Friday Reads – 10 January 2020

1. I don’t understand what the Leading Pedestrian Interval is.

   Is it somehow related to vehicles making nearside turns through red lights? As a Brit I have no idea how that interacts with pedestrian crossings — my only experience is junctions in Las Vegas that have no pedestrian signals at all.

2. I rarely use a taxi from Euston, except when “mobility impared” – the last time was with a pram (grandchild) and frankly access to the taxi rank was awful. The new arrangement in front of the station is much more convenient – for everyone!

3. @Ryan

   ‘Leading Pedestrian Interval’ sounds like a traffic engineering term and as such is a bit confusing. It’s merely a pedestrian advance signal of 7-10 seconds, then the traffic signal green is activated for autos.

4. Leading pedestrian intervals are not relevant to the UK where a pedestrian green phase can only be shown when traffic is not allowed to cross the pedestrian route. For example, many urban junctions now have an ‘all red’ phase so that all traffic os stopped allowing all pedestrians to cross. A somewhat older approach is ‘walk with traffic’ so that a pedestrian green phase is shown, typically, for one half of the road where traffic is stopped, leading to a ‘sheep pen’ in the middle of the road where pedestrians wait for traffic on the other half to be stopped and for them to cross. It’s very relevant in the US and other countries where you can either turn left(right) on red or where a green signal for pedestrians can be shown even when traffic can cross the pedestrian route.

5. I see that HERE mobility’s report, mentioned in the MasS article, once again ignores walking as a mode of transport in reaching the conclusion that car driving is the most important mode of transport in cities. It’s easy to make prognostications if you arbitrarily ignore a very significant mode of transport.

6. From comments in the article, it seems intersections in N. America with ‘leading pedestrian interval’ have signs for no right turn on red on all approaches. Elsewhere, right turn on red is the default I believe.

7. I remain unimpressed by the British railway’s failure to deal with temperature differences that are just normal in many other places that have railways. You don’t have to go very far east in continental Europe – part way across France will do you – to find places where British Heatwave is Happens Every Almost Year Here and British Big Freeze is Happens Almost Every Year Here too. Or indeed much of north America. And it is not as though British railways are under-engineered by comparison to them.

8. @Ivan
   Presumably British railways use steel rails with lower heat tolerances based on expected ‘averaged’ temperature variations, which is probably cheaper to engineer.

9. @Ivan
   I suspect the main reason is that these events don’t happen frequently enough. The pressure to save money over the past 30 years or more has seen many casualties, but an important one is resilience. Why spend money mitigating an event that only happens infrequently when the cost of that mitigation is more than the cost of clearing up later? And, in the world of franchises, you may not even be the company that has to pay for the clearing up later.

10. @ChrisMitch, @Quinlet
    But the British railway spends a lot more money on construction and maintenance per km than practially any other railway. How can it also be a lower quality railway? But that is apparently what you are telling me.

    You tell me that there is considerable pressure for saving money in Britain. In reality there isn’t, at least in comparison with other places, because the cost of everything inexorably goes up instead until it is far more costly than almost any other country, even for the lower quality you tell me that we apparently tolerate here.

    Actually, my belief would be that in many cases we don’t tolerate many aspects of the quality that foreign railways are built to. Our railways are, in some specific sense, “higher quality”. But we have to question whether those specific qualities are really useful and value-for-money “higher quality”. We forget useful higher quality like temperature resilience, that is just normal many other places. That is clearly a much cheaper quality than many of the less useful qualities we insist on instead.

11. @Ivan
    Two of the biggest reasons why UK costs are higher are land and labour costs. Land costs, inm particular, are higher because a higher proportion of UK rail lines are in populated areas. French, German and Spanish lines, in contrast, have a much higher proportion of their length in low population density rural areas. The impact this has is to raise UK tailcoats through no fault of the rail or track operators.

12. @Quinlet
    Clearly the €3bn for the 500km Madrid-Seville high speed line isn’t going to be replicated in Britain. Though it is embarassing that we can’t even upgrade an existing railway to 100mph at that unit cost (cf Oxford-Bicester upgrade), even were we to correct that €3bn for inflation given it isn’t very recent any more.

    But our unit costs are higher even than the Dutch, who surely have high labour costs and high land costs, being richer than us and densely populated. They also have poor land conditions, being squidgey and prone to subsidence. Extended sections of railway run on raised viaduct, which can’t be ideal for low-cost construction methods. They built their 125km high speed line for €8bn. Would that we could build high speed railways at that unit cost. Even when you correct for the things you mention, and indeed many other tangible spec differences things like tunnelling, line speed, etc, as was done in the 2018 HS2 cost benchmarking report, GB costs still come out substantially higher than other places. And HS2’s costs have gone up again since that benchmarking report.
    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-speed-rail-international-benchmarking-study

13. US construction costs for transit are 10x higher than the international median. There is no conceivable good reason for that, it is simply a result of a broken political and bureaucratic system. The UK’s costs are also consistently above the median, though not as badly as the US’s. This too is a result of broken culture.

14. When costs – for anything – vary among countries, we cannot deduce that the lower costs are correct and the higher ones are a result of “broken culture”. The higher costs /might/ be going to paying the workers properly, correct compensation for people displaced, and protection of the environment, and it could be the case that workers and the environment are being exploited elsewhere.

    Alternatively, of course, the higher sums might be all going to the undeserving rich; if so then maybe the culture is broken. But not necessarily.

15. As Malcolm says, it is unclear where the cost differences arise. If it was clear, there would be articles clearly identifying and quantifying the issues. Instead a whole zoo of things are proposed, often without any kind of quantification to tell you whether these are even the main issues. For example, even the common law legal framework is often identified as a driver. There are some plausible reasons for believing that is a cost increaser – continental contracts are far shorter and thus much less lawyer cost. But how much of the effect is it? No idea.

    Yes, some higher costs can be for good reasons. There are some good reasons why European infrastructure costs are higher than China. But when the comparators are NW European countries who are mostly reckoned to have a higher quality of life than GB, and similar or higher labour costs, good social protections, etc, I find it hard to believe that such large cost divergences are generally for good reasons. Rather there is a prima facie case that we in GB have lost a sense of proportion as to what things should cost, how they should be delivered and what their specification should be.

    And yes, the US is the main notable case where public transport construction costs are even higher than in GB. Articles like this are worth a read.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html
    http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastructure-costs.html

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