US public transit systems desperately need an upgrade:5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: One of the biggest legislative victories of the Biden administration is the trillion dollar infrastructure bill that he signed into law in November 2021. About half is expected to pour into America’s broadband, utilities and transportation systems over the coming months and years. In communities across the country, people are grappling with how they’ll use that money. Today's guest, Jonathan English, is a fellow in the Transportation and Land Use program of the NYU Marron Institute. He shares his knowledge about what may be possible for transit in America in the years to come. 

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

James Brown:

Hello, and welcome to Five Things. I'm James Brown. Go Bills.

Every week we take an idea or concept and go deep, and this week is about mass transit. One of the biggest legislative victories of the Biden administration is the trillion dollar infrastructure bill that he signed into law in November 2021. About half of that bill is expected to pour into America's broadband, utilities, and transportation systems over the coming months and years.

James Brown:

You've made a career in part by analyzing American transit, in particular New York's system. What's the appeal?

Jonathan English:

Well, it's interesting, right? It's been around for a lot longer than most places. Because of that, it's gone through multiple historical cycles. A subway that was built in 1995, it's still basically new and it hasn't changed much, but a subway like the one in New York, it's been around for well over a hundred years. Because of that, first of all, so much has changed around it. It has shaped the city and how the city works. In New York, there are all these stations in the subway, call them ghost stations or sections of station, that were built in anticipation of another subway that was going to be built but never was.

From a scholarship standpoint, what really matters is that it tells us about where we might be going, where other places might be going. And the struggles that the New York City subway had as it started to get old, we're seeing those same struggles in cities like Washington, in cities like San Francisco, where the system's starting to age and we have to think about it differently and rebuild it, in some cases almost from the ground up.

And also the way that New York just stopped building, and that's been kind of an American issue to some extent. New York built one of the biggest subway systems in the world in about 40 years, which is really fast. And we think that Chinese cities build fast today. They do, but New York built just as quickly in the '10s and '20s, into the '30s, but then it just stopped and they built almost nothing since then, tiny little bits here and there. And understanding why that happened and maybe how that could be reversed is I think really important.

James Brown:

Well, I want to touch on a couple of things that jump out at me from your response. You mentioned how subways shape the city. I would guess that comes from the fact that trains, and subways in particular, but trains overall aren't very malleable. Once you put down the track or build the tunnel, it's hard to move them.

Jonathan English:

That's absolutely right. It's the permanence of rail. People know that they can build a building around it, and that rail's going to be there for 50, a hundred years. You would build a subway out into farmland and apartment houses would just sort of sprout up along them, as if you're watering the ground. The way the country looks today, all the cities across the US, is broadly a reflection of the transportation infrastructure that was dominant.

James Brown:

What's a bad transit system like?

Jonathan English:

Really what matters fundamentally for transit is the service. It doesn't matter how impressive your physical infrastructure is if the train only comes once an hour, or doesn't run on weekends, or doesn't run outside rush hour, which is true of many, many, many transit systems, especially in the US. And that really, really limits people's lives, but it also means that nobody just about takes transit if they have an alternative.

It locks people out of all kinds of opportunities. You'll have a company in one part of the city that is desperate for workers, and a person who desperately wants a new job, but they can't take the job because they can't get there by transit, and maybe they can't afford a car or can't drive a car for whatever reason.

James Brown:

Comparing the prices of building trains in an American city versus someplace like Paris, what kind of difference are we looking at in terms of cost?

Jonathan English:

The difference can be as much as 10 times more expensive to build the same thing in a US city as in a city like Paris, which also has very strong regulations.

James Brown:

Why are the costs of building trains overseas lower than it is here?

Jonathan English:

That's a very good, but also a very difficult question, and some of my colleagues at the Marron Institute at NYU have just completed something called the Transit Cost Project. One of the things that they have concluded is that it's a complicated question. There isn't one single factor.

Some of it is a lack of experience. Some of it is that it takes a very long time to get projects permitted in the US. One of the things that's interesting is we tend to build using older technology. This is a generalization, I know, but in other parts of the world, what we tend to see built most often are relatively short trains that are automatic, so they run very frequently. Because when you think about it, a train that's three cars long that runs every two minutes is going to have the same capacity as a train six cars long that runs every four minutes.

The Second Avenue Subway was just built, but it's built to hook into a line that was built in the 1920s, so it has big, long trains that don't actually run all that often. When you go to Europe and you see, oh, look at how impressive the trains are there, it's not necessarily that they're spending more than the United States is, it's that they can build 10 times as much for the same amount of money.

James Brown:

That's remarkable. There have been several major train wrecks recently. Obviously those wrecks weren't passenger trains, but it does bring to mind train safety. What are some of the safety concerns around trains?

Jonathan English:

So I'll preface this by saying that the train is basically the safest way to travel. In the US, the practices around signaling are often much more manual. They can literally be on a less used line as simple as a guy calling on the cell phone to the dispatcher saying, "Okay, I'm moving past this place now. Make sure the track is clear." It does leave more room for human error, and there has been an increasing regulatory push for what's called positive train control on lines that have especially passenger traffic.

A central system should know where the trains are and be able to stop them if they're going someplace they shouldn't. Those systems are not yet in place in most of the American rail network. That's not to say that it's not a safe system, and when you're only running a few trains a day, as is the case on many lines in the US, a system where you just say, "Okay, I'm on the line now," is probably just fine.

In parts of the US when you're just carrying a slow train full of coal, the coal doesn't really care if the ride is bumpy, so sometimes the maintenance doesn't have to be as stringent, but as a result, sometimes the rails can break a little bit more often, and then you can have a derailment. Most of the time, that doesn't lead to any negative consequences really, other than a bit of a mess to clean up. But there are incidents where there can be a toxic spill.

James Brown:

Any famous last words?

Jonathan English:

Big picture, focus on service. The history of transportation and infrastructure is super interesting, and I encourage people to dig into it more. Everywhere you look around you, it's largely been shaped by transportation, and the choices we make about transportation, infrastructure, and service, what we build, is going to shape the city of the future.

James Brown:

I'd love to learn more sometime down the road.

Jonathan English:

Thank you very much.

James Brown:

Jonathan English, thanks for joining me.

Jonathan English:

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

James Brown:

Thanks to Shannon Rae Green for editing this episode. For all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown, and as always, be well.