract maximum compensation for the value they provide for their efforts. Europe underpays at every level so it’s “cheaper “ but not an accurate representation of fair market value.
Fair market value is not defined uniquely in one off transactions. It's very possible that what happens in both nations is a fair market price. If this is true it then becomes natural to ask how we, the taxpayer, can get a better deal like they do in Europe.
I assume OP was just giving an example, because the busiest lines in NYC subway (4/5/6) run about 20 trains an hour at peak times now, and that's with ancient signaling.
New York's busiest track pair is scheduled for 30TPH (E/F in Queens).
These scheduled service levels tend not to pan out because of dwell times causing trains to get stuck in stations. CBTC helps mitigate this by allowing trains to run much closer, so the dwell time in stations is less of a limiting factor, and the busier frequency also allows platform overcrowding to be less severe.
That's interesting! I ride the E train every day that I commute into the city (half of the weak), and I'm pretty sure that even at peak times, in Manhattan, it's more than 4-minute spacing. I once lived by the F train, and it's hard to believe that it ran enough trains to make up for that. So 30TPH seems wistful, indeed!
The 4/5 actually seems to achieve 3-minute spacing consistently, though.
It's a lot more noticeable in Queens; trains roughly do show up every two minutes.
The major issue is that all the merging and interlining of services introduces many conflict points; most subway systems try to limit the branching of services on any given track pair, and very few have reverse-branching, the combination of branches into trunks in the outer parts of the system (like the E/F, the 2/5, the A/B/C/D, the B/Q, the D/N, etc.)
Yeah, post Christie Street Connection, the branching is pretty wild. Nice for having some good options that minimize transfers, but I have to imagine it's hell for scheduling. The C shares track with the B in Upper Manhattan, the E in Midtown and most of Lower Manhattan, and the A from Lower Manhattan through Downtown Brooklyn until finally getting its own track. Going by common tracks, the A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, M, N, R, Q, W and Z have to be considered correlated. So that's basically the whole IND+BMT, except for the L!
Here's a pretty interesting map showing TPH (and number of train cars) in 1954 for the AM rush. I believe some lines are running fewer trains today than they were then.
The scheduled service on that map is 30TPH, although the theoretical max is 40TPH; the signalling system has never been used to that extent, mostly because the extra 30s between trains is used as contingency padding in case a train is late.
The Lexington Line actually ran 30TPH at one point between the 4/5, but this has decreased because overcrowding has gotten so severe that it is now holding up trains as people struggle to enter and exit overcrowded cars. Prior to the opening of the Second Avenue Subway, the Lexington Avenue Line carried more than the transit systems of San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston combined. http://web.mta.info/capital/sas_docs/feis.htm
NY trains tend to have more tracks than London’s underground which is just north/southbound, instead of north, south, north express, south express (iirc).
The London Underground has more miles of track which go in all directions, not just north and south. In fact cross rail which is the latest large expansion goes East to West. New York however has more stations and along with that 36 lines compared with London's 11
NYC's system has a lot of lines that basically run two lines on shared track, split them off, and then join other lines in complex reverse branching scenarios. This absolutely kills the ability to run high TPH (the Washington, D.C. metro also suffers this problem). The Victoria line has no revenue branches nor line sharing--it is much easier to get high TPH on those kinds of lines. Moscow Metro, in a similar situation, can pull 40TPH.
> It's a shame that the focus is always on the capital outlay and not on the cost benefit potential to be realized (both economic and non-economic). This sort of spending should always be seen as an investment.
The reason the focus is on cost is that New York transit has a long history of spending far more than it needs to, due to rampant corruption[0].
If you look at this like an investment, then you also need to do the same sort of due diligence you would with any other investment, including asking why the costs are outrageously out of proportion with what they should be.
You can't ignore things like: whether the debt can be afforded and paid back. Because these are public ventures, you practically know they'll never produce a suitable return on investment.
Did you know that the NYC subways were originally built and run by two private companies that competed with each other? Did you know that the city froze their rates for two decades then took them over when they were no longer making desired improvements (wonder why)?
On the other hand, government spending is designed to help the public good when private investment may not make financial sense. Parks, for example, would never provide an ROI if private companies had to build them. That’s why so many parks are public owned and built by the government. The ROI there comes from happy citizens who will pay taxes.
