Bullet-Train Bailout

Architectural Record, January 2002

A new generation of high-tech passenger trains may rescue beleaguered airlines, opening a new era of intermodal transportation facility design .

When travel plunged after last September’s terror attacks, the government pledged billions in loan guarantees, but these may not be enough to bail out airlines that were already suffering a slackening of demand. Air travel’s savior, ironically, may prove to be an old competitor–passenger rail.

With fewer flights and longer and more invasive security procedures, short-haul flights have lost a considerable amount of their appeal, especially for business travelers hoping for one-day turnarounds for meetings or conferences. Suddenly networking major airports with rail service between major cities, especially if it can reach speeds comparable to the best French, German, and Japanese trains, has moved much higher on the agenda of airport authorities, politicians, even airlines.

Skeptics tend to describe rail as a 19th-century technology that has little to offer the personal mobility-obsessed 21st. But new technology is transforming train and track design, making it possible to move trains faster on existing rights of way, while attaining record speeds in dedicated corridors with emerging traction technologies like magnetic levitation.

While a few lovingly restored golden-age gems still serve intercity rail pasengers, Amtrak often delivers passengers to humble prefab huts in forsaken parts of town. Outside the U.S., where high-speed trains and multi-modal transportation options are better established, architects and engineers are collaborating on spectacularly innovative multimodal centers. The diaphenous glass enclosure designed by Paul Andreu at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle (Record, January 1996, page 76) anticipated Bothe Richter Tehrani’s bubbled, high-speed rail station at Frankfurt Airport (page 120). Santiago Calatrava gave romantically winglike form to Satolas Station, the high-speed airport rail station near Lyon (Record July 2000, page 85).

Commuter-rail access is becoming more common in America, however: O’Hare, in Chicago; San Francisco; Atlanta; Washington; Philadelphia; Cleveland, and Portland, Ore. have, or are planning local rail connections. But cities elsewhere tend to make more of them in terms of design, and exploit their economic-development potential. In projects like the 15-minute Heathrow Express to Paddington Station or the 45-minute Stansted Express to Oxford Street station–both serving London–the airport rail stations offer an impressive and easy-to-navigate welcome, while their in-town destinations augment conventional visitor services with retail, commercial, and entertainment venues intended to revitalize once-dreary precincts. Hiroshi Hara’s Kyoto station (1997), a dizzying multilevel circus of space frames and escalators, is now that city’s largest commercial development. Offices and retail make up a large part of Von Gerkan Marg & Partners’ megastation rising in Berlin. Developers have spotted the potential of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s plans to revitalize New York’s Penn Station [Record March 2000, page 68], and intend to erect up to 20 million square feet of offices, hotels, and sports facilities nearby. (These and many other projects can be viewed at “Modern Trains and Splendid Stations,” an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, through July, or in the catalog by Martha Thorne)

Unclogging airports

Here’s why the outlook for intercity rail is brightening in the U.S.: If you have to arrive two hours ahead of your one-hour-long flight’s departure, and then drive for half an hour or so on either end, suddenly Amtrak’s fastest trains become time competitive, and fares can be lower because trains are cheaper to run.

But there are other reasons that airports nationwide are connecting themselves to rail. “Getting people to the airport is the number one design issue,” says Robert Davidson, the chief architect at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He was speaking not just of the general urban traffic congestion that strangles cities and airports everywhere, but the curbside congestion generated by passenger drop-offs [see Portland’s solution, page 124] and the huge sums airports spend on parking and parking structures. The Authority runs the New York area’s three major airports, and has just opened a station that links Newark Airport’s three terminals by monorail to the northeast rail corridor that serves both long-distance travelers and commuters (opposite).

According to Matthew Coogan, a transportation consultant in White River Junction, Vt., who has made airport access a specialty, “Zurich is increasing airside gate capacity by about 50 percent, but they are not increasing curb capacity at all.” The growth in passengers will be entirely taken up by a vast underground train station designed by Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners.

