April 2010 Archives

I have recently been thinking about the backbone transit network of the Twin Cities.

The existing and soon-to-be-built LRT lines (Hiawatha, Central Corridor, Southwest Corridor) all radiate from downtown Minneapolis. The same is true of the one Commuter Rail line.

Examining the proposed Minneapolis Streetcar System one again sees the downtown orientation (aside from the Midtown Greenway Streetcar line).

Most Minneapolitans, do not work downtown. Most do not take shop, entertain themselves, or do other things downtown very often.

Many other cities have adopted Railway loop lines , which circle around downtown at some radius. These cities include Berlin, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Glasgow, Madrid, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Osaka, Oslo, Seoul, Chicago, and Moscow. The advantage is that travelers do not need to go all the way into the center to go to a destination on another spoke.

Thinking about network topology in the Minneapolis case, I hypothesize a Minneapolis Circle Line service. There are several objectives in mind
(1) Maximize destinations served outside of downtown.
(2) Minimize construction costs, use existing (or to be built) alignments where possible
(3) Minimize interference from traffic, avoid on-street rights-of-way where possible.
(4) As a service, it can utilize existing tracks but go to different destinations. It separates the requirement that the line and services on the line be identical.

To that end, there are several major sections of the service:
(A) The south-side runs on the proposed Midtown Greenway Streetcar
(B) The west-side runs along the proposed SW LRT right-of-way from the intersection of the Midtown Greenway to Penn Avenue.
(C) The Penn Avenue section runs from the SW LRT Penn Station to Plymouth Avenue
(D) The north-side runs on Plymouth Avenue across the Mississippi River
(E) The northeast section runs through Boom Island park to Main Street/St. Anthony Main. If done as a "Heritage" Transit line, it could add to the qualitative attractions of this largely pedestrian zone.
(F) The southeast section follows from Main Street along the Granary Road right-of-way across the north side of the Gopher Stadium. Part of this is the Northern Alignment from the Central Corridor studies. However it would take advantage of its location and have stops at the new developments in the University Bio-technology corridor.
(G) The east section follows 25th Ave SE south to the railroad right-of-way paralleling and crossing I-94 to 27th Ave.
(H) The section passes through the five-way intersection at Franklin Avenue and East River Road to cross the Mississippi River on the Franklin Avenue Bridge.
(I) The route follows Franklin Avenue to 26th Avenue S, turns south, to meet the Midtown Greenway extended just past the Lake Street Station on the Hiawatha Line.
(*) Some alternative routings have been drawn as well.

The route thus connects Seward, Midtown, Phillips, Uptown, Lake Calhoun, Kenwood, Bassetts Creek, Harrison,Sumner-Glenwood, Near North, North Loop, East Hennepin, St. Anthony Main and Nicollet Island, Marcy-Holmes, Dinkytown,the University of Minnesota, Stadium Village, and Prospect Park, and Cedar- Riverside.

View Minneapolis Circle Line Service in a larger map

I have not tested this hypothesis in terms of potential travel demand. I do not have a perfect routing that inherently beats all others, it is a question of trade-offs and values. However the notion of non-radial services needs to be raised as the Twin Cities go forth on the biggest rail construction boom since the 19th century.

Not much to do with transportation, but according to wikipedia Nick Clegg, who is the leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, and doing surprisingly well in the lead up to their Parliamentary Elections, spent a year at the University of Minnesota.

If Tim Pawlenty were to get the Republican nomination and be elected, it would be possible that both the PM of the UK and the President of the US were both U of M alums. How often have leaders of both countries attended the same schools (e.g. Clinton and Blair both went to Oxford)?

Like the Vikings and the Superbowl, Minnesota is doomed to bridesmaidery in national elections. Consider Presidents Harold Stassen, Hubert Humphrey, and Walter Mondale.

Anyway, for the record, I'm with Nick.

This set of blog posts reviewed the state of HSR planning in the United States c. 2010. The plans generally call for a set of barely inter-connected hub-and-spoke networks.

• There is sometimes a danger of a planner falling in love with his map. There is no danger here, even the same agencies have random maps. It seems as no one cares where the lines actually go, so long as they are high-speed rail.
  
  
• The marketers have also made a mistake, 220 miles per hour sounds a lot slower (and less futuristic) than 350 kilometers per hour.
  
  
• The US carries a greater share of freight by rail than Europe. Converting rights-of-way into passenger only (which is required for HSR) may cost some of that freight share.
  
  
• Any money spent on HSR cannot be spent on something else. The issue of opportunity costs is seldom metnioned.
  