Even if a subway wouldn’t be profitable to a private company, it can still be “profitable” to the government if it encourages more population and more businesses paying more in taxes. It doesn’t have to be profitable based solely on ticket prices.
The private sector is not investing in public transit in NYC because IT IS NOT ALLOWED TO, not because it wouldn't if it could.
There used to be a lot of private sector public transit in NYC. Today there is none. That was not an inevitability!
Many cities around the world have extensive private sector public transit. E.g., Buenos Aires has privately-run public transit buses with amazing coverage of the city and surroundings. NYC's bus system is garbage by comparison to Buenos Aires'. The difference is that NYC's bus system is run by the city, while Buenos Aires' is run by private companies.
(It's always interesting to see what parts of the economy get socialized in different countries/cities. The public transit system was the easiest part of the private sector to socialize in the U.S., so that's what got socialized early. Elsewhere (e.g., in the UK) it was trains, telcos, medicine, etc. This allows us to compare results. It's never pretty, what results from socialization.)
Public transit in the U.S., and in NYC in particular, was very much a private sector function way back when. It seems unbelievable today that the private sector could build subways, but why should it be unbelievable? $19B is a lot of money for NYC, but it's a pittance compared to the capitalization of Apple or Amazon, or Elon Musk's ventures -- if only the private sector could do it, it absolutely would build a better transit system.
But the lesson has been learned: if you build something that cannot be moved, you will be highly vulnerable to takeover by the state.
Recall that the Baltimore Colts left the city in a hurry right before the governor of Maryland signed a bill appropriating the team...
You can't take a subway system with you should the city decide they want to own it instead of you, and you'll never be compensated the true value of the system you built no matter what the applicable Constitution(s) says.
Even if the private sector were now invited to invest in NYC public transit, without an ironclad guarantee that they won't get taken to the cleaners later, why should they?
But the point stands: if they were allowed to and not threatened with eventual state takeover, the private sector bloody well would invest in public transit, and it would do a far, far superior job by comparison to the state. We know that the private sector has, does, and will invest in public transit when they are allowed to and in locations where they reasonably believe their property will not be taken by the state.
If you wonder why Buenos Aires doesn't have a private sector subway system, the answer is obvious: the capital investment required for that is so much higher than for a bus system, that a private owner would stand to lose a lot more from a state takeover of their subway line than of their bus line, therefore no sane investor would invest in Bs.As.' subways. The same applies to NYC, except that in NYC the private sector is not allowed to run buses either...
You seem to have accepted the liberal mantra that some massive projects can only be run by the state. This is very, very wrong. How much evidence do we need before you and everyone else figure this out? Why would one believe that SpaceX is viable as a private company but subways are not? Elon Musk absolutely does not think this way. Yes, yes, Musk sure likes public subsidies, but I don't believe they are necessary for his ventures, and would much prefer that he not rely on them in any case, but even with subsidies his model is far superior to the state running those ventures outright.
I think the inefficiency of state controlled transit is worth discussing, but I think these examples are a bit cherrypicked and don't necessarily support claims like "[the private sector] would do a far, far superior job by comparison to the state." Unregulated private sector investing destroyed the traincar transit systems in the United States, and helped set a general national attitude towards cars vs transit that is not present in countries like Argentina. There are only a few privatized subways in the world, in Japan. Your argument waves away many of the realities of building and maintaining subterranean rail transit in a profitable private company. "If the private sector could do it" is a question staked on more than just government regulation.
Actually, in Argentina the use of long distance rail for mass passenger transit is increasing for the first time in years after the systems were nationalized.
Feel free to disregard what I've written if I, too, have accepted the liberal mantra. Issuing such a diagnosis poisons the discussion into an argument unnecessarily and suggests you're chanting a mantra of your own. Some of your examples are wildly picked and distant from the subject at hand, or downright confusing: What nationalized "telcos" in the UK are we comparing notes with? Can we use the highly regulated Korean ISP market as a substitute? Does it really support this point to crow that the US healthcare system is superior to socialized alternatives in European countries?