But rail-to-air connections also looked promising before September 11th because replacing take-offs and landings at overcrowded airports with train service can be much less expensive for airports and airlines alike. For airlines, short-haul flights are hard on airplanes and often unprofitable. So Continental Airlines now supplies passengers from Amtrak’s northeast corridor–Philadelphia, for instance, 80 miles south–to its long-haul Newark flights. “Relying more on rail for close-proximity flying frees up slots for the long-haul flights that customers demand,” explains David Kinzelman, who is director of alliances at Continental Airlines. In 2003, city and suburban commuters on the Long Island Railroad will be able to reach traffic-strangled JFK Airport through a new AirTrain connection–already built into the new Terminal 4 (page 114).

Right now, Newark is the only American airport to have direct intercity and commuter-rail access, but Baltimore-Washington has long had a van connection to Amtrak’s northeast corridor. It will probably be upgraded with a new light-rail connection. T. F. Greene, in Providence, R.I., is also working with Amtrak on a rail-to-air stop that could help make it Boston’s second airport. Similarly, Milwaukee seeks to become the long-dreamed-of third “Chicago” airport via Amtrak. Other candidate cities for intercity and local commuter rail include Burbank, Miami, Orlando, and Seattle. “It absolutely makes sense to replace as much of the short-haul air movement with the efficiecy of rail,” says Coogan. He says the terror attacks of September 11th, which shut airports nationwide for three days, showed how little redundancy the nation’s transportation system has. “A project like Newark gives passengers more options,” he says. “You put yourself in a better position to deal with uncertainty and unplanned events,” including weather delays or traffic-control snafus.

How fast? How far?

Many analysts see air-rail connections as an untapped market that makes high-speed rail a dream no longer deserving to be deferred in America. “Intercity rail, if fully embraced and developed, will be effective in reducing airway and highway congestion, especially if it focuses on the development of markets from 300 to 600 miles apart,” says Warren Flateau, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration. He says 40 percent of all air trips fall in this category. The competitiveness of rail depends not just on top speed, but whether equipment can travel at high speed over a long distance. The 125mph sustained speeds on Amtrak’s popular 230-mile New York-to-Washington service are the fastest in the nation, but are competitive with air only because roadways and airports are so congested and air shuttle service (halved since September 11th) is so costly. Cities much more than 300 miles apart can’t be thought viable, say experts, without the best Japanese or French rail technology now available, allowing speeds of from 150 to nearly 200mph.

The ideal candidates are large metropolitan areas, at least one of which has a major hub airport, and a few other high-volume corridors. Suggested city pairs include Los Angeles to San Diego and Las Vegas; Chicago to Detroit; Detroit to Indianapolis, Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh; Dallas/Fort Worth to Houston; Seattle to Portland; St. Louis to Kansas City; Orlando to Tampa and Miami.

Smaller cities along these trunk corridors, many of which suffer from poor air connections, could also benefit. Coogan says he’s advised Continental to solicit Newark business by rail from Bridgeport and Stamford–two of the largest Connecticut cities that must otherwise access airports via dozens of miles of congested I-95.

But there are a number of reasons that air-to-rail integration has been slow. American government policy treats each travel mode differently, subsidizes each in different ways, and lacks an overarching strategy about what each mode should do or how they should work together. Moving people from planes and cars to rail is an explicit policy, supported by subsidy allocations, in most countries. But most rails in America are in private hands, while cities tend to own airports and states build and own highways. Freight rail networks have hardly expanded in decades, for example, even as business has grown, because private railroads can’t match vast state and federal investments in competing roads. Indeed freight line business is growing for the same reason as passenger utilization: roads are too congested. But commuter-rail agencies want to run more trains on the same tracks that freight companies want to run more trains on, and conflicts are growing.

And then there’s Amtrak. Defenders of Amtrak cite inadequate funding and Congressional meddling for the national rail agency’s poor performance. Others say it’s incapable of making high-speed rail work. “Lots of people want high-speed trains, but they don’t want Amtrak,” says Joseph Vranich, a consultant who has worked for the agency and served on a council intended to reform it. In Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do About America’s Passenger Trains (1997, St. Martins Press), Vranich has compiled a 258-page indictment of 30 years of Amtrak’s management mistakes and broken promises.