  
  

The evidence from US transit systems shows that lines have two major land use impacts. There are positive accessibility benefits near stations, but there are negative nuisance effects along the lines themselves. High speed lines are unlikely to have local accessibility benefits separate from connecting local transit lines because there is little advantage for most people or businesses to locate near a line used infrequently (unlike public transit). However they may have more widespread metropolitan level effects. They will retain, and perhaps worse, have much higher, nuisance effects. A previous study of the full costs of high-speed rail in California (Levinson et al. 1997) showed that the noise and vibration costs along the line would be quite significant. Some examples are reported here, typical lines may have noise damage costs on the order of $1 billion.

If high-speed real lines can create larger effective regions, that might affect the distribution of who wins and loses from such infrastructure. The magnitude of agglomeration economies is uncertain (and certainly location-specific), but I think presents the best case that can be made in favor of HSR in the US.

That said, remember that real HSR (not the short term improvements to get to 90 or 110 MPH, which may or may not be a good thing, but are certainly not HSR) is a long term deployment, so it needs to be compared with cars 10 or 20 or 30 years hence, and the air transportation system over the same period. Cars are getting better from both an environmental perspective and from the perspective of automation technologies. The DARPA Urban Challenge vehicles need to be bested to justify HSR. Cars driven by computers, which while sounding far off is technologically quite near, should be able to attain relatively high speeds (though certainly not HSR speeds in mixed traffic). Further they may move less material per passenger than HSR (trains are heavy), and so may net less environmental impact if electrically powered. Aviation is improving as well, both in terms of its environmental impacts and its efficiency. Socially-constructed problems like aviation security or congestion can be solved for far less money than is required for any one high-speed rail line.

The local land use effects of HSR are likely to be small to non-existent. The agglomeration benefits may exist, but there is little grounds for concluding their size.

Acknowledgments

All opinions and errors are those of the author.

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Footnotes:

¹RP Braun-CTS Chair of Transportation Engineering; Director of Network, Economics, and Urban Systems Research Group; University of Minnesota, Department of Civil Engineering, 500 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA, Email: dlevinson@umn.edu, web: http://nexus.umn.edu Tel: 01-612-625-6354 ²Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:High_Speed_Railroad_Map_Europe_2009.gif Accessed April 20, 2010 ³Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shinkansenmap.png Accessed April 20, 2010 ⁴Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_Railway_High-Speed_.png Accessed April 20, 2010 ⁵The next largest city not on the network is Honolulu, Hawaii, at 55) ⁶New York (1), Los Angeles (2), Chicago (3), Dallas (4), Atlanta (9), Phoenix (12), Denver (21), and Orlando (27) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas . ⁷Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota are excluded from the Intercity Passenger Rail Program. However North Dakota and South Dakota have been included in the Minnesota State plan (connecting to Sioux Falls and Fargo). ⁸Source:US Federal Railway Administration http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/Research/hsr_corridors_2009_LV.pdf Accessed April 20, 2010 ⁹Source: AASHTO High-speed rail http://www.highspeed-rail.org/PublishingImages/Recipient_map012810.jpg Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹⁰Source: US Federal Railway Administration http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/Research/hsrmap-lv.pdf Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹¹Source: US High-speed rail Association http://www.ushsr.com/images/810_US_HSR_Phasing_Map.gif Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹²Source:http://www.uspirg.org/home/reports/report-archives/transportation/transportation2/the-right-track-building-a-21st-century-high-speed-rail-system-for-america?id4=HPAccessed April 20, 2010 ¹³Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_current_Interstates.svg Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹⁴Source: Florida Department of Transportation http://www.floridahighspeedrail.org/images/route-map_all_4.gif Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹⁵Source: California High-speed rail Authority http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/images/chsr/20091026134234_Preferred_state_102209pm.pdf Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹⁶Source: Midwest High-speed rail Association http://www.midwesthsr.org/images/network/midwest_hub_map_30Jun09_large.gif Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹⁷Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NEC_map.svg Accessed April 20, 2010 ¹⁸California High-speed rail Authority, "Nearly 160,000 Construction-Related Jobs, 450,000 Permanent Jobs," http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/news/JOBS_lr.pdf. ¹⁹CRS Report R40104, Economic Stimulus: Issues and Policies, by Jane G. Gravelle, Thomas L. Hungerford, and Marc Labonte. ²⁰U.S. Government Accountability Office, High Speed Passenger Rail, GAO-09-317, March 2009, Washington, DC, p. 29, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09317.pdf. ²¹Eddington Transport Study, 2006, p. 208. ²²Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics: Economy at a Glance: California http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ca.htm accessed April 20, 2010

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File translated from T_EX by T_TH, version 3.35.
On 22 Apr 2010, 09:22.

