TRANSIT/ECONOMICS CONNECTION: the
excellent New York Times "Economix" series by Harvard Professor Edward
Glaeser
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THIS
PAGE: Click here for latest Route 7 conflict.
- Part One: Is high-speed rail
a good public investment?
- Part Two: Running the number
on high-speed trains (as proposed by the
Obama administration)
- Part Three: How big are
the environmental benefits of high-speed rail?
- Part Four: What would
high-speed rail do to suburban sprawl?
FOR BACKGROUND, PLEASE REFER TO TRANSPORTATION
USA...AND ELSEWHERE ON THE "ABOUT WESTON" WEBSITE (USE SEARCH
FUNCTION ON INDEX PAGE)
Is High-Speed Rail a Good
Public Investment?
NYTIMES
By Edward L. Glaeser (an economics professor at Harvard).
July 28, 2009, 6:57 am
Last Thursday, the House of Representatives voted another $4 billion
for high-speed rail projects, on top of the $8 billion that was part of
the stimulus package. President Obama has described a vision of
“whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only
a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from
your destination.” The administration is imagining 10 high-speed rail
networks scattered throughout America, not only in the Northeast, but
in California, Texas, Florida and Wisconsin.
There is a powerful magic in the president’s vision of fast, sleek
trains carrying Americans at dazzling speeds. Why shouldn’t the
transport technology that hauled Americans during the glory days of
American industry also bring us to a brighter future? Older cities,
like New York and Boston, were built around rail lines: A move from
cars to rail would certainly help other cities develop. Europe’s fast
trains, like the speedy connection between Madrid and Barcelona, are
marvels that show the progress that trains have made since the plodding
trip I first took on that route in 1985. Personally, I almost always
prefer trains to driving.
Yet the public must be wary every time our leaders decide to spend
billions of our tax dollars.
The Government Accountability Office’s comprehensive report on
high-speed rail that reminds us that:
While some U.S. corridors have characteristics that suggest economic
viability, uncertainty associated with rider and cost estimations and
the valuation of public benefits makes it difficult to make such
determinations on individual proposals. Research on rider and cost has
shown they are often optimistic and the extent that U.S. sponsors
quantify and value public benefits vary.
The founders of transportation economics, like John Meyer and the
deeply missed John Kain, found that the benefits of passenger rail
rarely exceeded the costs.
Their views were caricatured by generations of Harvard graduate
students as “Bus Good, Train Bad.” Is money really better spent on fast
trains than on educating our children?
I would be delighted to share the president’s optimism about high-speed
rail, but if benefits do not exceed the costs, then America will just
be living through a real-life version of “Marge vs. the Monorail,”
where the residents of the Simpsons’ Springfield were foolishly
infatuated with a snazzy rail project oversold in song by Phil
Hartman’s character.
Economics doesn’t have any inherent opinion on trains, but it does
strongly suggest the value of cost-benefit analysis, which may be the
best tool ever created for evaluating public investments.
Large infrastructure projects are complicated things that all have
hundreds of consequences, some good and some bad. It is easy to come up
with good and bad side effects of high-speed rail: More people coming
into a centralized train station might reduce long car trips associated
with sprawling airports (that’s good), but increase congestion in the
city (that’s bad).
These ideas are so cheap that unless they are seriously quantified they
have no place in the debate. Serious accounting, not clever debating
points or soaring rhetoric, is the critical ingredient in good public
decision-making.
I will spend the next three blog posts on the major costs and benefits
of high-speed rail. The costs include up-front construction and
operating costs. The benefits include direct benefits to riders,
indirect benefits include reductions in carbon emissions and traffic
congestion, and any indirect aid that rail gives to local economies and
to national economic recovery.
The up-front costs of rail are primarily the cash outlays, and these
are perhaps easiest to quantify. The Government Accountability Office’s
summary of building costs in Europe range from $37 million to $53
million a mile. The Japanese lines cost from $82 million to $143
million a mile. (Higher costs in Japan reflect difficult
earthquake-prone terrain and expensive land.) Cost estimates in the
United States range from $22 million a mile, for a Victorville, Calif.,
to Las Vegas route, to $132 million a mile for connecting Baltimore and
Washington.