Amtrak may be in for a restructuring, which may pave the way for a true high-speed rail network, but it’s one the General Accounting Office recently estimated will cost between $50 and 70 billion. It’s a lot of money to be sure, but a fraction of what airline bailouts and security upgrades are likely to cost.

While the high-speed rail debate can be relegated to the realm of politics, perhaps it shouldn’t be. Today, there’s not a clear concept of how multimodalism could work nor how high-speed passenger rail fits in. A strikingly integrated vision was offered by Warren Manning, a landscape architect, one that contains many of the elements transportation analysts would like to see: a nationwide system of commercial highways with dedicated freightways that feed a parallel freight-rail trunk line system; of recreational roads that follow the nation’s geography; of high-tech means to switch between modes. Manning proposed his scheme in 1923. (For more, see Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America, by Keller Easterling, 1999, MIT Press). Maybe we need more Mannings now.

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	Bullet-Train Bailout Architectural Record, January 2002 A new generation of high-tech passenger trains may rescue beleaguered airlines, opening a new era of intermodal transportation facility design . When travel plunged after last September’s terror attacks, the government pledged billions in loan guarantees, but these may not be enough to bail out airlines that were already suffering a slackening of demand. Air travel’s savior, ironically, may prove to be an old competitor–passenger rail. With fewer flights and longer and more invasive security procedures, short-haul flights have lost a considerable amount of their appeal, especially for business travelers hoping for one-day turnarounds for meetings or conferences. Suddenly networking major airports with rail service between major cities, especially if it can reach speeds comparable to the best French, German, and Japanese trains, has moved much higher on the agenda of airport authorities, politicians, even airlines. Skeptics tend to describe rail as a 19th-century technology that has little to offer the personal mobility-obsessed 21st. But new technology is transforming train and track design, making it possible to move trains faster on existing rights of way, while attaining record speeds in dedicated corridors with emerging traction technologies like magnetic levitation. While a few lovingly restored golden-age gems still serve intercity rail pasengers, Amtrak often delivers passengers to humble prefab huts in forsaken parts of town. Outside the U.S., where high-speed trains and multi-modal transportation options are better established, architects and engineers are collaborating on spectacularly innovative multimodal centers. The diaphenous glass enclosure designed by Paul Andreu at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle (Record, January 1996, page 76) anticipated Bothe Richter Tehrani’s bubbled, high-speed rail station at Frankfurt Airport (page 120). Santiago Calatrava gave romantically winglike form to Satolas Station, the high-speed airport rail station near Lyon (Record July 2000, page 85). Commuter-rail access is becoming more common in America, however: O’Hare, in Chicago; San Francisco; Atlanta; Washington; Philadelphia; Cleveland, and Portland, Ore. have, or are planning local rail connections. But cities elsewhere tend to make more of them in terms of design, and exploit their economic-development potential. In projects like the 15-minute Heathrow Express to Paddington Station or the 45-minute Stansted Express to Oxford Street station–both serving London–the airport rail stations offer an impressive and easy-to-navigate welcome, while their in-town destinations augment conventional visitor services with retail, commercial, and entertainment venues intended to revitalize once-dreary precincts. Hiroshi Hara’s Kyoto station (1997), a dizzying multilevel circus of space frames and escalators, is now that city’s largest commercial development. Offices and retail make up a large part of Von Gerkan Marg & Partners’ megastation rising in Berlin. Developers have spotted the potential of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s plans to revitalize New York’s Penn Station [Record March 2000, page 68], and intend to erect up to 20 million square feet of offices, hotels, and sports facilities nearby. (These and many other projects can be viewed at “Modern Trains and Splendid Stations,” an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, through July, or in the catalog by Martha Thorne) Unclogging airports Here’s why the outlook for intercity rail is brightening in the U.S.: If you have to arrive two hours ahead of your one-hour-long flight’s departure, and then drive for half an hour or so on either end, suddenly Amtrak’s fastest trains become time competitive, and fares can be lower because trains are cheaper to run. But there are other reasons that airports nationwide are connecting themselves to rail. “Getting people to the airport is the number one design issue,” says Robert Davidson, the chief architect at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He was speaking not just of