High-speed rail while providing potential benefits at the nodes, guarantees costs along the lines. Evidence from hedonic price studies (the same kind of studies that were used to assess the accessibility benefits of public transit in a previous section) show that each additional decibel of noise reduces home value by 0.62 percent (Levinson et al. 1997). Using the methodology in (Levinson et al. 1997) , the noise per train, and the number of trains per hour determine a noise exposure forecast. Applying the noise exposure forecast to the number of houses effected by each level of noise, and summing over all of the houses, and multiplying by the value of each house, gives the economic noise damages associated with the trains. So for instance, for a project running 20 trains per hour at 241 km/h through an area with 1000 housing units per square kilometer, each with a value of $250,000 would produce a total noise damage cost per kilometer of track of $1.975 million, a not insignificant cost. For a line of 500 km, this would be a system noise cost of nearly $1 billion. These relationships are non-linear, even one train per hour would produce a total cost of $269 million. Running 20 trains at an average speed of 350 km/h would produce a cost of $1.5 billion.

The noise damages can be avoided if preventive measures are adopted. These include acquiring a much wider right-of-way so there is no housing near the tracks, or noise walls. Whether those costs are less expensive than accepting damages depends on the circumstances.

From NY Times, Interactive Ridership Map

The size of the circles are percents rather than absolute numbers, which is a bit misleading, but interesting map nonetheless.

Ridership was down in 2009.

Via Kurzweil, NPR writes: New Way To Guide A Car: With Your Eyes, Not Hands

German researchers have developed a new technology that lets drivers steer cars using only their eyes. ... "The car can do everything. It can drive autonomously or it can be guided by a driver's eyes," Rojas said. The compromise is a mode that has the car driving on its own, basing its decisions on input from scanners and cameras, and only requires the driver to give guidance at crossroads.

"The car stops at intersections and asks the driver for guidance on which road to take," the researchers say. A few seconds of attention with the driver looking in his desired direction get the car flowing again.

To demonstrate the car's autonomy, Rojas at one point jumped in front of the car -- which was at that moment driving at perhaps 10 miles per hour -- and the Dodge was immediately stopped by the cameras that had detected the obstacle.

One can see the issues with this without looking very far, but interesting technology nonetheless.

There is no grounded empirical work to date on the economic development impacts of high-speed rail in the United States, since such services do not exist. Little has been written from objective (as opposed to vested) sources. The Congressional Research Service has tried to balance the arguments:

Promoting Economic Development "HSR, according to supporters, promotes economic development, as well as potentially beneficial changes in land use and employment. In the short term, it is argued, jobs will be created in planning, designing, and building HSR. By improving accessibility, HSR, it is thought, will spur economic development and the creation of long-term jobs, particularly around high-speed rail stations. For example, the California High-speed rail Authority argues that its proposal for a HSR connecting northern and southern Californian cities will create 160,000 short-term construction-related jobs, and 450,000 long-term jobs.¹⁸

Although skeptics point out that increasing spending on anything will create short-term jobs, some research shows that infrastructure spending tends to create more jobs than other types of spending.¹⁹ In terms of longer-term benefits, however, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) notes that quantifying these benefits can be difficult, and "while benefits such as improvements in economic development and employment may represent real benefits for the jurisdiction in which a new high-speed rail service is located, from another jurisdiction's perspective or from a national view they may represent a transfer or relocation of benefits."²⁰ On the question of whether HSR can provide economic benefits for the national economy as a whole by increasing depth of labor markets and improving business travel, the UK transportation policy study discussed earlier notes that "such effects are quite limited in mature economies with well developed infrastructure."²¹ This study notes that building a HSR line between London and Scotland would probably provide modest economic benefits at best because air carriers already provide fast and frequent service at a reasonable cost for business and other travelers."[]

The job estimates from California cited in the preceding paragraph would be enormous if they could be validated. A single infrastructure project creating 450,000 jobs, (out of a total civilian employment of under 16 million ²²) gives a total of almost 3 percent of the state's workforce. The construction related jobs alone are 1 percent of the state's workforce. Presently, construction alone is 577,000 jobs, so this project would absorb on the order of one-third to one-fourth of all construction jobs in the state.

While the propaganda of project promoters may not be plausible, logically there are some regional effects. An argument could be made about strengthening intercity linkages to refashion the current metropolitan system into a megalopolitan system, where people more regularly interact between cities. One could envision this as Switzerland writ large. If, as Adam Smith suggests, the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, and transportation can be used to expand the market, the division of labor can therefore increase (i.e. be more specialized), which should have some positive effects for the economy (akin to agglomeration economies). Melo, Graham, and Noland conduct a meta-analysis of estimates of urban agglomeration economies from 34 studies. The ranges of effects are quite large, and no clear conclusions about the magnitudes can be drawn. The authors write "The findings support the intuition that agglomeration estimates for any particular empirical context may have little relevance elsewhere.".