These figures are all debatable, but anyone who thinks that the G.A.O.
got it wrong needs to come up with alternative figures that are equally
plausible. As such, the cost of a 240-mile line, like the one that
could connect Dallas and Houston, would probably run about $12 billion,
but it could be as cheap as $6 billion or as expensive as $24 billion,
and these are the numbers that we have most confidence about.
Next week, I’ll turn to operating costs and the direct benefits to
riders.
Running the
Numbers on High-Speed Trains
NYTIMES
By Edward L. Glaeser (an economics professor at Harvard).
August 4, 2009, 6:00 am
Is President Obama’s vision of hyper-fast trains racing through America
a sound transportation policy or a costly boondoggle? Last week, I
began a four-part series on the costs and benefits of high-speed rail.
The readers of last week’s post seemed particularly eager to get to
traffic congestion and the environment, but space constraints compel me
to push these off until next week. Today I will get mired in the
sometimes dull arcana of rail costs and direct benefits to users.
I’m going to frame the discussion around an imaginary 240-mile link
between Dallas and Houston, but the basic formula for direct costs and
benefit is general:
Number of Riders times (Benefit per Rider minus Variable Costs per
Rider) minus Fixed Costs.
I’m simplifying, but a formula needs to be simple if interested parties
can seriously debate the numbers, and the only way that America is
going to get to the right answer on public investments is if numbers
trump rhetoric. I will plug illustrative figures into the formula, but
not only am I well aware that every number here is debatable, I am
hoping for just that debate.
Last week, I cited data from the Government Accountability Office
suggesting that $50 million a mile was a reasonable construction cost
figure. To make this one-time cost comparable to everything else, which
is an annual flow, the fixed cost needs to be converted into an annual
cost, which is done by multiplying by an interest rate, capturing the
opportunity cost of capital. If that cost of capital is 5 percent (as I
said, everything is debatable), then the up-front capital cost is $2.5
million a mile per year, or $600 million for a 240-mile line.
The other cost that is independent of the number of riders is track
maintenance. One recent European estimate puts that cost at $140,000 a
mile per year for a two-track system. A feasibility study of high-speed
rail in Britain came up with the considerably higher figure of $493,000
a mile for surface trains. I’ll stay closer to the lower estimate and
go with $200,000 a mile per year, which brings the fixed costs of the
track up to $648 million per annum.
Other train costs — rolling stock purchase and maintenance, personnel —
more or less scale up or down with the number of passenger miles.
Unfortunately, there is plenty of range on these cost estimates. A
12-year-old classic in this field has a number of 10.5 cents a mile (in
today’s dollars), but one recent European study comes out at 50 cents a
passenger mile. Amtrak’s operating expenses run at about 45 cents a
passenger mile. I’ll average between 10 and 50 and plug in 30 cents a
passenger mile in operating costs, which comes to $72 for a 240-mile
trip.
I estimate benefits by comparing rail to air. A train going from Dallas
to Houston at 150 miles an hour would take 96 minutes. Southwest
Airlines takes an hour for the same route, but the need to arrive early
could add on an extra hour. I’ll add on an extra 36 minutes for the
driving time to the airports, which means that the train saves an hour.
The per-passenger benefit from the high-speed rail line is the saved
cost of the Southwest ticket ($80) plus an hour’s worth of time (let’s
say $40, which seems generous), plus any added benefits from the
comfort of the train (let’s say $20 more). All told, benefits per trip
are $140. Since the variable costs are $72 for the trip (30 cents a
mile times 240 miles), benefits minus variable costs come to $68 a
trip. If these numbers were right (and I think that they are very kind
to rail), then the system should be able to run a healthy operating
surplus.
How many riders will take high-speed rail between Houston and Dallas?
Amtrak gets about 11 million customers in the Northeast Corridor, which
has four large consolidated metropolitan areas together totaling 44
million people. If that four-to-one ratio held in Texas, then the
high-speed rail link could expect three million riders, and more to
come as Texas grows.
