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Alon Levy Discusses Public Transportation Costs
Fellow Alon Levy was interviewed on The Neoliberal Podcast on “why building public transportation is so difficult and expensive in so many parts of the world.” On norms and how they relate to public transportation costs, Levy brought up the example of New York City’s typical 24/7 service prior to the pandemic:
In New York, all of the work happens around moving trains, so they have this machinery of slow orders and that creeps into mainline rail. And for mainline rail in America, one of the requirements is for positive train control…temporary speed restrictions for the protection of workers because you have workers on one track and then trains are going to go on another track. The idea that you should do that is, not in all of Europe but much of Europe, unthinkable. In Spain...they never do that. You do not do any maintenance work within three meters of the tracks while the trains run. You do it in nighttime windows. Now, normally when you have two-track systems, on metro systems, you learn how to use nighttime windows, but Boston and Washington don’t do that, because maybe they learned too much from New York. So, they have all these weekend shutdowns, or these weekend 20-minute frequencies, or this weekend bus-replacement service that is simply unheard of over here [Europe] just because here they know how to use nighttime shutdowns.…It’s not construction cost, but it’s an example of a norm.