My use of "liberal mantra" as to one specific idea, is not an ad hominem, nor does it mean that I'm not a liberal, for example, or that I don't like liberals. It just means that that particular idea is typically championed by liberals (which I believe is true). I don't see what's offensive about that.
As to long distance rail, it's not public transit, but sure, let's discuss it. I've no idea what's going on in Argentina with long distance rail. One possibility is that the roads suck, so rail looks good by comparison -- I just wouldn't know. Long distance rail has a lot of competition (cars, planes) -- it doesn't look like a long-term winner to me, but if so, that would be true regardless of which sector is to invest in rail.
The UK nationalized the telephone system around the time of WWI, IIRC.
I did pick wildly: because I was illustrating that different countries/localities tend to make different choices as to what to socialize, and not much evidence is needed to see that this at least appears to be true. I listed some examples, but did not make an extensive study. I suspect local politics, and the ease or difficulty (socially, culturally, politically, practically) of taking over some industry or another are the main factors in the choice of what to socialize.
It really is astounding (to me) that in the U.S. it was public transit that was socialized -- everywhere you go in the U.S., the trains and buses are all state-run -- but much else was not socialized (e.g., healthcare). Telecommunications in the U.S. was -for a few decades- regulated to the point that it was not greatly different from being state-run, but healthcare, for example, was not, and neither was automobile manufacturing, and not even electric utilities (with few exceptions, such as the TVA). And it is astounding to me that Buenos Aires didn't socialize buses -- I don't know why, but perhaps it was because lots of nationalizations that happened in Argentina targeted foreign-owned businesses (always popular targets), while the bus operators must have been politically connected.
Also, I did not even remotely "crow that the US healthcare system is superior to socialized alternatives in European countries". I do think the private sector does better than the public sector at such things, but that doesn't mean that every instance of one sector doing some thing goes accordingly -- it's a generalization. Stop putting words in my writing. It seems that you feel attacked, but I don't know why -- maybe attacking an idea you hold is like attacking you? But it shouldn't be.
The subway never had a communications-based signalling system before, yet its functionality is waning compared to recent history. Will CBTC actually deliver the benefits you describe? Possibly not, if the system is afflicted by some unidentified other problem, i.e. falling speed limits.
I'm not across how it's been implemented on those lines but I know from experience that running mixed systems where you have some lines on CBTC that then then have to interface with older traditional signalling, you can't realize many of those time-saving benefits until you change over the rest of those lines for (among other things) safety reasons.
I'm a developer in the Midwest and my team participated in the signaling contest for the MTA Genius Challenge[1]. I handled gathering the raw data from our hardware and generating visualizations for testing, troubleshooting, and eventually presentation. Using a variety of hardware (ranging hardware on the train and through the subway tunnel, Ulta-wideband[2] transmitters for sending data, ect), we developed a Communications-based train control[3] system that would allow for moving block signaling[4].
It was a fascinating few months of problem solving and troubleshooting. I have fond memories of sitting at a folding table on the 7th Ave platform during a cold week in January.
That said, I don't envy those still working on this project. There are so many problem -- old signaling hardware that breaks down frequently and has to be manufactured by the MTA because no one produces the parts anymore, slower train speeds, track fires, train malfunctions, passenger-related delays... the list goes on and on. I hope they're able work it all out because I really enjoyed riding and working on the subways, even if only for a couple of months.
The New York subway system was built in spurts up to about the 1950s. This means that large sections of it, tens of miles long, become due for renewal at the same time. Contrast this to MTR, which opened short segments in several phases.
There was also a period stretching probably from 1930-1980 where maintenance on New York's subway was completely deferred. No maintenance or replacement was done for the signals at all. So a lot of what has been happening up until now is not only meant to replace stuff that is due for replacement, but stuff that has been overdue for replacement for decades. It takes a lot of time on a 24/7 railway's schedule to fix such a large backlog. And they usually only refresh the backlog with stuff that is both compatible with the entire existing fleet, which is thousands and thousands of train cars.
Coincidentally, since MTR was first developed in the '70s, those signals are due for replacement right about now. From what I have heard MTR is starting to have a much higher rate of failure than previously, which would make sense if the signals are getting old.
