Frequency Works, Again

Last month I posted a quick note on the importance of frequency in transit, spurred by some research I’d done for my ongoing research project. Here’s another one, this time courtesy of the Philadelphia suburban rail system (today’s SEPTA Regional Rail). From this 1958 article in The Nation:

A similar experiment, is now being attempted on commuter lines serving Philadelphia–so far with a similar result. Philadelphia appropriated $160,000 on the promise of the Pennsylvania and the Reading to step up commuter and off-hour service to the northern residential suburbs. The Philadelphia, city fathers explained that they did not regard the $160,000 as an actual subsidy, but merely as an underwriting of increased operational costs, to see if improved rail service would take some of the clutter of cars off city highways. If this could be done, the pressure for ever larger highways, ever more bridges and tunnels, ever increasing parking facilities would be eased, and a subsidy to the railroads, even from the taxpayers’ standpoint, would justify itself.

The New York Herald Tribune reported last month on the Philadelphia experiment at the end of the first month of a six-month test period. The Pennsylvania had increased the number of trains on its Chestnut Hill run by 33 per cent to thirty-six daily; service was stepped up to every fifteen minutes in rush hours, every half-hour in off-hours. The Reading boosted the number of its trains from thirty-three to thirty six daily, Saturday service on both lines was almost doubled, and cheaper fares were tied in with bus-line  transfers. The result: In the fourth week of operation, the Pennsylvania carried 4,133 more passengers than it had in the test week of October 6, before the plan went into effect, a gain of 14.8 per cent; and the Reading picked up 2,422 passengers in the same week, an improvement of 7.6 per cent over its test week in May. For the entire four weeks, the Pennsylvania gained 11,128 additional riders; the Reading 7,099. The effect on city traffic already was observable; 600 fewer automobiles a day were coming into the city from the suburbs.

Philadelphia hopefully assessed the advantages of the plan this way: cheaper fares mean a saving, for the individual commuter, of 90 cents a day over automobile operation (including parking fees, insurance and fuel costs), or a total of $100 in the six months of the test period. This saving to the individual driver is projected into a much greater saving to the city. It means, Philadelphia estimates, that about $81 million annually can be saved on the cost of maintaining existing roads and providing police protection. And this is apart from the merry-go-round cost of building ever more and wider highways.

This was a truly different world for transit. SEPTA wouldn’t be formed until 1963, and it wouldn’t take over any responsibility for the commuter lines until 1966, or direct operation of them until 1983. And yet, the truth that frequency translates to ridership is apparent in this report. Indeed, the actions taken on the Pennsylvania’s Chestnut Hill West Line (the two Chestnut Hill lines run very close and parallel to each other, entirely within the boundaries of the city of Philadelphia), mirror closely the idealized set of recommendations that Jarrett Walker or any frequency-minded planner would make: clockface schedules, decent off-hours service, reduced fares, and schedule and fare coordination with buses.  There are, quite frankly, any number of transit agencies that can’t get their act together to make these things work in 2014. Perhaps we don’t give the people running our public transit systems during their decline phase in the 1950s enough credit?

Note: The numbers reported work out to a daily 1958 ridership of a little under 4,000 on Chestnut Hill West and about 4,400 on Chestnut Hill East before the experiment. Today, both lines carry about 5,500 riders daily, despite service that maxes out at half-hourly at peak and hourly off.

New Life for an Old Bridge Line: Norfolk Southern, D&H, and the New England Market

On Monday the long-rumored acquisition of the southern end of the historic Delaware & Hudson Railroad by one of the two titans of railroading in the eastern US, Norfolk Southern, finally came to pass. On the one hand, this is a relatively minor transaction that simply brings ownership of a long-suffering rail line into line with the railroad that is its majority user. On the other, it’s a deal that has the potential for wide-ranging effects in the small world of Northeastern railroading—most prominently, to bring real competition to the rail freight market in New England for the first time since probably the 1960s.

History of the D&H

The D&H, whose main line (for now) extends from Sunbury (traditionally Wilkes-Barre), PA to Montreal, has a checkered and often-unprofitable history. A corporate descendant of an early canal corporation, it was in its early years a coal-hauling route, but has essentially struggled to survive on bridge traffic since the decline of the Pennsylvania coal fields. The story of

Historic map of the D&H, via http://www.american-rails.com/delaware-and-hudson.html

the D&H in the second half of the 20^th century is a story of a railroad struggling to keep its head above water, but never useless enough to be abandoned. At various points, it has been owned or operated by Norfolk Southern predecessor Norfolk & Western, Guilford Industries (owner of what is now known as Pan Am Railways, a key player in this week’s acquisition), the independent regional New York, Susquehanna, and Western, and, for the last 20 years, Canadian Pacific. Very little traffic originates on-line, and as Canadian Pacific has struggled to develop the through traffic to Northeastern US markets it anticipated when it bought D&H, the line’s importance to the Canadian railroad has declined, especially south of Schenectady. Above the Capital District, CP uses the line heavily for oil traffic bound for the Port of Albany—CP has the only single-line haul from the Bakken Shale to an East Coast oil port—but those trains don’t use the line down to Binghamton and Pennsylvania.