Whether HSR will expand markets then depends on whether it is faster (point-to-point) than alternative transportation modes, or allows users to be more productive, which depends again on context.

There is little else to say on this subject without entering the same realm of speculation that project advocates have.

`The estimated functions show that HSR accessibility has at most a minor effect on house prices" in Taiwan. [Andersson et al., 2010]

Examination of local land uses around international high-speed rail stations suggests that were it not for commuter traffic, the effects on land use will not necessarily be localized near the station, the way they would with a public transit station. Downtown stations, if they were to see land use benefits, should see higher local densities, higher local rents, and the construction of air rights over the station and local yards.

Eurostar is a heavily used high-speed rail line connecting London and Paris, serving 9.2 million passengers per year. Gare du Nord in Paris, which serves Eurostar, has local land uses largely indistinguishable from other areas of Paris. St. Pancras in London similarly. Ebbsfleet International Rail Station and Ashford International Rail Station are surrounded by surface parking lots.

Tokaido Shinkansen, connecting Tokyo and Osaka and serving 151 million passengers annually, is an order of magnitude more successful. The densities around stations on this line are visibly higher, but still air rights are partially, but not fully developed, indicating limits to how valuable the land is, even in Tokyo. Shin-Osaka station is adjacent to surface parking lots.

The development effects are not local (unlike public transit stations), which is not surprising since if they are serving long distance travel they are also serving less frequent travel, and as a consequence the advantages of being local to the station are weaker. Where they share space with local transit system hubs, the effects would be difficult to disentangle.

Figure 4: Accessibility by Network Topology

Accessibility measures the ease of reaching destinations. The higher the travel cost the lower the accessibility. It also measures the value of destinations, the more activities at the destination, the more valuable it is.

Accessibility does two things, first it increases total wealth. Agglomeration economies caused by new infrastructure make aggregate output larger. But second, it redistributes wealth, as the locations where the accessibility gains are larger gain more of that aggregate wealth. Places which do not increase accessibility at least as much as average may find themselves losing economic opportunities which will relocate to take advantage of the accessibility benefits.

The reason for describing the hub networks in the previous section in a paper on economic development is that the hubs, because of their respective positions, will capture accessibility benefits disproportionate to their already relatively large share of the population. First order beneficiaries are New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Orlando, as they will be hubs of the new HSR networks. Places where the network branches will also see some benefits, but not as great. Second order beneficiaries are Atlanta and Dallas, which are hubs of the next generation networks. Third order beneficiaries are cities like New Orleans, Kansas City, Louisville and Raleigh which tie together multiple hub networks. Other cities on the networks will also see absolute accessibility gains, people in those cities will be able to reach more people in less time (or with higher quality, or at less out-of-pocket cost). However, while they may achieve absolute gains in accessibility, they may lose in relative position, as a greater share of the now larger total accessibility is accumulated by the hub cities.

A simple accessibility model is constructed between five cities, a hub and four spokes. In the first case, it is a strict hub and spoke network, so that to go between any two spokes, one must travel through the hub. It is assumed that otherwise all cities are of equal size (and thus value), and the four spokes are symmetrically placed. In the second case, direct routes between the spokes are constructed, so to go from, e.g., the east spoke to the south spoke there is a direct route (at a distance of ÷2 times the distance between the spoke and the hub), but to go from the east to west spoke cities still requires passage through the hub. Schedules are assumed indifferent.

The accessibility model follows the classic Hansen model [] in which impedance is a negative exponential function of time. The results are shown in .

As can be seen, as willingness to travel decreases, and as time increases, the advantage over the hub and spoke increases from 1 (no difference) to 4 (the hub has four times the accessibility as a spoke). This is because if the time is great enough (or willingness to travel low enough), people can travel from a spoke to the hub, but the cost of reaching a second spoke through the hub is too great to be valued, while the hub, due to it centrality, can reach all four spokes. In the second case, with direct routes, the same pattern emerges, but the spokes are relatively stronger (though still not as strong as the hub).

"The spatial impacts of the new lines will be complex. They will favour the large central cities they connect, especially their urban cores, and this may threaten the position of more peripheral cities." [Hall, 2009]

"[T]he wider economic benefits of high-speed rail are difficult to detect, as they are swamped by external factors", but are likely to be larger in more central locations than more peripheral locations."[Preston and Wall, 2008]

As used here, a hub is a center of activity, from which multiple (at least three) spokes (links connecting the hub with other locations) emanate. On a network with a tree structure, the primary hub is the point from which the maximum number of spokes emerge. There may be secondary and tertiary hubs on the network as well.

