F-Line I think you really get to the marrow of why NEC Future is so incoherent. It does not ask the proper fundamental questions up front and that is why we are debating so many crazy transit pitch ideas regarding the future of the NEC.
However, going back to the questions you pose as someone who clearly thinks a lot about this sort of stuff it would be interesting to hear about what your answers to them might be. Not exactly your detailed alignment ideas but what should be the purpose of the NEC going forward a long ways? If we were to make a significant investment in it what would that look like? What major things to we need to concede and what things to be really need to put our collective backs into trying to get done?
I think the whole notion that we have to run screaming from the NEC and discard it for something radically new for new's sake end up faulty when you look at what's served. The current NEC hits major union stations in the CBD's of Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, Newark, New York City, Stamford, Bridgeport, and New Haven. Those CBD's organized themselves 1-1/2 to 2 centuries ago around the NEC. Those CBD's went through each and every one of their boom-bust cycles over that immense span of time organized around the NEC. And unlike every other CBD on the continent that either lost its train service or built itself out independently from "Peak Train"...the NEC's influence on these CBD's never diminished nearly enough--not even during Peak Car--to loosen its grip. Those CBD's are huge demand gravity wells, and the NEC is the only thing that links all those gravity wells because it CREATED them in the first place and never took its hand entirely off the wheel steering them through 2 centuries of change.
So there is nothing "more perfect" you can dream up than the D.C. to NYC (and arguably D.C. to NHV) sequence of downtown stops. Swap out any one piece or drag anything off-center because reasons, and the sum ends up much worse off on collection of parts.
So first off is acknowledging what the NEC
is not in the business of doing:
- The NEC is not in the business of developing real estate. NEC FUTURE's attempts to goose up the area around Baltimore's convention center and Philly's waterfront by stretching/distorting the CBD and transit nodes around it are irrelevant and counterproductive. Ditto other real estate dev trojan horses like bypassing downtown Bridgeport for the waterfront.
- The NEC is not in the business of developing new whole-cloth demand. The CBD gravity wells are so huge and so distinct we know already where the people are going and where they're hitting their transfers. The single-minded pursuit of real estate development to create new sources of demand out of thin air is a waste of time and energy for a question no one is asking.
The Philly Airport bypass, a relative cheapie that does have some very straightforward upside going for it, was also attacked in the Philly meeting by Philly officials for being a giant distraction because they thought NEC FUTURE was ludicrously overrating the new demand it would generate. Their response was "The whole city is organized around 30th St. Station. We've had a pretty good idea from Day 1 of the Airport what demand it's generating from where, and how wide a reach that demand goes before Newark and BWI proximity starts diluting it. You're tarting up an 'it couldn't hurt' infill footnote into a "It's a game-changer!!!" when real HSR vs. air mode share trends say it's going to matter even less going forward. What the hell are you basing this on???"
- The NEC is not in the business of top-down management. It is such an intricately layered mix of local commuter vs. state-sponsored regional vs. trunkline regional vs. HSR vs. LD services that it's impossible to parse out the national vs. state vs. city interests; they're inseparable. The route leads the whole spectrum of stakeholders by the nose. Banalities of cat-herding and all, it only works as a ruling coalition...not a dictatorship. We see the shortcomings of treating it as personal property when Amtrak squeezes NJ Transit and MARC too hard down south, and Metro North squeezes Amtrak too hard on the New Haven Line. It has to be a governing coalition. Those same CBD gravity wells shape every single service on an unbroken continuum from hyper-local to national such that appointing a "Big Man in Charge" misses the point.
Turf warrage is death. NEC FUTURE is all about the FRA erecting walls to keep the states out of its sandbox, even when that comes at price of watering down the demand with CBD keep-away games. Shit...NEC FUTURE undercuts and contradicts Amtrak's own Infrastructure Improvements Master Plan document co-signed with all the states. "I...me...mine" apparently draws no distinction between the states and the National Passenger Railroad Corp. itself as far as marking territory is concerned.