But as President Obama has said one of the appeals of high-speed rail
is “walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up
just blocks from your destination.” That’s bad news for Texas. In
Dallas less than 5 percent of the population takes public
transportation to work, and more than 60 percent of all jobs are more
than 10 miles from the city center. For these reasons, driving will
continue to be extremely attractive for travelers who want to save
parking fees and need cars once they arrive. I’ll go with 1.5 million
trips a year (even including future growth), which would make the new
rail line about as popular as all airplane flights between the two
cities are today.
Now it’s just down to multiplying: 1.5 million trips times $68 a trip
means $102 million for benefits minus operating costs. Annual capital
costs came in $648 million, more than six times that amount. If you
think that the right number is three million trips, then the benefits
rise to $200 million, and the ratio between the per rider net benefits
and costs drops to one-to-three. This is the cruel arithmetic faced by
people, like myself, who would love to be pro-rail. One hint for train
lovers who would like to make this comparison look better: make a
compelling case that the interest rate should be much lower, as nothing
else makes nearly as much difference. Also keep in mind that I haven’t
brought in the environment or congestion. They’re up next week.
How Big Are the Environmental Benefits
of High-Speed Rail?
NYTIMES
By Edward L. Glaeser (an economics professor at Harvard).
August 12, 2009, 9:52 am
How large are the environmental and other social benefits of high-speed
rail?
I’ve now reached the halfway point in this series of blog posts on the
president’s “vision for high-speed rail.” The national discussion of
high-speed rail must get away from high-flying rhetoric and tawdry ad
hominem attacks and start weighing costs and benefits.
Environmental benefits are one potentially big plus from rail lines.
Today, I focus only on the social benefits that come from switching
travelers from cars and planes to rail, not any indirect benefits
associated with changing land-use patterns. I’ll get to those next
week, when I also discuss high-speed rail as an economic development
strategy. As I did last week, I use a simple, transparent methodology,
focusing on costs and benefits during an average year. Today, I’ll
estimate the environmental and other social benefits that will help
offset the costs of rail.
To estimate the social benefits of rail on ridership in any given
corridor, I calculate:
(Number of riders who switch from cars to rail) times (Social costs of
cars minus social costs of rail) plus (Number of riders who switch from
air to rail) times (Social costs of air minus social costs of rail)
minus (Number of new riders who are taking rail) times (Social costs of
rail)
I’d like to include buses, but this post is too long already. Only
about 2 percent of inter-city vehicle miles are traveled by bus, and a
Center for Clean Air Policy report has convinced me that buses wouldn’t
make much of a difference.
I’m going to ignore fatalities for both rail and air and noise
externalities (typical estimates for these are modest), and ignore any
traffic congestion associated with getting to and from the airport or
train station. For both air and rail, the only social cost will be
carbon emissions. For cars, I’ll add in traffic deaths, congestion and
local pollution.
As in the previous two posts, I focus on a mythical 240-mile-line
between Houston and Dallas, which was chosen to avoid giving the
impression that this back-of-the-envelope calculation represents a
complete evaluation of any actual proposed route. (The Texas route will
be certainly far less attractive than high-speed rail in the Northeast
Corridor, but it is not inherently less reasonable than the proposed
high-speed rail routes across Missouri or between Dallas and Oklahoma
City.)
How big is the reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions associated with
switching from cars to rail?
Cars average 22 miles a gallon, and contain an average of 1.63 people.
Each gallon of gas is associated with 19.56 pounds of carbon dioxide.
That comes to 0.545 pounds of carbon dioxide for each passenger mile,
but I’ll increase that by 20 percent to reflect emissions from refining
and delivering the gas.
All told, a 240-mile car trip produces 157 pounds of carbon dioxide.
Domestic air flights in the United States average 0.022 gallons of fuel
for each passenger mile, and using a gallon of jet fuel is associated
with 21.095 pounds of carbon dioxide. I’ll again increase that by 20
percent to reflect refining, and that comes to a total of 133.7 pounds
of carbon dioxide on a 240-mile plane trip. This number is close to a
Center for Clean Air Study figure based on flying a regional jet.