Figure 2: United States National High-speed rail Maps

Figure 3: United States Regional High-speed rail Maps

The proposed US system (see Figure) , such as it is, has no well-thought out national architecture. There were a number of independent proposals that have been drawn on a single map.

• The existing Northeast corridor, the only US claim to HSR, such as it is, is part of the national "plan", though it received the least funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (see the top right on ) . The Northeast has the most developed network with semi-high-speed rail (Acela) running from Boston through New York to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. This could be described as a New York Hub (though it has not been pitched as such), with current non-high speed lines from New York emanating in particular to Albany and then to Rochester and Buffalo or to Montreal, and spurs from New Haven to Burlington, from Philadelphia to Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, from Washington south to Richmond and Raleigh, and from Boston to Portland and Brunswick, Maine, all of which have been proposed for upgrade to high speed.
  
  
• The proposed California Corridor, is based on a mainline that runs from San Francisco, through California's Central Valley to Los Angeles, with extensions to Sacramento and San Diego. The long-term vision of the national program has a line from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. With all of the commuter rail already in the Los Angeles region, the network could more accurately be described as the Los Angeles Hub. Even the Sacramento line is more oriented to Los Angeles than San Francisco, despite the distance.
  
  
• The most coherent of the new proposals is the Chicago Hub, which as its name suggests, hubs traffic from other Midwestern cities into Chicago. This proposal has achieved agreement from all of the regional governors, and with a Chicago-based administration in the White House, not surprisingly received a large share of the recent federal allocations ($2.6 Billion).
  
  
• The proposed Florida High-speed rail system runs from Miami though West Broward, West Palm Beach, to Orlando, Lakeland, terminating in Tampa with about 10 stations planned. Proposed additional extensions connecting Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee and Pensacola have also been drawn on maps, but these are farther into the future. This could be described as an Orlando Hub. Though Miami is a larger metropolitan area than Orlando, the branching structure is naturally geographically based in Orlando due to it centrality on the Florida peninsula, as well as it central location vis-a-vis tourist traffic. Tourist traffic is important to this line, as stops at Disney and Port Canaveral have been included. It is anticipated the line will carry 2 million travelers yearly ( 5500 per day on 12-18 round trips), and is 324 miles in length in total. With 10 stations, there is an average of 32 miles between stations, which will bear nuisance costs, and 10 station areas, which will see accessibility benefits. The line is anticipated to run along the I-4 and I-95 corridors for significant stretches, so those areas already see some accessibility benefits (at on-ramps and off-ramps) and nuisance costs (between interchanges).
  
  
• The Northwest region, or Seattle Hub connects Vancouver, Canada with Salem, Oregon.
  
  
• The South-Central region, once dubbed the Texas Triangle, and now the Texas T-Bone, may be described as a Dallas Hub, connecting San Antonio, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, and Memphis, among others.
  
  
• The Southeast region is probably best described as an Atlanta Hub, as Atlanta is the key interchange in the region (hubbing traffic from Savannah, Jacksonville, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Nashville, Charlotte, and Raleigh), and the largest metropolitan area. There is also a line from Raleigh through Columbia to Savannah, bypassing Atlanta, which is helpful for long-distance train travelers from the Northeast going to Florida, but might not have much local demand.
  
  
• The Gulf Coast Corridor, or New Orleans Hub connects Houston to Mobile and Atlanta. This is an official FRA corridor, but seems on a slower track than many of the others, not receiving funding in the most recent round.
  
  
• The long term program includes a line from Phoenix to Tucson (a Phoenix Hub), and from Denver to El Paso (a Denver Hub), but these are both isolated corridors, indicated on the long-term vision, without any likelihood for construction in the short-term. Describing these as hubs stretches the meaning of the term, but those are the primary cities on the respective networks, and are the only cities on their networks with significant feeder public transit. While these local spokes do not show on the national high-speed rail network, they still exist, and support the use of the term for these locales.
  
  

Several cities tie together multiple hub networks, these include New Orleans (connecting the Dallas and Atlanta networks as the hub of the Gulf Coast Corridor), Raleigh (connecting the Atlanta and New York networks), Louisville (connecting the Chicago and Atlanta networks), and Kansas City (connecting the Dallas and Chicago networks). Those with an eye to drawing networks would easily conceive of links (not yet on the books) connecting Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville in Tennessee, or Pittsburgh and Cleveland or Columbus. The unofficial US High-speed rail Association has the most comprehensive network plans, including staging, which includes many of these and other links, see the bottom left on .

