Why Is American Rail So Costly? - Bloated Station Designs

[M II A II R II K]

Why Is American Rail So Costly?


January 27, 2021

By Connor Harris

Read More: https://www.city-journal.org/why-ame...-are-so-costly

Study: https://transitcosts.com/

Why are American rail projects so costly? The initial results of an ambitious project by three researchers at New York University’s Marron Institute suggest one culprit hiding in plain sight: pointlessly fancy train stations.

- The Green Line Extension (GLX) built by Boston’s public transit authority, the MBTA. In principle, GLX is simple. It extends an existing light-rail line 4.3 miles into Boston’s inner suburbs, mostly in a trench that already holds commuter rail tracks. But GLX’s costs ballooned after planning began in 2006, reaching $3 billion in 2015 more expensive per mile than most subways. — Much of the cost bloat, the NYU researchers found, was for bells and whistles on the line’s seven stations. The first design for GLX envisioned basic stations much like existing Green Line stops in dense parts of Boston, comprising little more than a pair of concrete platforms with wheelchair ramps and costing about $500,000 each. But in later designs, the researchers write, “These simple stations morphed into bespoke neighborhood icons with headhouses, redundant elevators, escalators, personnel rooms, fare arrays, larger footprints, and additional landscaping and street grading extending beyond the stations.”

- Simple tunnels in New York were 1.7 times as expensive as in Paris due to overstaffing of tunnel-boring machines, but New York’s stations were also larger than their Parisian counterparts and 6.5 times as expensive. One engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area has also pointed out that several suburban Bay Area Rapid Transit stations are overbuilt. For instance, Milpitas Station, part of a recent, expensive extension to San Jose, is a pointless hangar-like structure occupying more than an acre. A functional station would need just escalators from the street to the platforms, a simple bus shelter, and possibly a pedestrian bridge. — Another driver for station bloat, which played a large role in GLX, is community involvement. In reaction to postwar urban-freeway construction, which threw hundreds of thousands of residents out of their homes with minimal due process, state and local governments began requiring infrastructure projects to pass through protracted community meetings and public comments.

- “Pushing the yes button” exemplifies a general problem with government: bad policies with obvious benefits for the few and diffuse costs for the many are easier to pass.— One possible solution: transit agencies should make tradeoffs more explicit. Planners could propose multiple versions of projects: one that spends extra on fancy stations and other nice-to-haves, and a more economical version that rolls the savings into better service and faster construction. The public could even vote on these alternatives: in Switzerland, one of the world’s leaders in low-cost construction, most transit investments are made by referendum, encouraging planners to cater to the whole public, rather than just vocal minorities. Ultimately, planners need to be enabled to make economical decisions that benefit the entire population, overruling local busybodies if necessary.

.....

[mrnyc]

bloated station designs.

aka actual ada compliance in america.

[jmecklenborg]

This article overlooks the fact that BART trains are 710 feet long and most NYC subway trains are 600 feet long - each roughly 2X as far as any train on any line in the Paris subway system. The BART and NYC platforms are so long that almost all of them have two or three entrance points and each street access point is expensive to build.

The IND system was built after the BMT and the IRT. That means it had to pass underneath the earlier lines and so it didn't make sense in most places for the local stations to ascend to street level since it would have to duck under an older line a few blocks away. That's why it made sense to build mezzanines. Also, NYC was still growing at an explosive rate in the 1930s, when the IND was planned and built, and there was no reason at that time to expect that NYC wouldn't continue to grow upward and densify.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

bloated station designs.

aka actual ada compliance in america.

Why would any other country comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act?

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by biguc

Why would any other country comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Plenty of other countries in North and South America :-p.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by biguc

Why would any other country comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act?

hows that again?

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

This isn't 1970, most developed and developing nations are accommodating the disabled in new infrastructure with or without ADA-style legislation - it's just universal design.

it is definitely not universal.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

hows that again?



it is definitely not universal.

Think really hard about your original post. Other countries don't follow American laws. We make our own laws and follow those. I shouldn't have to spell this out.

You seem to have trouble expressing yourself coherently and politely. The point you're struggling to make is that other countries don't build their cheaper subway systems do be accessible, and that makes up the whole difference in construction costs.

There's a lot of evidence against that. For example,90% of Barcelona's metro stations are accessible--getting there has called for retrofitting a lot of legacy stations, and building all new stations to be accessible--including the new, very, very deep stations on the L9/L10 lines.

Yet this line is still cheaper than anything in the US.

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/...st-comparison/


Do you seriously believe that London and Berlin aren't building new stations to be accessible? A lot of their older stations sure aren't, but neither are New York's.

[Qubert]

Just a thought:

How many transit agencies employ a "Universal Design Standard" for their systems so architects and engineers aren't reinventing the wheel for every new station stop? I always thought every major system should have an off the shelf station design ready to be duplicated with only location specific tweaks here and there with everything from ceiling heights, amount of escalators/elevators, platform widths, life system schematics, etc all ready pre-printed and ready to go....

[electricron]

I going to surprise some with my response, because I almost agree with everything BART has done. Every decision made along the way have really good engineering reasons behind them.