I don't understand why transit agencies seem to reinvent the wheel when it comes to signalling, Caltrain spent $250M+ on a custom CBOSS PTC signalling system.... which I think they recently abandoned in favor of a standard signaling system.
The precursor agencies and corporations in New York developed signalling systems that were cutting edge in the '30s, since there weren't a lot of multinational signalling suppliers back then, nor were there a lot of metro systems.
The current situation is what happens when you don't fund a replacement for several decades.
$19B for a new signaling system? A true "sweeping overhall" will include a hell of a lot more than that. There was a times article a few weeks ago that sketched out a much more ambitious overhall, and pegged the price at $100B, which still sounded low to me.
I'm a subway commuter, I really love the subway system, and my emotions want to invest in it. And we should plan big. I think the greater NYC area could double or triple in population as the world grows and be more stimulating and productive than it's ever been. I guess my honest question is whether the subways are a prerequisite for that outcome, or if more WeWorks, satellite offices, telecommuting and suburban financial centers are more sane.
My answer would be to remember that subways serve a purpose beyond just commuting to work; they provide a means to travel easily across a city for recreation, leisure, and cultural activities too.
There is much value in providing the means for citizens to enjoy the breadth of opportunities their city provides, rather than making it difficult for them to leave their immediate neighbourhood.
> they provide a means to travel easily across a city for recreation, leisure, and cultural activities too
There's an economic advantage to this to. In London we recently (last year?) made parts of the underground 24/7. It's estimated that this is going to add £138m to the London economy annually [1].
Public transport investment is almost always hugely beneficial to the area in many different ways.
It shouldn't cost that much, but signalling is surprisingly expensive because pre-computerised signalling systems rely on large amounts of heavy equipment installed trackside, and trains can't run without coherent signalling. So changing it can only be done in small pieces, small parts at a time, yet labour and equipment must be constantly available. For this reason the productivity of railway workers is quite low but unavoidably so; they spend most of their time just waiting for tracks to clear.
Long story short, everyone sits on their ass and pretends to be borderline incompetent while clocking overtime to take longer than normal to do anything routine.
Why? Because, gee, it'd really be a shame if some of these buildings happened to fall down and go boom, on account of some kind of cave in... Wouldn't want that to happen, would we?
That means we gotta go real slow, and be real careful, but hey, if you think youse can do it faster, hey why not grab a shovel and help us dig some of these ditches. They ain't gonna dig themselves, is they?
Oh, oh, sorry, I didn't realize you was wearing your expensive clothes on account ah some kinda hot date tonight! By all means! Don't let us holds youse up!
We'll just goes back down into the catacombs and dig another dungeon for ya. No problem, boss!
His proposal, which hasn't been fully released as of this writing at least, seems to have other modifications as well. The article mentions at least bathrooms and elevators.
He also plans to complete this overhaul in 5 years - previous estimates had suggested it could take 50 years. That sounds ambitious, and i'm guessing there must be significant cost associated with completing it relatively quickly.
Figure that with your belief that NYC could handle more, let's say 2.5 times that, to get 20 million riders of the system.
$100 billion / 20 million riders = $5000 in capital expense to upgrade the system. That's a lot of riders going on a lot of subway rides to recoup that!
Subways are mostly important in terms of positive externality, though. The differential in wages between a job in Manhattan and an equivalent job in the outlying parts of the city can be quite large. The money saved by not requiring a car to live in New York is tens of thousands of dollars. The additional property value that subway accessibility provides is in the billions of dollars. The subway averts several billion dollars worth of gridlock and the ensuing air and noise pollution. And so on and so forth.
Without the subway New York would, quite literally, be unlivable. The following scenes were from the traffic pandemonium that resulted after Hurricane Sandy closed all subway crossings of the East River:
I don't deny that subways in NYC are an overall benefit, or that it can be tough to fully capture in numbers its usefulness.
But somehow the money has to be paid back, or else there has to be a consensus that "we won't get the money back directly but it is a good thing to do for NYC" with NYC taxpayers then picking up the slack.
Even leaving aside the other myriad economic benefits of the subway and the fact that your numbers are off even by the standard of fuzzy back-of-the-math envelope (you should consider tourists and commuters who live outside of the city but work in the city, which will balloon that number significantly), $5000 a head isn't all that much. At $2.75 a ride (and the price goes up every few years), that's roughly 1,800 rides, which if a rider rides twice a day every day (fairly common for New Yorkers) means that $5000 will be recouped in two and a half years.