These hub networks in the Federal High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program includes the top 47 metropolitan areas of the United States (and many smaller ones), the largest city not on the network is Salt Lake City, Utah, at 48, with just over 1 million people in the metro area ⁵. The Hubs themselves are metro areas ranked 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 15, and 27.⁶ The US High-speed rail Association network includes even more cities. The political genius of the proposed intercity passenger proposal is that it includes lines in all but 8 of the 50 states⁷. This is a practice learned in transportation from previous national packages, the Interstate Highway System (with miles in all 50 states (special routes in Alaska and Hawaii), as shown in the bottom right of ) and Amtrak (nearly so), helping ensure strong support in Congress.

Titles:

US HSR Maps

(1): Federal Railroad Administration High-Speed Rail Corridor Designations ⁸.;

(2) US DOT High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program as funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 ⁹;

(3) US DOT High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Vision ¹⁰;

(4) US High-speed rail Association Staging Plan ¹¹

(5) US Public Interest Research Group ¹²;

(6) Interstate Highway System ¹³.

Regional HSR Maps

(1) Florida (Orlando Hub)¹⁴;

(2) California (Los Angeles Hub)¹⁵;

(3) Midwest (Chicago Hub) ¹⁶;

(4) Northeast (New York Hub) ¹⁷.

No failures allowed.

Figure 1: International High-speed rail Maps

High-speed rail lines have been built and proposed in numerous countries throughout the world. The advantages of such lines are a higher quality of service than competing modes (air, bus, auto, conventional rail), potentially faster point-to-point times depending on specific locations, faster loading and unloading times, higher safety than some modes, and lower labor costs. The disadvantage primarily lies in higher fixed costs, potentially higher energy costs than some competing modes, and higher noise externalities. Whether the net benefits outweigh the net costs is an empirical question that awaits determination based on location specific factors, project costs, local demand, and network effects (depending on what else in the network exists). The optimal network design problem is hard (in the mathematical sense of hard, meaning optimal solutions are hard to find because of the combinatorics of the possible different network configurations), so heuristics and human judgment are used to design networks.

The network architecture of high-speed rail lines has tended to be in a hub-and-spoke pattern, connecting a hub city (e.g. Paris, Madrid, Tokyo) to secondary cities in tree-like architecture, with occasional crossing links, typically at both lower speed, lower frequency, and lower cost of construction. As these systems were designed nationally, and the largest city is often the capital (as in Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo), which is also (roughly) centrally located, it is no surprise that the hub was based where it was. Germany has fewer very high speed links (faster than 300 km/h), and a flatter (less-hubbed) network, perhaps reflecting its strong federalism, relative decentralization into a multi-polar urban structure and late formation into a nation-state. Italy has centered its hub in Milan, the largest metropolitan area in the country. Maps of International HSR systems are shown in .

The reason for the hub-and-spoke architecture is to achieve economies of density in track usage and network effects at the hub city which enable frequent service to multiple destinations. Multiple paths between origins and destinations would diffuse the network effects and result in less frequent service, and therefore reduce demand. The hub-and-spoke architecture, while benefitting the network as a whole when demand is insufficient to enable frequent point-to-point service, clearly benefit the hub cities the most, as they gain from all the incoming flows which create additional demand, and thus greater service. In air transportation, airlines often use hub-and-spoke networks, and if they have a large market share at a hub airport, will use that advantage to charge a premium for travel, thereby capturing some, if not all, of the benefits of being located in a hub airport city.

SFGate: Bay Area transit up for unprecedented overhaul

In the last decade we almost doubled the amount of money we put toward transit, while increasing service only 16 percent and ridership only 7 percent. Which calls for more strong words from the report:

"That is a terrible return on our region's transit investment, and it should cause us to think long and hard before committing future funds to such a low-yield strategy."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/transportation/detail?blogid=33&entry_id=61502#ixzz0llHxwksw

I will be in New York on Friday April 30 giving a talk on Transport, Land Use, and Value hosted by the local University Transportation Center at City University of New York.

Given transportation creates land value, and recognizing the problem of underfunding transport infrastructure, new funding sources can be used to increase transport investment, create additional land value, and improve social welfare. This presentation considers co-evolutionary process between the development of land and transport networks. Using data from the rail and Underground in London and the streetcar system in the Twin Cities, the empirical relationship is established statistically under several different contexts, and hypotheses about the positive feedback nature of the interaction are tested.

Time & Location
Baruch College Conference Center
151 E. 25th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY

9:30 am - Breakfast & registration
10:00 am - Seminar

From the Telegraph (such a quaint name for a newspaper) HIT loses $500m in pre-school TV market

"The owner of Thomas the Tank Engine, HIT Entertainment, has been forced to write $500m (£325m) off its value, wiping out the entire investment of private equity owners Apax Partners."

... blaming a competitive pre-school market. I know our household purchases of Thomasana is down this year, mainly because there is nothing left to buy.

Will Warren Buffett be next?