The New England Gateways

In more recent years, much of the D&H’s traffic has been shaped by a business alliance external to the railroad itself—one that has more to do with the New England market than with the D&H’s historic Pennsylvania-Canada axis. There have, historically, been essentially three routes carrying large amounts of rail freight into New England. The southernmost was the New Haven Railroad’s Maybrook Line, which used the majestic Poughkeepsie Bridge until its suspicious damaging fire in 1974. The second was the New York Central controlled Boston & Albany, an early example of masterful American engineering that connected its two namesake cities across the Berkshires and is still the dominant rail freight corridor into New England. The northernmost of the major New England access routes was the Hoosac Tunnel route, controlled for most of its history by the Boston & Maine and its successor, Guilford/Pan Am. Finished later than the B&A, and cursed with eternal tight curves, single track (though it does have the advantage of less severe grades), and different-line connections to the west, the Hoosac line was always the weaker competitor in the Albany-Boston corridor. Since the reorganization of the railroad industry in the 1960s and 1970s, the Hoosac line has become increasingly marginal, since it fell under the control of a weak regional railroad, while the B&A was controlled by much larger railroads: NYC, Penn Central, Conrail, and now CSX.

Pan Am Southern Enters the Scene

In 2009, the fortunes of the Hoosac route began to look up. Norfolk Southern, seeking to break into the lucrative New England market over which CSX held a virtual monopoly, entered into a business partnership with Pan Am for joint control of the Hoosac Line from the connection with D&H at Mechanicville, NY to the intermodal terminal at Ayer, MA, and associated branch lines.  Known as Pan Am Southern, the partnership brought NS capital investment to the ever-strapped

Pan Am Southern. Original: http://www.nscorp.com/nscorphtml/pdf/pan-am-southern.pdf

Hoosac line, with the promise of additional traffic to come. The Hoosac line still stands at a clear disadvantage to the B&A—it is still single-tracked, is not cleared for double-stack container traffic, and needs a lot of capital investment before it will be ready for fast-moving intermodal traffic. And let there be no confusion—the intermodal market is what NS is after. In days of yore, the railroads moved finished manufactured goods out of New England; now, they’re looking for a slice of the market for moving consumer goods to the region, especially since Boston’s port is not cleared for post-Panamax container ships and has never developed as a major container port.

The closest NS-owned tracks come to the Hoosac Line, though, is Binghamton. And that’s where the D&H comes in, neatly connecting NS’ Southern Tier line at Binghamton to the Hoosac line at Mechanicville. NS has had trackage rights over that segment since the Conrail breakup in the late ‘90s, and the frequency with which it took advantage of them increased markedly after the Pan Am Southern kickoff. In recent years, D&H has reduced local service to 3 days/week, and 80% of traffic on the line has been NS traffic-rights trains (a lot of my information on this comes from the STB filing for the proposed acquisition). It makes sense, then, for NS to try to gain control of the line from a railroad that uses it little and has little incentive to invest in the infrastructure. And that’s how we landed where we are today.

Policy Implications

From the STB filing

NS’ purchase of the D&H’s southern end may remove one major carrier from a small slice of the US, but it carries with it the potential to bring true rail freight competitiveness back to New England for the first time since at least the Penn Central merger. Though the Hoosac Line is not cleared for double-stack intermodal carriage, Pan Am Southern has initiated an efficient “fillet/toupee” operation in Mechanicville, and NS has stressed the D&H purchase’s potential to bring longer, more efficient trains to and from Mechanicville Yard (apparently D&H currently limits train lengths to 8,000 feet, relatively short by today’s standards). NS does not project train volumes to rise much from current levels, but with longer trains running at faster speeds, the volume of freight flowing to New England will surely rise. With NS in full or partial control of Pan Am Southern and, for the first time, a friendly western connection as well, the Hoosac Line stands to be in a position to compete with the B&A in short order.

And the entrance of a strong second competitor into the New England market could have a major impact on the picture for both freight and passenger rail. Currently, CSX essentially has both the New York and Massachusetts state governments over a barrel when it comes to expansion of passenger service. The railroad has refused to allow the use of an unused half of the historic Water Level Route right-of-way for passenger service in New York, and bled Massachusetts for improvements to the B&A that would be necessary for increased passenger service. As I have written in the past, the strong entrance of NS into the New England market, which has now become manifest, allows both state governments (and especially Massachusetts), should they so desire, to put the screws to CSX somewhat. The Hoosac Tunnel route will never be suitable for modern passenger service, and the B&A is barely so, but Massachusetts should be using the threat of employing the public treasury to help NS lower the floor of the Hoosac Tunnel to cow CSX into allowing restoration of a second track for passenger service on the B&A, among other things.