A classic study pegged high-speed rail in Europe as using from 6.1 to
11.1 kilowatt hours for every 100 passenger miles. The Center for Clear
Air Policy also gives electricity use figures for a number of
high-speed rail lines that run from 5.6 kilowatt hours for every 100
passenger miles for German intercity trains to 15.6 kilowatt hours for
every 100 passenger miles for a Japanese bullet train.
Taking a middle figure of 8.6 kilowatt hours for every 100 passenger
miles, and using the North American Electric Reliability Corporation
estimate of 1.555 pounds of carbon dioxide for each kilowatt in Texas
means 13.37 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 100 passenger miles, or
32.1 pounds of carbon dioxide for a 240-mile trip.
If I assume, relatively arbitrarily, that one-half of the rail riders
used to take cars and one-half used to take planes, and that there is
no extra travel generated by the rail line, then each 240-mile train
trip eliminates 113 pounds of carbon dioxide for each passenger in our
atmosphere. These estimates suggest that trains are green, which
differs from the studies, which include the emissions from building the
rail system, cited by Eric Morris at Freakonomics.
Trains reduce carbon emissions and the world should reduce its carbon
footprint, but those two facts don’t make the case for rail. Trains
make sense only if they are a cost-effective means of reducing carbon
in the atmosphere, or whether the social benefit of eliminating 113
pounds of carbon dioxide emissions can outweigh the costs of rail.
A recent review article looked at the dollar cost to the world of each
additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Most estimates found that a
ton of carbon dioxide causes less than $20 worth of damage. Put another
way, eliminating a ton of carbon dioxide would bring about $20 worth of
benefits. (The one big outlier to these estimates, the Stern Report,
shows the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide to be $85 a ton, but that
figure has been widely disputed.)
A better way to evaluate the benefit of reducing carbon emissions by
rail is to look at the cost of reducing carbon emissions by means other
than rail. In current carbon offset markets, the average price of an
offset is $7.34 for each ton of carbon dioxide. Technologies like
carbon capture and sequestration seem to offer the possibility of
reducing emissions for less than $50 a ton of carbon dioxide emissions
eliminated.
I’ll assume a environmental benefit of $50 for eliminating a ton of
carbon dioxide emissions. With this figure, the total
global-warming-related benefit of 1.5 million high-speed riders taken
equally from cars and planes is $4.24 million a year.
The National Safety Council estimates the total losses due to traffic
accidents in 2008 as $237.2 billion. There were about 3 trillion
vehicle miles, and 1.63 people per vehicle, so all this safety cost of
cars comes to 4.8 cents a passenger mile (which is more than double
more standard estimates). Using this 4.8 cent figure, a rail line that
displaces 750,000 drivers creates an extra $8.73 million a year of
traffic safety benefit.
A standard estimate is that cars create 5 cents of congestion damage
for each vehicle mile of travel. From the same source, I’ll add in
another 2.7 cents per vehicle mile to cover local pollution, fuel
dependency issues and road maintenance. This works out to another $8.67
million worth of benefits from reducing the number of drivers by
750,000.
Combining reduced carbon emissions, reduced congestion and reduced
traffic mortality provides an extra $21.63 million worth of benefits a
year from the rail line, which increases the $102 million benefit minus
operating costs figure from last week to $124 million, which is still
far less than the $648 million estimated cost per year of building and
maintaining the infrastructure.
The environmental and mortality benefits of rail are real, but the
magnitude of the social benefits from switching modes seems is quite
small relative to the cost of the system.
What Would High-Speed Rail Do to Suburban Sprawl?
NYTIMES
By Edward L. Glaeser (an economics professor at Harvard).
August 18, 2009, 6:00 am
Will the economic and environmental benefits of President Obama’s
“Vision for High-Speed Rail” exceed the costs?
Over the last three weeks, I have tried to put together figures for a
hypothetical high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston. A link
between Dallas and Houston is not one of the designated corridors, but
a link between the country’s fourth and sixth largest metropolitan
areas is not obviously less sensible than many of the proposed links.
