It’s Not ‘Speed’ That Kills, It’s ‘Dwell’

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

Bloomberg News recently published a CityLab piece laying out an interesting plan from New York University’s Marron Institute, the thesis of which was that we can get a lot faster conventional rail service than we have today just doing a better job modernizing what we already have – leaning on level boarding platforms, electrification, and fast-accelerating locomotives – to reduce dwell time, the true killer of trip-time competitiveness.

“Modeling shows that full implementation can shorten commutes by as much as 29 percent and slash an hour or more off of many inter-city services,” writes lead author (and fellow Streetsblog contributor) Nolan Hicks. “In short, the framework will allow American rail planners to deliver the aggregate benefits of high-speed rail at lower costs, while minimizing the regulatory and political risks.”

Hicks argues that building high-level platforms, everywhere, will speed boarding and disembarking, and also permit operators to adopt railcar designs with big wide doors to further speed boarding and simultaneously solve disability-access challenges. You could save anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds per stop on commuter lines and maybe even two minutes or more on Amtrak intercity routes. All those minutes really do add up.

Electrification, meanwhile, is not only cleaner but also quicker. If you’ve ever played with a go-kart you’ll know what this means. A gas-powered kart can take a while to get to top speed, whereas the new electric karts? Careful how hard you step on that pedal or you’ll go through the safety barrier. A passenger train pulled by a diesel locomotive could take three minutes to reach 80 mph, but an electric loco can do it in 60 seconds or less. Now you’ve added another two minutes per stop back into the equation.

Hicks uses two examples to summarize the step-change improvement you’d get to intercity services using his high-throughput Momentum framework.

“Electrification and full modernization would slash trip times between New York City and Albany down to one hour and 54 minutes to two hours and five minutes, which is a half-hour quicker than current service,” Hicks writes. “Or take the route between Chicago and Detroit, large portions of which are publicly owned. Amtrak #352 travels between the two cities in five hours and 25 minutes. Momentum, combined with long-planned improvements to the Chicago approach, would slash trip times to three hours and 50 minutes. That’s an hour faster than driving and roughly the same as flying, when counting time spent at the airport.”

There are many good ideas Hicks advances here in what he calls the “Momentum” framework. We ought to do them and do them quickly. They are cost-effective and deliver real, meaningful improvement to many, many riders everywhere. I heartily endorse them!

Where I part company is with the philosophy that we should do this instead of high-speed rail because it’s politically more palatable. That’s not a good reason. We should do it because it’s the right way to continue investing in our conventional rail network, but why should that mean we leave high-speed rail to China, France, Spain, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, and Iran?

“Because we’re afraid to ask the government for money right now,” you might say. Well, OK, but political winds quickly shift and every time today’s government points to other countries’ high-speed rail programs as evidence that we ought to throw our high-speed future over the wall to the magic of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” I have to point out that all those cool rail systems got built with government money, and they’re maintained with government money, too. A lot of it.

Fritz Plous, a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter and a guy who has been doing passenger-rail advocacy longer than I’ve been alive, saw the Bloomberg piece and had more or less the same reaction as I did...but he said it much better. With apologies to him, perhaps, for quoting him in this blog post, I’d like to share with you what he said.

“Nice little story, but why the bashfulness about a federal high-speed rail program? What is everybody afraid of? Too expensive? The federal government built two nationwide highway systems that now have a replacement value of several trillion dollars. Same with the Federal Airways System—a vast network of fixed infrastructure worth at least several hundred billion dollars and an annual operating budget of several billion—and both the highways and the airways lose money. Whence the reluctance for a federal high-speed rail infrastructure (just the infrastructure—the operators would be from the private sector)?

Sad to say, a lot of the bashfulness about promoting true HSR comes from railfans, mostly old men who feel they have no stake in the future and just want one final taste of the trains they used to ride before they get off at that Great Last Stop in the sky. HSR is a movement that needs more youth (including us old guys pretending to be young).

Read the goddam papers, people. U.S. transportation is falling behind the rest of the world in speed, safety, reliability, capacity and environmental impact. Highways and airways are struggling to deliver the mobility required by a modern economy. We’re not just behind Europe and Japan now. We’re behind South Korea and Cambodia. A high-speed rail network would inject trillions in fresh mobility, safety and industrial/economic potency into an increasingly tired and distracted economy and culture.”

What could I possibly add to that?