Richmond to San Jose is 53 miles or 85 kilometers long. it takes BART 5 minutes short of 2 hours to travel so far. Few metros have lines as long. Amtrak California trains on a parallel route and stopping at far fewer stations does so 10 minutes faster if on schedule. That's really not that bad for a metro rail to almost match an inter city rail on time over that distance. Why is it so fast?

They took their name seriously. Yes. BART is the Bay Area "Rapid" Transit, not Bay Area Transit (BAT). They made engineering decisions throughout to keep the system "rapid".
A) Not mixing operations with freight trains period, by using wider gauge tracks and full grade separations.
B) Avoiding at grade crossings to maintain full speed and reliability of service.
C) Larger spacing between stations than most metro lines to keep average train speeds higher.
D) Fewer stations serving many customers requires larger stations and station infrastructures.

Imagine how long it would take a street running light rail transit system to travel the same 53 miles. Let's use the Saint Paul's Metro Green Line as an example, street running with very frequent stations. The Green Line is 11 miles long, and it takes 50 minutes to ride.
Some math follows:
53/11 = 4.82
4.82 x 50 = 241
241/60 = 4 hours and 1 minute.

241/115 [5 minutes less than 2 hours]= 2.09 times longer.

So we can state BART system is twice as fast as a street running light rail system. Does that make it "rapid". I think so.

BART has been designed to be a High Speed "Metro" system much like High Speed "Intercity" trains using many of the same engineering techniques, like fully independent operations, grade separations, and larger station spacings. Yes it is more expensive to build relatively, but speed comes at a price.

For the cheapskates out there, Amtrak provides the Capitol Corridor service that parallels this BART run on freight owned tracks, 10 minutes faster than BART stopping at far fewer stations along the route. But they only provide 8 trains a day, compared to 4 trains each and every hour on BART. That's a significant difference in service being provided. And BART provides the same amount of service un many more lines as well, it is more than just this one line.

[Crawford]

The NYC subway stations (and a lot of the PATH, LIRR, Metro North and NJ Transit stations) are often larger/more elaborate than equivalents in other metros, but I don't think that's the primary issue. It's salaries/benefits and regulatory process.

I mean, take the Second Avenue Subway. Yes, it has giant mezzanines, but so do all the subway stations built post-1929 or so. The sandhogs were making 4x as much as in Paris, had double the staffing, and cut-and-cover, at least in Manhattan, is impossible.

And NY subway stations should be larger than in Paris, because they're more widely spaced, and are usually four-track stations serving much longer trains. Paris has the densest metro network on earth, and the stations are relatively small, the trains are relatively short, and stops are a few blocks apart.

[Busy Bee]

This isn't 1970, most developed and developing nations are accommodating the disabled in new infrastructure with or without ADA-style legislation - it's just universal design.

[jmecklenborg]

Again, not only are the NYC subway stations are gigantic structures as compared to any in Paris, so is any and all non-revenue track. The recent Second Ave. subway project included tail tracks north of the temporary terminus that are upwards of 1,000 feet long. When and if the line is extended to 125th St., the new terminal station will again have tail tracks that extend well west of the station box that will itself be built at a deeper level than the existing Lexington Ave. station.

The #7 extension also has tail tracks. If you remember the old #7 terminus, it dead-ended into a brick wall right next to the platform.

[nito]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

This article overlooks the fact that BART trains are 710 feet long and most NYC subway trains are 600 feet long - each roughly 2X as far as any train on any line in the Paris subway system. The BART and NYC platforms are so long that almost all of them have two or three entrance points and each street access point is expensive to build.

BART trains might be longer, but the distance between stations on the Paris Metro and BART is 740m and 4,220m respectively. Frequencies are higher in Paris and the city has two additional heavy rail networks (station spacing; RER: 2,284m and Transilien: 3,313m), not forgetting that an astonishing five Paris Metro lines have higher ridership than the entire BART system! The New York Subway is closer to the Paris Metro in terms of station spacing, but of course if you look at this from a passenger volume perspective, the average Paris Metro station sees 20% higher usage than the typical New York Subway station, and well over double that of BART stations.

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Again, not only are the NYC subway stations are gigantic structures as compared to any in Paris, so is any and all non-revenue track. The recent Second Ave. subway project included tail tracks north of the temporary terminus that are upwards of 1,000 feet long. When and if the line is extended to 125th St., the new terminal station will again have tail tracks that extend well west of the station box that will itself be built at a deeper level than the existing Lexington Ave. station.

The #7 extension also has tail tracks. If you remember the old #7 terminus, it dead-ended into a brick wall right next to the platform.

Underground turnback/run-off sidings aren’t unique to New York; Paris even has loops. This is beside the point; the big cost is not the tunnelling, but the stations and escape/ventilation shafts in between stations. It is why projects like East Side Access and Penn South are so ludicrous and so disproportionately expensive with far fewer benefits relative to any other heavy rail project on the planet.