In one blog post in this series, I estimated that if the rail link had
the same ridership as all airlines now connecting the two cities (1.5
million), then annual costs would exceed the direct benefits to riders
by $546 million. In another post, I estimated the environmental and
other social benefits from 1.5 million riders to be $21.6 million,
excluding the environmental costs of building the rail line.
These numbers suggest that costs will exceed benefits each year by $524
million if the rail line has 1.5 million customers, and by $401 million
if the region’s rail demand has a huge rate of growth and attracts
three million riders.
Now I turn the larger economic and environmental benefits that are not
related to direct ridership, but rather come from rail’s potential
reshaping of the American economy. The easiest argument to dispatch is
that high-speed rail is sensible stimulus spending. There is an iron
rule of infrastructure that it is impossible to build massive projects
wisely and quickly. Serious rail projects take years to build, and it
is impossible to tell whether that spending will come during a
recession or a boom.
A second economic argument for high speed rail is that it will
revitalize troubled regions of the United States. This argument would
never be made about Dallas or Houston, which are booming, but some
argue that high-speed rail can save Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland.
Transportation can have a significant impact on urban growth. Josh
Gottlieb and I estimated that counties with access to a rail line in
1850 grew 20 percent more over the next 40 years. Gilles Duranton and
Matthew Turner found that a 10 percent increase in a metropolitan
area’s stock of highways in 1980 caused a 2 percent increase in
population growth over the next 20 years.
But there are reasons to wonder whether rail’s impact today will be
that large.
Any transportation investment can create large economic ripples only if
it significantly increases the speed at which an area with cheap
real-estate gains access to a booming place that doesn’t have any
comparable, closer available land area. For example, in Spain, the city
of Ciudad Real seems to have gotten a big lift thanks to high-speed
rail because people can now live in Ciudad Real, where housing is
cheaper, and commute into Madrid.
This logic has led some to think that high-speed rail will do wonders
transforming Buffalo into a back office for Manhattan. Buffalo is 376
miles from Manhattan, so a 150-mile-an-hour rail line will take two and
a half hours, which is not going to be significantly faster than air.
Moreover, vast amounts of low-cost space are closer to Manhattan than
the shores of Lake Erie. Faster connections between Buffalo and Toronto
might do more, but in that case speed is hampered by the burdens of
border crossing.
Philadelphia is the more natural beneficiary of high-speed rail access
to Manhattan; there are already people who live in Philadelphia and
commute to New York. Yet even in this most propitious setting, the
coming of Acela seems to have had little impact on the population
decline of Philadelphia or growth of Wilmington. Perhaps the absence of
any trend break in population growth around 2000 just reflects the
incremental nature of the Acela investment, but there is little here to
bring confidence that rail lines revitalize cities.
Moreover, I don’t see why is it in the national interest to disperse
economic activity from Manhattan to Buffalo or Philadelphia. I have
long argued that the economic case for directing economic aid to
declining regions is weak.
A third possible benefit of rail is environmental. Can high-speed rail
bring people closer to city centers and thereby reduce carbon emissions?
My work with Matthew Kahn on the greenness of cities suggests that each
household that moves from Houston suburbs to the central city reduces
carbon emissions and creates $164 of global-warming-related benefits
each year. Each household that switches from suburb to city in Dallas
creates $133 of benefits annually. Those benefits represent both
reduced electricity usage (associated with smaller urban homes) and
reduced driving.
But there is little evidence documenting that rail has strong positive
effects on land use.
Unfortunately, all of the evidence on this question comes from
intraurban, not interurban rail lines. Atlanta’s rail line had little
impact on population or employment within the metropolitan area. BART,
the Bay Area Rapid Transit system serving the San Francisco region,
seems to have done more, but the effects are still modest.
Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Matthew Kahn have done the most comprehensive
look at new intraurban rail systems in 16 cities. I asked them to
examine whether population levels rose close to new rail stations, and
they found no evidence for that.