What to Expect

I see little chance the STB will have any problem with this transaction, given its essentially pro-competitive nature. Over the next couple of years, the (former) D&H south end should see a surge of investment in track, signals, and the like, and I’d expect NS to pour more cash into Pan Am Southern as well. Many New England-area railfans would love to see NS take over Pan Am as a whole as well; since the Guilford era, the railroad has had a reputation for neglecting infrastructure and driving away customers that seems to be fairly well-deserved. I doubt that that is going to happen on any quick timetable; NS seems perfectly happy to proceed slowly with its Upstate and New England investments, and it already has significant sway over the most lucrative part of the Pan Am system. But it could happen down the line, especially if NS decides the Portland, ME market (and its port) are a worthy target.

Also predicted: I will finally get my ass over to Mechanicville to watch some trains. I’ve lived half an hour away for over a year and haven’t been yet.  If it’s time for real freight rail competition in New England, it’s time for me to get there.

The Challenges of Geography of Jobs in Small Cities

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently playing with the Census Bureau’s OnTheMap tool, which (primarily) allows users to do a variety of fun things with data relating to where people live and work. As someone who grew up in a mid-size Northeastern city (New Haven), and currently lives in another (Albany), I have a particular sensitivity to the economic challenges facing such cities. And while researching New Haven last year for a paper, I ran across some rather disturbing data in the city’s comprehensive plan about just how few of the jobs in the city are held by city residents, which the following graphic does a pretty good job summarizing:

via New Haven Comprehensive Plan Update 2013 Databook and Census OnTheMap/LEHD

Just 23.1% of workers in New Haven actually live in the city, and over half (56.5%) of the city’s employed residents have to travel outside city limits to find work. The latter statistic actually interests me more, since, as a transit planner, it is much harder to plan service for reverse-commuters, who tend to head to diffuse locations, than it is for people employed within a city.

How typical is New Haven, though? New Haven was, proportionally, among the hardest-hit cities from urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s, and in many ways has yet to recover. Using OnTheMap, I decided to look into these numbers among a set of midsize American cities, and compare them to some larger cities. The selections, are, admittedly, arbitrary; I picked cities I’m familiar with or know at least something about, and I will perhaps return to this in more rigorous fashion later.

Major Cities	% of working city residents employed in home city	Minor Cities	% of working residents employed in home city
Washington, DC	64.20%	New Haven	44.00%
Philadelphia	63.20%	Hartford	34.30%
NYC	84.40%	Albany	46.70%
Chicago	63.70%	Akron	36.30%
Houston	68.90%	Dayton	33.00%
Phoenix	60.20%	Portland, ME	52.10%
LA	51.90%	Harrisburg	26.10%
San Francisco	61.60%	Roanoke, VA	43.20%
Denver	48.00%	Des Moines	50.40%
Minneapolis	42.10%	Peoria, IL	47.40%
Average	61%	Average	41%

On the whole–there are, obviously, exceptions–smaller cities are able to hold in and employ a smaller percentage of their residents than larger cities. That’s not particularly surprising–larger cities have greater economic “pull” and will naturally pull a larger percentage of total regional jobs into themselves (that’s a set of data I will perhaps pull into comparison with these at some future time). But it does have other, negative effects for residents of those smaller cities that have trouble providing in-town jobs for their residents. Those residents are (probably) more likely to have longer commutes, and are obviously less able to use public transit or walk to work.

There’s a lot more to unpack here, and obviously regional differences have a major impact in employment patterns. Sunbelt mid-size cities, for example, which have historically been able to annex growth, retain more of their workers than older cities. Northeastern mid-size ex-industrial cities are really struggling; look at the numbers for Harrisburg (a state capital, a status which tends to cement lots of job in place!), Akron, and Dayton. Overall, these numbers present a challenge for planners that goes beyond the typical land-use considerations. I’ve become more and more convinced that arresting job sprawl is just as important to a more sustainable future than stopping land-gobbling residential sprawl. I think what these numbers are telling us is that that job sprawl is a particular concern for small-to-midsize cities. After all, concern for pollution, congestion, and such is important, but what happens to a core city when half or two thirds of the residents have to look elsewhere for work?

For a look at how this dynamic can look in practice, let’s take a look at the census tracts that contribute the most workers to jobs in New Haven:

Data from LEHD/OnTheMap; exported to Google Earth

The pattern is just about backwards from what we should expect. All of the tracts that contribute the most workers to New Haven are located either on the fringe of the city (mostly in wealthier neighborhoods) or in the suburbs. The inner-city neighborhoods hardly register at all. It’s the residents of those neighborhoods–poorer, more vulnerable, less educated–who are having to trek out to the suburbs for work.