Stats include ALL riders including tourists and commuters etc.
This when NYC population is ~8.5 million in 2016.
Note that the $5000/head is just for the additional capital expenses.
Your math doesn't cover all the other expenses the subway system would incur, like wages, power, maintenance over the estimated 2.5 year period you mention.
A new above ground track comes nowhere near the cost of updating a subway system below an extremely dense metropolis that will attempt to keep running 24/7/365?
Not much of a shocker there. That’s a true apples to oranges.
It is true that corruption has resulted in exorbitant cost over runs by the MTA but I think this is a silly comparison.
Works out to ~$2,111 per resident. About the same cost as a few years of car insurance. That's including babies and stuff though, I'm not sure what it works out to distributed among the regular ridership (which would also include non-resident commuters).
Unrelated to the original article, but I find it unusual that young drivers have cheaper insurance. In the UK younger people often pay over 2x more than drivers in their 30s or 40s, mainly due to the 18-25 demographic having high rates of reckless driving.
From the link: "Young drivers tend to need less coverage than motorists with families or greater savings to protect, a factor that we included in our analysis."
They are literally correcting for the fact that young driver's drive cheaper cars less distance. It's definitely true in the US that car insurance is more expensive for younger drivers when all other aspects are held fixed.
That actually made me realize how wasteful this system is by business standards. We should expect a income stream of at least 8% of the investment on something like this. So, this decision needs to add 500 million rides per year at $2.75, and that's not even considering the marginal cost of adding riders beyond just the signal changes. So, a 30% increase in MTA usage just because trains will come slightly faster? Not a chance in hell do they get that.
Yeah, expected to "cost" $19B, which means about $7B will actually be spent on improving the infrastructure; while the rest will be back-channeled to the coffers of various construction company executives, politicians, middlemen, gangsters, etc.
About 1.5 aircraft carriers or 3 bay bridge eastern span replacements. I have various costs in my head to conceptualize how much things cost in terms of what we could’ve bought. The last aircraft carrier the US bought cost about $13 billion. The bay bridge eastern span cost 6.4 billion.
For smaller costs a good one is submarines: about $2.4 billion.
I did the math once and the war in Iraq directly cost about the replacement value of the nyc subway but can’t recall the figures well.
I'm not sure how the military devices help understand those numbers much. Presumably, the idea is to take something whose impact is large and intuitively understood and identify it with the price, so that other things which are nonintuitive with similarly large prices can be understood. (My preferred version of this is "$1M is about the life's work of a median American", in the sense of being the median salary over a lifetime minus what a human needs to survive. $1M is a lot of money, but I can kind of imagine what a man can build in his life.)
But military devices seem like things whose value is very unintuitive. (I've made similar criticism of people who say "oh, $6B? That's just three B2 bombers.") Obviously, we have no real conception of how complicated and expensive such devices are to build. But more importantly, few of us have a good grasp of the value to world stability delivered by rarely-used weapons that play a mostly deterrent role.
Actually military figures are fine for this expenditure because they are very large per unit, so easy to conceptualize in small integers. It doesn’t matter if you can think about how complicated they are to build or their deterrent role or whatever. Point is you can imagine an aircraft carrier. This is about as expensive as 1.5 aircraft carriers or three bay bridge replacements.
If you aren't bothering with an interpretation in terms of value, and are just using the military device as a physical object you can visualize, why not just use "stack of 10 billion dollar bills" as a unit? Then you can think of the subway upgrade as two of those.
I can imagine a world in which basically all of Manhattan's streets are open only to autonomous vehicles. I wonder what sorts of redesigns we would do if all trips were effectively one-way and most cars were the size of a Smart fortwo.
I think we're many years and a couple trillion in infrastructure retooling from this reality. But when my infant daughter is my age, I think this is what NYC will be like, assuming society as we know it keeps progressing, while diffusing the many potential catastrophes we've set up for ourselves.