Moreover, the story of Ciudad Real should make us question the
presumption that rail will centralize. If a Dallas-Houston line stops
somewhere between the two cities, and fosters the growth of a new
exurb, the result will be more, not less, sprawl.
Despite the lack of any positive evidence linking centralization to
high-speed rail, I certainly accept that there is a great deal of
uncertainty. To give rail the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume that
high-speed rail will cause 100,000 households to switch from suburb to
city in both Dallas and Houston. This change would create extra, annual
environmental benefits of $29.7 million. These benefits would be real,
but they would still do little to offset the $524 million or $401
million net annual loss discussed above.
I’m going to write on something completely different for the next two
weeks, but return to this topic in three weeks to revisit some of my
main assumptions, and discuss other rail links besides Dallas and
Houston.
IT NEVER GROWS OLD...CONFLICT OVER
SUPER SEVEN.
Planning agency defends its efforts to
study Route 7 traffic and land use
Martin B. Cassidy, Staff Writer, Stamford ADVOCATE
Published: 10:11 p.m., Tuesday, November 23, 2010
With no clear consensus to build a four-lane Route 7 expressway between
Norwalk and Danbury and with other big projects grounded during the
state's budget crisis, local planners limited an ongoing study of
transit and land-use issues to target its influence toward more modest
but still worthy improvements, the head of the region's municipal
planning agency said Tuesday.
Floyd Lapp, executive director of the South Western Regional Planning
Agency sent state Sen. Robert Duff, D-Norwalk, vice chairman of the
Legislature's transportation committee, a response letter after Duff
questioned why the study neither endorsed nor analyzed the merits of
the long-delayed project that would link Interstate 84 in Danbury to
Interstate 95 in Norwalk, a project first proposed in the 1950s.
"It has been in a stalled position for years, and it is basically an
option that does not exist at the current time," Lapp said of the
expressway. "We can't just start spending money on Super 7, because it
has not been studied for years."
Lapp said he shared Duff's frustrations about the state Department of
Transportation last year postponing a separate project SWRPA has
endorsed to spend $136 million to $156 million to build an interchange
between the Merritt Parkway and Route 7 in Norwalk, justifying the
cancellation because it lacked money for an environmental study.
The project, initially begun in 2006, was blocked for nearly four years
after a nonprofit Merritt Parkway Conservancy forced major aspects of
the project to be redesigned, an obstacle that could re-emerge whenever
the project is close to beginning again, Lapp said.
"We were disappointed when the DOT unilaterally decided to delay the
project because of a lack of money for a study," Lapp said. "When the
DOT starts up the engine again, either of their own accord, or because
of our agitation, there is no guarantee there won't be a new group that
objects to it."
Duff said he acknowledges the lengthy process of grooming the
expressway concept into a project might be daunting, but repeated his
criticism that the agency's study averted a discussion of the
expressway concept because of the likely backlash from opponents who
have traffic and environmental concerns about the roadwork.
"I certainly appreciate Floyd Lapp's response, but my position is still
the same," Duff said. "I think SWRPA should be more of an advocate of
what is in the best interest of the regional economy than placating the
few."
Lapp said a decision to back or oppose the expressway project would
come only after consensus is reached by the eight chief elected
officials of the member municipalities that are part of the South
Western Metropolitan Planning Organization to approve the expressway
concept.
Lapp said the lack of consideration of the expressway and the
interchange were based on the likelihood the projects will remain
dormant for the foreseeable future.
"If there is agreement in the MPO, we will add it to our improvement
plan and seek funding," Lapp said. "The interchange is one of our
highest priorities, and we support it too. It was a good project, and
it was deleted by the DOT."
State Sen. Toni Boucher, R-Wilton, an opponent of the expressway
concept, said any effort to revive it would be prohibitively expensive
under the state's budget crisis and face widespread opposition from
Wilton and Ridgefield residents and leaders.
"We have a $3.5 billion budget deficit in the coming year, and the
discussion of any issue in coming years is going to be colored and
influenced by that," Boucher said. "Hartford has not kept its financial
house in order for years, and we have to handle that first."