When SEPTA opened the Center City Commuter Connection in the 1980s, it relabeled its commuter rail lines R1 through R8, skipping R4, pairing each branch on the former Pennsylvania Railroad side with one on the Reading side; the resulting map, for which this was an early plan, was not at all coherent and featured self-intersecting lines, but it matched the lines based on expected ridership and railyard locations. Switzerland is also physically small enough that the Zurich-Bern-Basel triangle has legs of about 110 km, which an upgraded rail system can connect in an hour minus transfer time, and which it is very hard to speed up to 30 minutes minus transfer time. From SNCFs perspective, privatizing eurocrats are trying to mess with its perfectly working system. The new LIRR Lost and Found at Penn Station The biggest drivers of climate change are people who live far from other people, who drive long distances, and whose detached houses have high winter heating needs. The traditional car-commuter train interface is to jobs in a city center served from all directions by commuter rail. practically all of Brandenburg would count, Those metro areas are less important in rich Asia or the US, but are important throughout Europe, in 2009, nearly everyone drove betwen Lyon and Toulon, it makes up excuses why RENFE cant operate on its network, Madrid-Barcelona riderhip in 2019 was 4.4 million, The Regional Connector and NetworkCoherence, The Regional Connector just opened in Los Angeles, rich and poor people are mostly traveling to the same places, for reasons that the city and state could choose to change, Burning the Midnight Oil for Energy Independence, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland Arts And Livable City Blog, Jim Aloisi, Trimount Consulting and Board Member at TransitMatters. How? We have established a Lost and Found process that is designed to recover and return as many items as possible to our customers. Theyre split across two maps to avoid cluttering the core too much, but the transfers should be free and the fares should be the same within each zone (thus, all trains within the city must charge MetroCard/OMNY fare, including commuter rail and the JFK AirTrain). He points out that American and Canadian commuter rail riders drive long distances just to get to a cheaper or faster park-and-ride stations, but are reluctant to take the train if they have any transfer at the city center end. The origin of the Swiss planning system is in the 1970s and 80s, as it was refining intercity rail, taking what West Germany was doing with its InterCity brand and going further. Grand Centrals location is better; the studies done for the project 20 years ago found that for the majority of LIRR commuters, Grand Central was closer to their job than Penn Station. Commission: Extend MSG permit for 10 years, cooperate on Penn The same is true of platforms. There is no charge associated with filing a Lost & Found claim with NYC Transit, MTA Long Island Rail Road or Metro-North Railroad. I wrote a post to a similar effect four years ago. Its an empirical observation that rail riders who are faced with a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if its near their home than near their destination. But there are others chiefly, turning faster at terminals, since the new tunnels would mainly feed stub-end tracks. But they are not going to get the money for the expansion; it competes with so many other priorities for a pool of money, $30 billion for the entire Northeast Corridor, that is large compared to normal-world costs but small compared to American ones. But once all the necessary improvements and efficiencies come in, the benefit-cost analysis looks much healthier. These would raise both peak and off-peak ridership and the extra capacity provided by the new tunnels improves the business case for them, even if the business case is healthy even purely on off-peak travel. Lost & Found Media Relations Open Public Records Act (OPRA) Those metro areas are less important in rich Asia or the US, but are important throughout Europe. The TGVs modal split between provincial regions is not good. However, it would look different. The installation of systems like electrification and cables should not cost more underwater than underground the construction of the tunnel and its lining is where the premium is. The line about losing the connection to nature was historically used by British and American patricians to argue for dispersion of city residents in the late 19th century, creating modern suburbia as we know it. We will need to modify the model as written above for the French case anyway. Ironically, this means that the best way to get SNCF to behave better is to improve German and perhaps British trains to the point that French people can look up to them rather than denigrate their insufficient speed. It would not be a niche broad sections of society in France and Germany would be familiar and only lament that the same quality of service, offered domestically and on this line, is not available on links like Paris-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Cologne, or Brussels-Cologne, and eventually on other cross-border European links, covering the entire Union through accretion of more city pairs. And yet, even relative to the highest costs of phase 2, Gateway is overpriced. Provence is renowned for its tourism, which generates extra trips out of Paris beyond what we should expect from population alone. One of the justifications used by people who actively prefer such lifestyle, rather than merely not being able to afford a city like New York or London, is proximity to nature. 17 Jul 2023 20:19:41 Most of the overperformance in PACA relative to Rhne-Alpes can then be explained by leisure travel and the good metro area coverage of the TGV thanks to Aix and the linear population distribution of the Riviera. Wheelchair accessibility at every station is a must, and must be built immediately; a judge with courage, an interest in improving the region, and an eye for enforcing civil rights and accessibility laws should impose a deadline in the early to mid 2030s for full compliance. The population distribution in both Rhne-Alpes and PACA may favor the train. I think this is right, but its not obvious (in fact it wasnt to the reader who posed this question). Switzerlands current knot diagram has to be understood in the context of the following geographical features: Switzerland is not unique in having these features. Berlin is getting two new high-speed rail lines to the south, one to Dresden and a separate one to Grlitz (district population 248,000), but nothing to Halle and Leipzig, even though that would also speed up the trains to Munich. The low frequency of TGV services to smaller cities trains run every two to three hours, often timed to just miss regional trains should be visible as a serious malus to ridership. Our system includes over 700 miles of track on 11 different branches, stretching from Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island to Penn Station in Manhattan, approximately 120 miles away. What is far more suspicious is that 5 km of double-track