It'll be interesting to see what this realignment yields, because Sounder is insanely constrained by the Seattle region's insane level of freight rail terminal fragmentation

https://twitter.com/SoundTransit/status/1707100990154149994

North of Seattle, Sounder faces capacity constraints that look a bit more like your run of the mill capacity bottlenecks -- single track here, limited passing there, movable bridges, etc.

A few months ago, Norfolk Southern quietly closed one of their North Jersey rail terminals in Elizabeth. Amidst the supply chain chaos of the past few years, its passing has barely registered in the trade press -- but its significance should not be lost on us There are two plots here. The first has to do with railroad strategy.

The MTA released an awesome new dataset yesterday -- detailed station ridership data by hour going back to 02/2022!

data.ny.gov/Transportation…

To say these data are useful would be to hugely understate matters. Some quick maps for my fellow transit geeks: #1: the subway's 'peakiness,' or the fraction of riders who enter the system during peaks, by stop. You can really clearly see shopping districts, schools, and other sorts of non-work activity hubs here (stadiums, airports, museums, etc).

One of the real tragedies of PSR is that, at its core, the argument it makes about traditional North American railroading is entirely correct. It is indeed true that cars spend way too much time in yards, and that there's too little attention to ops consistency vs flexibility. Problem is, PSR analysis of a railroad network is a managerial tool that is inevitably going to sit within a universe of existing incentives, constraints & pressures on a railroad. In American railroading, those background conditions are corrosive.

I keep ending up having this discussion in the replies, so going to make a thread about it here. NB: saying that precision scheduled railroading (PSR) is what caused this ends up telling an incomplete history of what happened to railroads.

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1598167839692972032

Historically, railroads have run non-premium trains on a pretty much ad-hoc basis. They'll have nominal schedules but the train plan can change from day to day, and local managers had immense discretion to do what they wanted w traffic.

Good thread from Christof here, but I wanted to supplement it with one critical piece of information: even with American railroads' unscheduled operations, it is neither the historical norm nor the current reality that all railroad crews are part of these unpredictable pools

https://twitter.com/christofspieler/status/1597797779316711424

Generally -- and there's a good deal of railroad-to-railroad variability on exactly how these terms are defined -- there are two basic classes of railroad T&E work:

Shell opened a plastics refinery in Monaca, PA this week. It's garnered a lot of press discussing its relationship to the shell boom, environmental justice issues in the Ohio Valley, and the global plastics boom. But I wanna talk about the depressing story of its rail connections American freight RRs exist in this *interesting* space where their efficiency is gonna be critical to a green transport transition, but their network geography, profit incentives, histories, and relatively deregulated context means they're pretty invested in the FF economy

Have been making some maps of transit frequency in the Toronto region (for something I’m working on with @EnglishRail) and I really never cannot get over the remarkable frequency drop at the York-Toronto line, rel Mississauga/Brampton. @EnglishRail For those of you asking how I made this: I've been working on an R script that takes GTFS data, and painstakingly breaks transit routes into segments with constant service levels (to account for branching/short turns/etc) and then maps them.

That this announcement (and the *$200 million* set of capacity investments supposedly necessary for the 1 extra trip) comes on the same day that NS is inaugurating an entirely new operating plan (nscorp.com/content/nscorp…) really gets to the heart of US rail planning issues.

https://twitter.com/PennDOTNews/status/1541495374065590274

The main features of the new NS plan are...fewer, more reliable trains. That not only means there's likely more mainline capacity to go around, but also just on a very basic level that the capacity modeling done for the new Amtrak svc is...essentially void.

The rapid decline of walking commutes across the rural US might be the most underreported transport shift of the last 50 years. Many small towns/cities used to post walk modeshares in the 20s, thanks to walkable commercial cores and urbanized industry. Sprawl and centralization (i.e. into regional retail centers) killed both, massively cutting walkable trips and increasing VMT

One of the more fascinating bits of NYC transport geography is the wildly different uses of buses and subways in the city. Buses -- even if just looking at the non-school bus network -- see their greatest proportional use by students; subways by commuters. Generally, buses' share of all travel is remarkably flat across travel category; while they carry proportionally fewer trips than subways in all categories, that flat distribution does speak to their remarkably versatile role in NYC's all-day transit system