Imagine removing street-side parking. Not all at once. First on some key streets, then every 5 or so streets, and so on. Eventually, perhaps a couple of decades from now, there could be no daytime street-side parking (autonomous vehicles "sleeping" in the erstwhile parking spots at night).
On many streets in NYC removing street-side parking will triple bandwidth. This could be piloted now, though without autonomous vehicles. And perhaps some such streets could be limited to access by buses, taxis, and limousines (uber, lyft, ...).
Of course, selling this to voters will be impossible for a while yet. Once we get autonomous cars though, this concept will become very tempting.
You'd still need to allow AVs to stop. But in my conception, the vehicles aren't so much "autonomous" as they are routed. The routing algorithm would be able to prepare all the vehicles an arbitrary distance away for a briefly blocked lane. I think a lot of redesign would have to happen, realistically, to try to account for all sorts of exceptions. But it still feels like we could have a far more flexible and efficient transportation infrastructure than we do now if a whole lot of things we take for granted coudl be revisited.
Yea I was always thinking you’d have a portion of each block set aside for loading/unloading. Would create some funneling issues though. It’s an awesome amount of space which could be reclaimed for pedistrian and bicicle usage though.
I think that bicycles and other human powered (also
with electric assist) vehicles or small electric vehicles like scooters are the best short term future we can ask for. And working public transport - who cares if it's autonomous out not. There are already places that work with these.
I find it strange that you mention Smart Fortwo, which is not particularly small when one compares it to VW Golf for example. Toyota IQ would be better example, it's not much bigger than Fortwo, but has four seats.
It was just the smallest car I could think of. Hmm, yeah, the idea of bike and scooter vehicles makes some sense, although you would lose the shelter from the elements, the ability to travel without your eyes on the road, and the ability to travel in groups. So both options are probably needed, although right of ways will be less efficient if heavily shared by autonomous vehicles and human-powered transport.
I wish people would stop with this. Human-powered transportation for mass transit is slow, does not work over long distances, requires effort that most people are not willing to provide, and is a poor choice in the rain or snow or cold.
The problem is always density. For example, the new 345 class train that will be used on the Crossrail Elizabeth Line in London is as long as 82 Smart fortwos placed back to back, but carries up to 1500 people.
Cars are extremely convenient and comfortable, but an extremely space inefficient way of moving large numbers of people. Even with autonomous vehicles, you still have hard limits on how many vehicles per hour you can physically move through any point.
Andy Byford failed in fixing Toronto's transit problems although I don't think it was his fault and more likely a dysfunctional city council and an uncompromising transit union. Hopefully, he can help NYC fix their problems.
I just got back from Tokyo. What an incredible network of trains/subways. I know every city has its own challenges but if there are any questions, ask the Japanese because they seem to have figured it all out. Moving 10 million people a day in Tokyo is a testament to their know-how.
There's lesson to be learned everywhere, including Tokyo. But it's hardly a perfect system. The main trains and stations are absurdly busy (to a degree where it won't work in the US). Signage is awful, and many station are confusing.
If you're looking to build something at the same scale of Tokyo (in terms of KMs of track, and daily ridership) I think you need to do better. The system feels like it's bursting at the seams.
On a smaller scale, Taipei's subway is pretty damn impressive. Hong Kong's octopus and airport express are still gold standards in payment and airport link. Finally, in many way's Shanghai takes the cake, in large part because of how it went from nothing to this massive system (largest by distance, I believe), in a relatively short time. I believe Shanghai has roughly the same daily ridership as Tokyo and, although it's also insane at peak hour, it's better than the worst of the Yamanote line.
There's lesson to be learned everywhere, including Tokyo. But it's hardly a perfect system. The main trains and stations are absurdly busy (to a degree where it won't work in the US). Signage is awful, and many station are confusing.
It's hard to make the case that an absurdly busy transit system is the sign of a transit system that needs improvement. The stations can be confusing at first (especially to a foreigner), but part of that is that the stations are huge... though after a few trips it's much more navigable.
The thing that I like best about the Tokyo transit system (and Japanese transit in general) is that it's so punctual and reliable. In the USA (SF Bay Area) I need to take a train scheduled to reach my destination at least 30 minutes before I need to be there to account for inevitable delays. And in the off hours, trains may only run every 30 or 60 minutes, meaning that I might be padding my schedule up to 90 minutes to make sure I get there on time. While in Tokyo, trains arrive almost to the second of their scheduled time.