tunnel, even partly underwater, even partly in Manhattan between skyscraper foundations, are said to cost $14 billion in total. I dont know if tall buildings make rich cities more resilient to climate change or less (I suspect its neither), and frankly, I dont care. LIRR September schedule revisions feature changes to Penn Station A visionary project a generation in the making championed by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Moynihan Train Hall is the citys newest grand civic icon. Metro-North, with no opening comparable to that of East Side Access, had 5.43 million riders in May with a peak of 215,000 passengers but pre-corona ridership was 276,000. But there may be other concerns at play. The only data point I have is from Paris, where pro-rated to New Yorks length it should be $10 million per station and $5 billion citywide. At present, Starbucks is open, with more of the shops and restaurants coming soon. Pedestrian Observations | For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Grand Central's location is better; the studies done for the project 20 years ago found that for the majority of LIRR commuters, Grand Central was closer to their job than Penn Station. The maps below detail what New York could build if its construction costs were normal, rather than the highest in the world for reasons that the city and state could choose to change. LIRR scheduling is already extremely complex, with one-off express patterns and trains weaving around one another at rush hour; in 2015, I looked at some rush hour schedules and compared them with the rolling stocks technical capabilities and found that even relative to the derated capabilities of the trains, the timetables are padded by 32% on the Main Line. Rearrangement of existing lines to reduce branching (. If off-peak frequencies are increased so that passengers can use the trains not just for rush hour commuting, then ridership will rise. The EU is increasingly forcing national railways to allow on-rail competition. The floor of 500 km, or in this case a trip time of hours, is empirical in Japan. In PACA, the same is true for the secondary cities. MTA LIRR - The LIRR Lost and Found is located in Penn But its not the only one; there are real issues of biodiversity that arent quite about climate but instead are about habitat loss. Ticket Office Hours Weekdays: Open 6:10 AM - 1:45 PM (Closed 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM). Germany is investing in it intercity rail network in a way that sometimes tries to be Switzerland except bigger (such as the Deutschlandtakt and other measures supported by technical advocates) and sometimes tries to build high-speed rail lines and through-stations like Stuttgart 21. Customers may also visit the. More speedups are planned, all aiming to add more points where trains can be timed to connect, called knots, till the network looks like this: The notion of running trains as fast as necessary is in one sense a global principle. A larger Berlin fulfills German climate goals, by putting more people on top of a large public transportation system none of whose components is anywhere near capacity (the S-Bahn trunks run 18 trains per hour and the U-Bahn ones run 12-15; capacity is 24-30 on an S-Bahn system and more than that on a separate subway). Now, people in France are aware that French economic performance is not great. In fact, the current pattern in Los Angeles is coherent: trains go north-south on the new A Line or east-west on the new E Line; the question, posed to me by a supporter (thank you! Based on such analysis, the plan was to send as many trains as possible to Grand Central, at the expense of trains that used not to enter Manhattan at all but instead diverted to Downtown Brooklyn (within 1 km of Atlantic and Flatbush there were 41,360 jobs in 2019, of which 3,895 were held by Long Islanders). The traditional car-commuter train interface is to jobs in areas with traffic congestion and difficult parking. This pattern is especially relevant as, due to continued job sprawl, American rail reformers keep looking for new markets for commuter rail to serve and set their eyes on commutes to the suburbs. Private competition did not invent high-speed rail, and where it has been introduced it has so far failed to produce outcomes on a par with what the TGV has with entirely public operations. Instead, suburban job sites must be placed right on top of the train station, or within walking distance along streets that are decently walkable. It is imperative to build a system of cross-border trains in Europe with both good operations frequent, reliable, well-connected to other lines, and charging 0.10/km for the privilege and not twice that. Czechia is planning its own system, with international connections. The Netherlands built a 300 km/h high-speed rail line between Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the border with Belgium toward Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris, but this line is not important to its intercity rail planning, which instead lives on Swiss-style knots. For those, we assume that trains average 220-225 km/h; this is the rough average speed of the express Shinkansen trains as well as that of the TGVs to Lyon and Marseille. The dedicated Marseille-Lyon trains have an inexplicable six-hour gap, with frequent service on both sides of it, and the Toulon-Lyon trains are even worse. Judging by the example of Metro-North, it appears that no net ridership has appeared as a result of the new project. The Lost & Found holds everything that is found by conductors and cleaning crews after trains reach the end of their lines at Port Jefferson, Far Rockaway, and other stations. This means that streetcars and subway branches run very six minute all day, every day, and subway trunk lines like the 6, 7, and L get twice as much frequency. Ive spent many years criticizing reverse-branching, in which a trunk line outside city center splits into branches in the core, in this case some trains serving Penn Station and others serving Grand Central. These patterns are too fleeting for example, Columbia Heights gentrification is so rapid that the links with Anacostia are unlikely to last for more than a generation. Thalys and Eurostar, in a way, created a strong initial system, for the benefit of rich travelers. The main reason one might oppose overpriced projects like Second Avenue Subway phase 2 even if their benefit-cost ratio is okay (which, for both phase 2 and the Hudson Tunnel Project, is iffy, though not obviously bad), is that pressure to reduce costs before approval can result in efficiencies. In fact, Germany, charging similar average intercity rail fares to France, seems to overperform the Shinkansen model too. Why Does TGV Ridership OverperformModels? With such improvements to speed and reliability modern rolling stock (which none of the regions agencies is interested in acquiring), electrification, high platforms, some junction fixes, and better timetabling (which the region will have to adopt for greater peak throughput) combine to a speed increase of a factor of about 1.5, with all the benefits that this entails.