[Busy Bee]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Again, not only are the NYC subway stations are gigantic structures as compared to any in Paris, so is any and all non-revenue track. The recent Second Ave. subway project included tail tracks north of the temporary terminus that are upwards of 1,000 feet long. When and if the line is extended to 125th St., the new terminal station will again have tail tracks that extend well west of the station box that will itself be built at a deeper level than the existing Lexington Ave. station.

Tail tracks not only enable staging trains during layovers so they can be inserted to carry passengers during rush periods but they also are there to prepare the line for possible extensions. The tail tracks under 125th would accommodate a westward extension to Broadway (1) and the tail tracks continuing north under Second will accommodate a Bronx/Third Ave subway extension, which I think is more likely to happen than not even though the MTA doesn't talk about it. There's nothing unwise about these future provisions, it's actually the definition of good planning.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

There's nothing unwise about these future provisions, it's actually the definition of good planning.

Also, everywhere else in the world, multiple lines are often under construction simultaneously, allowing specialized workers, engineers, and consultants to continue to work for long periods of time. Building the four phases of the Second Ave. subway with orders to proceed spaced about 1 year apart would have been a lot cheaper than waiting 10 years in between each phase.

The high costs of piecemeal construction are compounded when all of the provisions for future extensions that are built are never used or end up being used in a different fashion. For example, the MTA plans to not use one of the never-used 1970s-era sections of the Second Ave. line in Lower Manhattan.

Costs are also higher in the United States because almost zero rolling stock is built in the United States. If you look at the Dow 30 back in the 1960s, railroad equipment manufacturers were some of the biggest companies on the planet. With the exception of GE, none remained after the collapse of passenger rail.

Not only must we buy from foreign companies, we also rarely coordinate equipment across the country. At this point we could have picked a standard for light rail (i.e. LA's light rail) and every city building a light rail line could have built to that standard. Instead we have at least a dozen different types of light rail in operation across the United States.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Also, everywhere else in the world, multiple lines are often under construction simultaneously, allowing specialized workers, engineers, and consultants to continue to work for long periods of time. Building the four phases of the Second Ave. subway with orders to proceed spaced about 1 year apart would have been a lot cheaper than waiting 10 years in between each phase.

The high costs of piecemeal construction are compounded when all of the provisions for future extensions that are built are never used or end up being used in a different fashion. For example, the MTA plans to not use one of the never-used 1970s-era sections of the Second Ave. line in Lower Manhattan.

unh huh, yep, and so now all you need to do is figure out how to get the loot rolling in regularly. good luck!

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Again, not only are the NYC subway stations are gigantic structures as compared to any in Paris, so is any and all non-revenue track. The recent Second Ave. subway project included tail tracks north of the temporary terminus that are upwards of 1,000 feet long. When and if the line is extended to 125th St., the new terminal station will again have tail tracks that extend well west of the station box that will itself be built at a deeper level than the existing Lexington Ave. station.

The #7 extension also has tail tracks. If you remember the old #7 terminus, it dead-ended into a brick wall right next to the platform.

These extensions have tail tracks to allow for future extensions.

The SAS is being extended to 125th Street, and the layout allows for extensions west along 125th Street, and north, to the Bronx, along 3rd Ave (basically along the since-demolished Bronx portion of the 3rd Ave. El).

Similarly, the 7 train extension was built in case of future southward expansion to Chelsea, where the 7 would link up with the L train at 14th Street (it would be a platform transfer where the two lines meet).

In any case, I don't think that "overengineering" is a primary cause of U.S. transit cost differentials.

[Crawford]

Looking at some of the newer BART stations, some do seem comically large given the ridership/location. The Milpitas station is kinda silly. Did they really need a UFO-like station, and below-ground BART platforms, and giant pedestrian bridges, in some random minor exurb?

But the older BART stations don't seem large or elaborate relative to ridership/location. BART is kinda weird in that it's functionally a commuter rail system, but is usually grouped in with Metro systems. But it's not a subway, it's a RER, S-Bahn, LIRR, etc. type system. If you think of its actual functionality, yeah, some of the newer stops are kind of ridiculous. But I doubt that's the primary issue with Bay Area transit construction costs.

[Busy Bee]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Looking at some of the newer BART stations, some do seem comically large given the ridership/location. The Milpitas station is kinda silly. Did they really need a UFO-like station, and below-ground BART platforms, and giant pedestrian bridges, in some random minor exurb?

I don't see how the Milpitas station is outlandish at all. It's below grade because the trackway is below grade. Are the passengers supposed to jump off the sidewalk (or side of the 8 lane road since there is no ped bridge) onto the roof of the train?

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

I don't see how the Milpitas station is outlandish at all. It's below grade because the trackway is below grade. Are the passengers supposed to jump off the sidewalk (or side of the 8 lane road since there is no ped bridge) onto the roof of the train?

But why is the trackway below grade? Why didn't BART utilize existing rail right-of-way like every other commuter rail system on earth?

They decided to build a commuter rail system from scratch, which is defensible in core areas but gets weird when you're out in the exurbs. RER was built on existing rail infrastructure (excepting the core tunnels), while BART was basically "hey, let's build a subway like commuter train in the middle of nowhere".