The lanes on Riverside Avenue in Minneapolis are now a puzzling palimpsest of perceived precepts. Since the snowplows scraped up some of the most recent markings and whatever obscured the previous iteration, Riverside is now not a self-explaining road, instead it is a self-confusing road. Is there or is there not a turn-lane?

Photo taken at intersection of Riverside and Butler Place.

In Twin Cities Daily Planet: Returning streetcars to the Twin Cities.

A bill before the Minnesota legislature would use value capture techniques (Tax Increment Financing in a Transit Improvement District) to pay for the capital and operating costs of transit, including streetcars.

Whether streetcar benefits outweigh costs for Minneapolis or not, value capture to pay for transportation services is progress (compared with other general fund sources).

Ryan Avent at The Bellows argues in his post No Choice

"The bottom line is this: we can no longer afford to not tax important negative externalities. We can no longer afford to not do the stuff we really ought to have been doing in the first place. The options we have are to ratchet up current taxes with bad incentive effects and diminishing returns, or to cut spending on important priorities, or both. But cutting back on education spending and infrastructure investment while increasing taxes on income will squeeze growth, making the task of closing these financial holes harder.

Or we can bite the bullet, suck it up, and start charging an appropriate amount for valuable public infrastructure. We can stop giving away space on roads and parking spots for free, costing everyone a lot of wasted time. We can stop letting companies foul the air and slow-cook the earth with no negative impact to their bottom line. And then we just might have enough dough to keep critical infrastructure running. We might even be able to invest in a new and better infrastructure capacity."

Similarly, the blog Grush Hour argues No more RUC [Road User Charge] trial please, suggesting we know enough and the time for action is now.

While any claims I have to working in transportation economics would be revoked if I did not support road pricing, there are several issues that keep getting ignored in the progressive blogosphere when endorsing quick implementation of road pricing.

(1) Gas taxes send the right signal about general use, and encourage conversion from gasoline to electric powered vehicles if set appropriately, though does not send a useful signal for time and place A Dozen Reasons for Raising Gas Taxes

(2) Gas taxes are administratively efficient, road pricing loses on the order of 20-30% of revenue to administration and collection costs. See: Too Expensive to Meter

(3) Imposing a new mileage based user fee/road user charge/vehicle mileage tax on existing vehicles is going to be unpopular, probably less popular than simply raising gas taxes. See: Road pricing killed off by Transport Secretary

Everyone now recognizes gas taxes will cease to be effective as user charge as hybrid and EV adoption rises (unless the gas tax rises with MPG, and even then 100% EVs will get off the hook). If we rely only on gas taxes, we eventually will have to tax 100% of the cost of roads on the last gasoline powered vehicle. The system will break down long before then. See Beyond the Gas Tax.

This suggests an obvious transition point. Use gas taxes to collect revenue from the "old fleet" powered by gasoline or diesel, use a Vehicle Mileage Tax to collect revenue from the "new fleet" powered at least in part by electricity. It can be easily communicated that the new fleet does not consume gasoline (or as much) and this is about fairness. The relative gas and electricity charges can still be skewed to adjust for environmental externalities associated with gasoline, but other than that, should be equalized to reflect costs imposed and benefits received. A standing, independent "Highway User Fee Commission" can set federal rates to ensure full funding of the Highway Trust Fund (and secondarily manage traffic by time and place). States could piggy-back on the apparatus.

Each new electric or quasi-electric car can have an on-board device to compute tolls specific to the vehicle (based on MPG, and therefore discounting for the gas tax already paid) and for time (hour of day, day of week) and general place (in the city, on the freeway, vs. in the country, on local roads, etc.). Since this would apply only to new cars, no older EVs would be harmed (it is a small price to pay for political harmony).

Trucks are another story, since the fleet is smaller and more centrally (though not centrally) managed. They can be converted sooner.

Hattip to Strong Towns Blog, a report from MPR on the number (or lack therof) of jobs created due to stimulus in Minnesota: How many jobs? Roads, bridges and the stimulus

... "I checked in with the Minnesota Department of Transportation on Friday after seeing a jobs number on its site that just couldn't be right -- 483 full time equivalent jobs.

It wasn't. A MnDOT spokesman said that represented only jobs from the last quarter of 2009 and that the total FTE was about 1,500. That made sense and I was going to post the 1,500 number on Friday but then the spokesman called back and said they were still working on a calculation and I shouldn't use the 1,500."
...

I have no clue what the real number is, nor does anyone else, but I do suspect the methodology is nonsense. The prediction for 5000 road construction jobs in Minnesota did not come to pass. As I said last year, highways are a lot more capital intensive than they were in the 1930s, and macro-economists who think of highways as job-creators are simply remembering black and white films of the Civilian Conservation Corps with gangs of workers and pickaxes building roads through national parks. This of course doesn't mean roads should or should not be built, but the stimulus bill was not terribly effective in this arena for job creation.

