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Are Larger Planes Feasible?
In my previous post, I showed how, in New York, high-speed rail can’t realistically be expected to reduce demand for travel much, and so to decongest its airspace something else is needed. The...
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Carolyn Maloney’s International HSR Proposal
Carolyn Maloney, the Congresswoman representing Manhattan’s East Side, gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which she called for high-speed rail between New York and Canadian cities. She did not...
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Sanity Checks on HSR Ridership
If you multiply the populations of the metro areas served as a proxy for HSR ridership, then by comparison to Shinkansen lines as well as the AVE, New York-Washington traffic should be about 15-20...
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Nobody Likes Riding North American Commuter Rail
In New York, two neighborhoods at the edge of the city have both subway and commuter rail service: Wakefield and Far Rockaway. Wakefield has 392 inbound weekday Metro-North boardings, and 4,955 weekday...
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Intercity Buses and Trains
In the three countries with the longest and traditionally largest HSR networks – Japan, Germany, and France – there is no large intercity bus network, with government regulations against the...
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Transit and Place
There is a large class of transit supporters who think that every right-of-way that can be used for transit should be preserved for this purpose, even if it is not very useful. A few overzealous...
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Branching
S-Bahns and similar systems have two defining features. One has been hashed to death on this blog: they reuse legacy rail lines, allowing urban rapid transit to extend arbitrarily deep into suburbia....
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C-Shaped Lines
The ideal rapid transit line looks something like a straight line. It can have deviations, but on a map it will be more or less a line with a definitive direction. Most rapid transit lines are indeed...
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The Problem with Anchoring
A major idea due to Jarrett Walker, adopted with gusto by Vancouver’s Translink, is that transit should be anchored at both ends. That is, transit lines should have busy destinations at both ends, and...
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Infrastructure and Democracy
Two stories, one recent and one older, have made me think about the undemocratic way the US builds infrastructure. The older story is California HSR’s cost overrun coming from scope creep; the biggest...
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Quick Note: Why the Focus on Penn Station?
Penn Station is in the news again: the Municipal Art Society ran a public competition for a rebuilt station house, involving proposals by four different architectural firms. This does not include any...
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Who are the Opponents of Transportation Alternatives?
Streetsblog has traditionally lashed at multiple factions that oppose bicycle and transit infrastructure, but reserved the harshest criticism for entrenched community groups and NIMBYs, and their...
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Large-Diameter TBMs
Deep-level subway tunnels are usually built with tunnel-boring machines (TBMs), which can dig and create their own lining even under other infrastructure, such as older intersecting tunnels. But then...
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Are Express Trains Worth It?
So, you have your urban rail line. It’s mostly above ground, so constructing new express overtakes is feasible. It has decent frequency, and carries trains to destinations at a variety of distances...
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Quick Note: More on Urban Absolutism
In previous posts, I brought up the theory that American cities are run in a feudal fashion, despite the nominally democratic system, and that the failings of feudalism are leading proponents of...
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Quick Note: Why Quinn is Unfit to be Mayor
The Triboro RX plan calls for using preexisting freight rail rights-of-way with minimal freight traffic to build a circumferential subway line through the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. It was mentioned...
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Who Regional Rail is For
A few rail proposals have happened in the last few months that begin with the concept of improving transit access in the suburbs, and end in a bad direction. These center on airport-oriented rail...
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The Metro-North Accident and Train Control
Early in the morning on Sunday, a Metro-North train derailed on the Hudson Line, immediately south of the junction with Amtrak’s Empire Connection: maps of the derailment area can be found on the BBC,...
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Metro-North-Everything Compatibility
The Regional Plan Association has a new study warning that Metro-North’s infrastructure is falling apart, and demands $3.6 billion in immediate spending on state of good repair. In general, my line on...
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Empire High-Speed Rail
At the beginning of the month, New York State released its draft environmental impact statement for high-speed rail from New York to the Upstate cities. The costs of HSR as proposed by the state are...
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