Honestly $19B doesn't sound so bad considering in Boston we can't even build a 3 mile above ground extension to the Green Line for less than $2 Billion.
It does. The New York comptroller estimates that tax revenue alone would be ~1.3B per year. I couldn't find a good estimate on the judicial costs though.
At that price… I’ve just been watching a video about Launch Loops, and a well-costed design for one of those with existing tech costs only $2bn, which implies it would be nearly ten times cheaper to make a 2,000km long, 80km tall maglev train fling you all the way around the planet (wonder how hard it is to aim for the right spot on the way down?) than to do public transport right in what ought to be a perfect location. From what I remember when I visited, possibly also faster.
Infrastructure is vastly cheaper when you don't need to deal with other infrastructure. EX: Big dig forced to use liquid nitrogen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_freezing However those 2 billion estimates for a launch loops are well into into crazy town territory.
Much like how a grad student was supposedly tasked with doing image recognition over a weekend, and 30 years and billions later it only mostly works.
It’s a densely populated city. Lots of people using the same transport routes, all of which are close enough in one place to where they live and to where they work at another that the doors at each end can be pedestrian rather than motor.
Can’t do that when the population is spread out. (Or the workplaces, but IDK if that happens).
It's a perfect location to have public transit, but it's an absolutely terrible place to build it because you would have to disrupt so much existing infrastructure and millions of people.
Andy Byford, who made a name for himself running transport systems in London, Sydney and Toronto, is now in charge of turning around New York's Subway.
Having read the article, the headline seems like exaggeration. He didn't run a transport system in London. He was a station manager. And he was the COO in Sydney, not the CEO.
Still - that doesn't mean he'll do a bad job. He has worked his way up and spent his whole life working in public transport. And some fresh outside thinking might be what the MTA needs.
"station manager" initially but he then ran the Kings Cross + St Pancras group (a pair of large "terminus" stations next to each other in central London plus a single huge underground interchange to connect them both to six different "tube" lines).
It's not New York Subway, but it's already a large sprawling system just for those two stations. In one way it's more complicated than the New York Subway - St Pancras station needs immigration and customs control because it's effectively a border with France. This is definitely a management job, taking personal control over everything, as a station master might, just isn't possible.
London Underground, where Byford worked, does not control the surface stations at King's Cross and St. Pancras, so immigration and customs control wouldn't be part of his job. Still, King's Cross St. Pancras London Underground station alone is one of the most complex in the London Underground system, with six lines, three ticket halls, and 95 million entries and exits per year.
Yes. But he had other jobs with increasing responsibility in London up to being operations director for a passenger railway before moving to Sydney. I think people are omitting that.
$19 billion for a train signaling system and 50 elevators seems outrageously expensive.
There are less than 1,000 trains in the entire system and their movements are highly constrained. A WiFi based system could both easily communicate with and locate (WPS) each train. Modeling the entire system in real-time seems doable. Lastly there would need a UI for the driver (or eliminate the driver completely) and various hardware interconnections.
The core of the system would appear to be a WiFi network, servers, tables and custom interconnects to train controls, trip stops, switches, etc. Sure it has to be incredibly reliable but $19 billion?!
CBTC is more complicated than "a wifi network and servers" unfortunately. And it's not a great business.
Firstly, no, WiFi is not going to work. WiFi runs in the junk bands like Bluetooth does. It's designed to run in unregulated spectrum, not be reliable, which is why WiFi is a synonym for "why does my internet not work today". Just think of interference from the riders phones, for example.
You also need to know the location of the trains to a much higher degree of accuracy than what WiFi would allow. The trains use transponders on the track that antennae pass over. It's closer to NFC than WiFi. When the train knows where it is, it can communicate that info to the control rooms but trains spend a lot of time inside tunnels which are not exactly famous for their excellent radio propagation properties. There's a lot of testing and planning work required to figure out where to install antennas and cable uplinks. Remember that track maintenance hours are severely constrained on any live transit system so reducing the amount of equipment to install is important.