Transportation should be justifiable on its own merits (private + social benefits > private + social costs), not because it creates jobs (which in any case is a cost not a benefit -- I am not a macroeconomist).

A recession may however make the case stronger. If a recession causes employment to go down (and thus wages to drop, and other demand to drop, so other capital costs to drop as well), the total costs of a project will drop, and the benefit cost ratio should rise (the benefits may be lower due to lower initial demand, but that is only short-term and thus a small fraction of the benefits, while the cost drop for initial capital costs is a large fraction of the costs). If the benefit-cost ratio goes up, funding is more justifiable.

It is most optimal to run the capital equipment required for road construction at a continuous level of "full" utilization, because this equipment is expensive, you don't want it lying about unproductive, and you don't want to buy more for only a short-term spike. Due to specialization, the equipment is not terribly fungible (nor are its operators), you cannot use road construction equipment on non-road projects very easily. Continuous rate of utilization is achieved by a steady rate of expenditure on projects which is not very spiky due to stimulus or other money bombs, or on the other side, drops in revenue due to failure to authorize expenditures, short term drops in user fees etc.

From Chicago Breaking Business (via Daily Kos of all places) Spirit Airlines to try $45 fee for a carry-on bag

(Parenthetically this is a terrible name for a website, Chicago "breaking business", if so business should move elsewhere)

"Spirit Airlines will charge as much as $45 each way for a carry-on bag, adding a fee that bigger airlines have yet to try. The charge will apply to bags in the overhead bin. Personal items that fit under the seat will still be free.

The new charge is $45 if paid at the gate, and $30 if paid in advance. It begins Aug. 1. Spirit says a new fare reduction means most customers won't really pay more to fly.

It says having fewer carry-on bags will help empty the plane faster. Spirit also charges to check luggage.

Spirit mostly flies out of Florida to Latin America. Even though it's a minor player, bigger airlines are likely to watch to see whether customers are willing to pay for carry-ons."

First they charge you for baggage that is checked, now they charge you for bags that are in the overhead. I suppose it will be cheaper to just buy clothes at each end and dump the suitcases if this persists. It is almost enough to make someone want to take a train or ride a bus. Someone once called long distance phone companies "billing machines with a network attached", it seems airlines are moving in that direction.

The 4th International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability draft agenda is now available for download. The conference will be held July 22-23, 2010, University of Minnesota. We look forward to seeing you here.

From New Scientist: Look, no hands: Cars that drive better than you

Ekmark says we are now entering an era in which vehicles will also gather real-time information about the weather and highway hazards, using this to improve fuel efficiency and make life less stressful for the driver and safer for all road users. "Our long-term goal is the collision-free traffic system," says Ekmark.

Ultimately, that means bypassing the fallible humans behind the wheel - by building cars that drive themselves. Alan Taub, vice-president for R&D at General Motors, expects to see semi-autonomous vehicles on the highway by 2015. They will need a driver to handle busy city streets or negotiate complex junctions, but once on the highway they will be able to steer, accelerate and avoid collisions unaided. A few years on, he predicts, drivers will be able to take their hands off the wheel completely: "I see the potential for launching fully autonomous vehicles by 2020."

This is a nice summary of the state of affairs in driverless cars. Deployment in 2020 seems likely, but the way it is with these things it seems it will be forever-off (it is 10 years in the future and always will be, like useful fusion, or peace in the Middle East) until it happens, and then it happens really quickly (if it is useful) (i.e. we will almost turn over the fleet within 10 years (perhaps 5) if this proves useful, with a few antiques (human-driven vehicles) allowed out on Sundays). I am convinced that autonomous vehicles will be perceived as quite useful by travelers, etc. (everyone except the anti-mobility crowd who will now have to explain why diesel powered driverless commuter trains enabling exurban development are good, but driverless electric powered cars enabling exurban development are bad).

Convoys, like the EU SARTRE plan, seem much more doubtful since they require far more coordination than autonomous driverless vehicles, for very little gain (slightly faster times on freeways for other people, slightly more freeway capacity) that does little for most trips (which are mostly non-freeway).

In New Scientist: Picking our brains: Why are some people smarter?

One important factor [in intelligence] seems to be how well our neurons can talk to each other. Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, found that smarter brains seem to have more efficient networks between neurons - in other words, it takes fewer steps to relay a message between different regions of the brain. That could explain about a third of the variation in a population's IQ, he says.

So can we extrapolate that ``smarter'' cities have more efficient networks (in a sense, higher accessibility)? This may be the source of agglomeration economies that give value to cities over random space, the ability to connect.