I think the word "commute" here is really important. It's true that there are a _lot_ of commute trips to/from Manhattan, but reality is that most LIRR svc area travel isn't commutes, and doesn't go to Manhattan

https://twitter.com/TheLIRRToday/status/1541055437029654528

To get at this point, I decided to face my fears and play around with NYMTC's regional travel survey data. It's a bit old (2010-12ish) but it's still useful to get a sense of how people are use the region's infrastructure for _all_ their trips, not just commutes

It's incredible how you can capture so much American environmental and resource history in a single census tract. A thread, on railroads, fraud, timber, owls, and the complexity of environment(alism) in the PNW:

https://twitter.com/everytract/status/1514638651816386564

What's perhaps most immediately striking about this tract is the checkerboard pattern of land ownership here. The West's terrain-agnostic land grid was one of the great rationalist instruments of settler colonial expansion (it made the commoditization/distribution of land easy)

These costs seem incredibly inflated, even on a unit cost basis. Hard to make a perfect comparison between these proposals and other freight RR investments, but a high level look at prices _strongly_ suggests that the costing went haywire here.

https://twitter.com/liameoconnell/status/1514087815205826562

These figures seem to come out of a 2014 study of westward expansion of the Keystone service whose assumptions about track construction are unclear to me. The report text suggests they expected a lot of semi-greenfield work to triple track (on a previously 4-tk corridor)

One of the more fascinating operations improvement proposals ever to be made about the subway was the Public Service Commission's capacity audit from 1908. It identified the IRT's overloading (and relative financial underperformance) as key issues to the future viability of subway investments, and recommended a series of ameliorative actions, ranging from altered signal designs and improved operator training to junction reconfigs

A rather underdiscussed ‘future of transit’ pressure: the unit cost of providing service-hours is likely going to increase a lot over the next few years as labor market trends lead to (much overdue) driver wage gains. That’s great, and labor advocates should celebrate this victory. But COVID-era federal injections aside, transit funding is indeed scarce. Gonna need to pursue rider-positive productivity gains, like network redesigns, stop consolidation, bus priority & rail substitution

One other reference case I think is important here is an HBLR extension. HBLR exp svc means that, at rush hour, 8th St HBLR to 33 St PATH is doable in a bit more than 45 mins, so you could reasonably expect sub-hour travel times to Midtown w/ SI extension over the Bayonne Bridge.

https://twitter.com/vanshnook/status/1495575232421244929

Moreover, on top of 'should have been done 10 years ago' items like HBLR/NYCT/PATH fare integration, there are real opportunities to shorten that trip cheaply by fixing this mess of curves in the HBLR ROW, and potentially grade separating (parts of) HBLR in JC

I agree w this take, but I think this gets to the heart of the tension in the free fares discourse.

https://twitter.com/the_megalopolis/status/1494840247896748033

We absolutely should be redistributing funding at all levels of govt towards high quality, universally accessible social services (like transit) — but that’s generally not the choice cities are making today when they decide to go fare free

Some really interesting divergences in the US heavy rail space recently. Some systems -- notably PATH, NYCT and LA -- have experienced continuously rising operating costs, while others have seen flat or decreasing per-unit spending. Though we should def take some of these conclusions with a grain of salt -- NTD data isn't always perfectly standardized across time/agency -- this does, in my eyes, put a fine point on the wide divergences in political context and managerial capacity among even US agencies

Hell hath frozen over: Norfolk Southern is experimenting with bringing back less than carload freight service, a business railroads lost in the 50s. Trucks gather freight, which is then put into boxcars and shipped on the head end of intermodal trains.

trains.com/trn/news-revie… A really interesting idea -- along with the traffic growth potential, it has the capacity to increase urban shippers' access to premium rail service, as truck-rail transload warehouses are a lot less space intensive than intermodal termini

In the spirit of good advocacy, I wanted to highlight few positive svc goals in the NEC Commission report. There's a lot wrong with it, but making sure that ppl hold agencies to these outlined visions while critiquing some of the more *interesting* capex ideas is important There's a lot of language that at least suggests Amtrak is thinking about clockfacing their timetables in the future? These really should be, at the very worst, half hourly on the whole NEC but any clockface (+ standard stopping patterns to make clockface hold) at all is welcome.