Then you have redundancy. When your home wifi router goes on the fritz it's annoying but not that big a deal. If a part of the train monitoring network goes black, done naively that would shut down an entire line, which is catastrophic. So you want redundancy, you want spare parts inventories, you need to train staff how to do the replacements etc. Every train needs to be brought back to shop and refitted, usually using custom equipment and designs because trains are not standardised across the world.
That's just the hardware.
The software needs to be developed and tested too. Again, no standardisation in how transit systems work, so each deployment is a custom job requiring the engineers to have a good understanding of each railway with all its quirks and complexities, especially in exotic signalling and switching arrangements.
Still, in the end, $19 billion is too much. The NY premium.
I've toyed with the idea of doing a popular subway improvement project where we'd make battery-powered devices (arduino, rpi, whatever -- the biggest cost irl would be labor) to plant on subway cars and stations for tracking trains. A proof of concept could be done with just a few tens of such devices. They'd use the subway wifi to transmit train locations.
Of course, there are complications. There's no such thing as a head train car -- these things get mixed and matched. So ensuring that every train has such a device might mean ensuring that every car has one or that every train gets a car that has one, and this seems difficult. But even so, this could cost just in the millions done right.
Obviously the price tag for the NY system is crazy, but honestly so is what you guys are proposing... It's almost completely impossible to certify a safety critical system with WiFi and Arduino/RPi. This kind of engineering is a whole different ball game, and for good reason (train crashes and derailments are really not pretty).
For an informational system (i.e. telling passengers how long trains are away or for statistics gathering), sure. You could absolutely do that like you say. But as soon as it involves controlling the train or anything to do with signalling, it just can't be done like that.
MTA union, it's an extremely powerful union. The L line for example is set up to be fully automated, but they are still required to have staff for the train.
The unions aren't the main reason, it's that the signal system in the NYC subway is decades old and won't allow automated trains. It needs to be upgraded, but that costs money that so far no one has been willing to spend.
From what I understand, the L train is one of few that has the necessary upgrades, primarily because it doesn't really intersect with other lines, which makes it a lot easier to deploy. If I recall, the L functions with only one conductor when the other lines use two. I agree that the union could be more progressive and embrace change... but the big problem is money, and consequently, state politics.
The skytrain has never had drivers. Its first section was completed in 1986. "The signalling technology used on all three SkyTrain lines to run trains automatically was originally developed by Alcatel, and loaded from a 3.5" diskette."
In NYC it isn't a question of whether the technology exists - everybody knows driverless trains have been possible for a long time.
Most importantly, most of the lines are using signaling systems installed decades before computerized signaling existed so currently operating them without people is impossible. Much of the current system is so outdated that even the human dispatchers don't know the precise position of any given train without radio contact with the onboard crew. The upgrade project that the article in the link talks about would move towards enabling this at a technical level.
Secondly, because the trains _have_ had human drivers and conductors for a century, the union representing them is extremely powerful and there are many political considerations that go into getting humanless train operation. A newer system, which was built fully-automated and never had a motorman or conductor's union in the first place, has it much easier in that regard. Its a classic legacy problem, building anew doesn't involve any of the hassles of upgrading an old system.
(None of these problems are unsolvable, and all the fixes are waaaayyy overdue... but these are the cards we're playing with here in NY. There are a ton of entrenched interests and a few decades of technical debt to pay back.)
I remember a few years ago reading an article about how in some parts of the NYC system it's impossible to know where the subway car physically is from a central control room. This has other impacts, like not being able to reliably update the forward station on arrival.
Yes - at some of the stations the people directing the trains only know when it has left a station, and when it gets to the next one. Some of it is still controlled with vacuum tubes and switchboards. The person featured in this video ruffled quite a few feathers when it was released: https://youtu.be/Mjx3S3UjmnA
For instance, modern/improved signaling and train control technology will allow you to run rolling stock at greater speeds with more frequency, requiring less on-track maintenance. In other systems, undergoing recent upgrades (for example) you can run a train every 3 minutes as opposed to 6. As a commuter knowing you only have to wait a max (n)minutes as opposed to max 2(n) can be the difference between deciding to take a train or using some other means of transport, especially if you can shave a few minutes off your commute as well.
It gives the operators much more control over how they design services and run their business. It's a key enabler.