I'm asking because I struggle with these questions myself. Let's face it; as painful as the current NEC service is the point is we have a functional railway alignment that pretty much links all of the Northeast Corridor CBD's that is reasonably fast enough that someone can do business in NYC (originating from BOS or DC) for the day using the Acela. I don't ever foresee a future in which where trips BOS to DC will be viable vis-a-vis air travel and frankly that is not an objective worth achieving. If we look at the NEC as two distinct segments- NYP-BOS and NYP-DC- then those two segments could stand to be drastically improved but even as is they are technically workable in their current form.
Exactly. And it's a bunk argument that "first-world HSR" would find a problem with any of that. It goes where the people need to go. That is the single most
functional part of it. Nobody would throw that away. The deplorable state-of-repair needs to be dealt with, full due diligence needs to be applied on performance enhancements where they're reliably achievable.
But no one worldwide would chuck the alignment or the basic layer cake of services in the trash because they're geometrically less-than-perfect or don't set the land speed record. HSR lines get built or upgraded to serve demand. No country would ever thumb its nose at a single alignment that hits a CBD string of pearls like this and conclude "we better start forking and bypassing so we can set a land speed record, and move some real estate in the process". The ones that do bypass and augment...do so only
after they built the bestest trunk they can on the highest-demand alignment.
To the Euros, who have a very fragmented continental rail system to string together...they look at the NEC and say, "Oh, America...you don't even know how good you have it on the NEC. If only you'd focus on the right things."
So with all that in mind I often find myself asking, "is the NEC at full SGR really all we need considering all of the costs- not just monetary but the either-or decisions on routing that need to be made- associated with the alternatives." Is that a shortsighted perspective? Is our future in peril if we can't get from BOS to NYP in about 90 minutes or is slightly under 3 hours good enough? I lean towards the latter and wonder how much we should be killing ourselves to try to achieve the former.
I think the NEC at full and total SGR + capacity enhancement within the existing footprint is probably 90% of the goal. This obsession with raw speed and perfect straightness is pointless when there's no more perfect alignment D.C. to New Haven for hitting all the demand wells. Honestly, there is probably no major realignment whatsoever south of NYC worth considering at all save for these:
- The Gunpowder and Bush River bypasses along the CSX freight ROW. But as an SGR project that retires the two very expensive spans for a few miles of 4 passenger + 1-2 grade separated freight track 'super' ROW avoiding the river mouths.
- *Maybe* the Philly Airport bypass. Not because of the Airport stop, but because sidestepping 10 SEPTA local stops and the junction with the Doylestown Line opens up lots of service increases for Regional Rail on 2 largely intra-city serving lines.
One an SGR project, one a commuter rail enhancement project. Otherwise simply tightening the bolts between CBD's accomplishes all goals. Including making the NEC
convenience-competitive on a large scale with short-haul air travel. Convenience, not stopwatch. The first CBD that has to get bypassed in the name of raw speed is a setback for that convenience argument.
The ONLY places where you've got legitimate cases for a bypass are:
- The Shoreline in SE Connecticut, where the ROW geometry is legitimately poor and unimprovable. You also do not have nearly the same CBD draws with Old Saybrook, New London, and Kingston now being the kinds of locales meriting stops. Those are not HSR markets; they're NE Regional intermediate stops. The murderer's row of HSR CBD stops ends at New Haven, doesn't begin again until the Providence-Boston pair, and leaves an intriguing hole in the chain in the form of Greater Hartford. There is legitimate fodder for studying a better route, and a better chain. And yes, Worcester is a consequential influence on proceedings from a starting point that asks the right questions.
