Jonathan English@EnglishRail

Fellow, @NYUMarron. PhD in Urban Planning, Columbia University. Writer for pubs incl @CityLab, @GlobeandMail.

infrastory.substack.com
Joined January 2014
190 Photos and videos
Also, it looks like the links @CityLab to the list of my articles is broken, so here they are. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Why Did America Give Up on Mass Transit? (Don’t Blame Cars.)

Streetcar, bus, and metro systems have been ignoring one lesson for 100 years: Service drives demand.

bloomberg.com
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Not that long ago, we lived in a world where very few things were standardized. You couldn’t plug things into any random wall outlet, trains couldn’t run on tracks of other railways, even screws wouldn't fit just anywhere. This week's Infrastory article linked below.
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Every city has its transit map. But too often they’re more than a little misleading, with routes that run only a few times a day or shut down on weekends. A city's real transit maps, with the useful routes, can be shockingly limited. Link to Infrastory below
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I love this so much. Ridership in Burlington up 49% since 2019, after they improved service on a bunch of bus routes. That's at a time when many cities were experiencing post-pandemic stagnation. This is a notably affluent, low density suburb. burlingtonpublishing.escribe…
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I wrote a bit on this (linked below). 70s France-US comparison shows building new generally goes better than trying to fix up old. It’s very complex trying to rebuild over-century-old infrastructure. 1/
Matt Spoke
@MattSpoke
Sep 9
Genuine question for @RM_Transit and @EnglishRail on the topic of Alto and the use of $90b (give or take $100b)… How much could Via be improved with that amount of capital? What are the legitimate technical limitations of “old” rail being upgraded? Is there a scenario where Via could become >80% as good as the Alto promise, but with significantly less risk of a boondoggle?
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There’s a tendency (especially Anglo/Northern European) to try and go for a solution that delivers 80% of the benefits for 50% of the cost. Unfortunately, these solutions very often tend to deliver 40% of the benefit for 80% (or sometimes 100+%!) of the cost.
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Now if you’re talking about VIA across Canada, as we should, a Calgary-Edmonton, Vancouver-Whistler, and Vancouver Island corridor are no brainers. VIA needs to be much more national. But first 2 still require deal w/ freight.
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Liverpool's Merseyrail was one of the earliest modern regional rail systems, but it never ended up becoming a national model. It's an unfortunate wrong turn because UK cities tend to have very extensive local rail networks to convert. My Infrastory post linked in reply.
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The Crosstown Expressway was unsurprisingly the first of Toronto's expressway projects to be abandoned.
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Jonathan English retweeted
Seán Keyes
@Keyes
Sep 2
Big metro stations are very expensive, said @EnglishRail. Also: modern automated trains accelerate and decelerate faster. So: smaller platforms with more frequent stops can move the same number of people at lower construction cost. This was Metrolink's design approach.
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Infrastory@Infrastory_
Sep 1
Endless arguments ensue about how many stops high speed trains should have but this is the wrong question; the right question is what the different service patterns look like. You can always have an Express. Read the latest Infrastory: infrastory.substack.com/p/th…
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We often hear this idea that there's somehow a tradeoff between more stops and competitive end-to-end travel time on high-speed rail. It's a myth, because there are many examples of express/local high speed. My Infrastory article linked below.
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