- Long Island crossing. Only because the New Haven Line is unexpandable and so singularly traffic-skewed to short-haul and express-haul commuter rail train spacing on all 4 tracks that capacity ceilings may be very real. You wouldn't bypass because Long Island offers a better string of CBD's to tap...you'd augment because you physically approach the outer limit of schedules that can serve every CBD on the chain and simply must start evaluating alternatives. This is where the Euros will nod approvingly and say "OK, you milked the mainline for all it's worth...now let's see how good you Americans are at mixing-and-matching to get around a capacity cap." Not that LIRR is a congestion management piece of cake itself.
This probably is not an alt spine you'd bake in up-front, because a New Haven Line at 100% SGR isn't going to be at-capacity and those CBD's outslug raw speed as a value proposition. But it's first reach when the capacity does truly become a noose. NEC FUTURE makes no attempt to pitch it that way; they pretty nakedly see Long Island as a real estate development program above all else.
I know that one of the basic things driving NEC Future is the premise that the NEC is at capacity so we need to add a complete two-track separate HSR alignment throughout the whole corridor unless we want constrained growth. I can see where this premise is coming from, especially on the Connecticut shoreline to NHV, it's obvious that that is where a lot of these crazy alignments come from. However, that approach might make sense in terms of making 100 year outlook infrastructure investments but is that a reasonable objective to try to achieve considering what we already have now? We aren't CAHSR; we already do have a functional rail alignment.
Well, and NEC FUTURE's capacity assumptions are utter bullshit to begin with. The Providence Line gets 4 tracks, but the MBTA gets no service increases and potential service cuts??? How does one explain that when the 4-track New Haven Line at today's godawful SGR handles way more. Arbitrary turf-warrage. Every commuter rail agency gets robbed so the FRA can play "I...me...mine." Except Metro North, because the ownership shoe is on the other foot.
It's worthless. We know there are bottlenecks and have a decent itemization of where they are. But we don't know what the 'true' capacity limit is amid all this turf war noise. We don't know it because we're only hearing quotes from single-issue parties...not the whole spectrum of the NEC coalition. We don't have a basis for evaluating it yet. Hence, ALL of the crazy alignments supposedly justified by "capacity constraints" are built on a foundation of bullshit until somebody starts asking the right questions.
Nobody's going to do that as long as NEC FUTURE is allowed to operate like a rogue player.
So what do you think we should be aiming for on the NEC and who- if anyone- is articulating that vision? We sure know the FRA isn't getting close in their attempt.
Well...Step #1 I think is going to involve sending NEC FUTURE home so battered and bruised they have no choice but to disband and start over. The answers won't come as long as they are around. This is Phase I: Tragedy and Setback. They have to be sacrificed for the good of everyone. Everyone on the NEC spectrum needs to lick their wounds and come to grips with how wrong their approach was. And then hopefully out of that embarrassment a coalition starts to get forged that asks the fucking right questions and realizes that they're only going to be able to come up with the answers acting as an inseparable coalition of services on a common corridor. Then there's a basis for revisiting whatever useful nuggets NEC FUTURE left behind and and getting a plan together.
Independent of that, we just need to step up by several orders of magnitude the bread-and-butter SGR funding. Start picking off that Infrastructure Improvements Master Plan bucket list major line items at a time, because that's where 80% of the the "first-world" service & reliability gains are going to come from that distinguish the NEC as
convenient and
demand-serving HSR rather than just laboratory-fast HSR. You don't have to fret so much about this country getting with the 'vision' thing if the very cut-and-dried SGR items are such self-starters. The coalition-building becomes very easy when every bridge replacement and electrical system upgrade makes the existing Acela--in all its fat, bloated, international laughingstock cromulence--a much more pinpoint-accurate schedule with each passing year. This isn't "nuke the FRA / replace them with their superior German counterparts" -level improbable for the ugly Americans to do. SGR delivers the means...and asks the right questions...on a silver platter. The coalition-building stuff and "what do you want this thing to be?" questions get much easier, more self-evident, and more self-sustaining in its wake.
This is why NEC FUTURE has to die as a necessary first step. It is
pre-empting beneficial progress on SGR by waging a turf war and obfuscating what all the key questions are.