the general urban traffic congestion that strangles cities and airports everywhere, but the curbside congestion generated by passenger drop-offs [see Portland’s solution, page 124] and the huge sums airports spend on parking and parking structures. The Authority runs the New York area’s three major airports, and has just opened a station that links Newark Airport’s three terminals by monorail to the northeast rail corridor that serves both long-distance travelers and commuters (opposite). According to Matthew Coogan, a transportation consultant in White River Junction, Vt., who has made airport access a specialty, “Zurich is increasing airside gate capacity by about 50 percent, but they are not increasing curb capacity at all.” The growth in passengers will be entirely taken up by a vast underground train station designed by Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners. But rail-to-air connections also looked promising before September 11th because replacing take-offs and landings at overcrowded airports with train service can be much less expensive for airports and airlines alike. For airlines, short-haul flights are hard on airplanes and often unprofitable. So Continental Airlines now supplies passengers from Amtrak’s northeast corridor–Philadelphia, for instance, 80 miles south–to its long-haul Newark flights. “Relying more on rail for close-proximity flying frees up slots for the long-haul flights that customers demand,” explains David Kinzelman, who is director of alliances at Continental Airlines. In 2003, city and suburban commuters on the Long Island Railroad will be able to reach traffic-strangled JFK Airport through a new AirTrain connection–already built into the new Terminal 4 (page 114). Right now, Newark is the only American airport to have direct intercity and commuter-rail access, but Baltimore-Washington has long had a van connection to Amtrak’s northeast corridor. It will probably be upgraded with a new light-rail connection. T. F. Greene, in Providence, R.I., is also working with Amtrak on a rail-to-air stop that could help make it Boston’s second airport. Similarly, Milwaukee seeks to become the long-dreamed-of third “Chicago” airport via Amtrak. Other candidate cities for intercity and local commuter rail include Burbank, Miami, Orlando, and Seattle. “It absolutely makes sense to replace as much of the short-haul air movement with the efficiecy of rail,” says Coogan. He says the terror attacks of September 11th, which shut airports nationwide for three days, showed how little redundancy the nation’s transportation system has. “A project like Newark gives passengers more options,” he says. “You put yourself in a better position to deal with uncertainty and unplanned events,” including weather delays or traffic-control snafus. How fast? How far? Many analysts see air-rail connections as an untapped market that makes high-speed rail a dream no longer deserving to be deferred in America. “Intercity rail, if fully embraced and developed, will be effective in reducing airway and highway congestion, especially if it focuses on the development of markets from 300 to 600 miles apart,” says Warren Flateau, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration. He says 40 percent of all air trips fall in this category. The competitiveness of rail depends not just on top speed, but whether equipment can travel at high speed over a long distance. The 125mph sustained speeds on Amtrak’s popular 230-mile New York-to-Washington service are the fastest in the nation, but are competitive with air only because roadways and airports are so congested and air shuttle service (halved since September 11th) is so costly. Cities much more than 300 miles apart can’t be thought viable, say experts, without the best Japanese or French rail technology now available, allowing speeds of from 150 to nearly 200mph. The ideal candidates are large metropolitan areas, at least one of which has a major hub airport, and a few other high-volume corridors. Suggested city pairs include Los Angeles to San Diego and Las Vegas; Chicago to Detroit; Detroit to Indianapolis, Columbus, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh; Dallas/Fort Worth to Houston; Seattle to Portland; St. Louis to Kansas City; Orlando to Tampa and Miami. Smaller cities along these trunk corridors, many of which suffer from poor air connections, could also benefit. Coogan says he’s advised Continental to solicit Newark business by rail from Bridgeport and Stamford–two of the largest Connecticut cities that must otherwise access airports via dozens of miles of congested I-95. But there are a number of reasons that air-to-rail integration has been slow. American government policy treats each travel mode differently, subsidizes each in different ways, and lacks an overarching strategy about what each mode should do or how they should work together. Moving people from planes and cars to rail is an explicit policy, supported by subsidy allocations, in most countries. But most rails in America are in private hands, while cities tend to own airports and states build and own highways. Freight rail networks have hardly expanded in decades, for example, even as business has grown, because private railroads can’t match vast state and federal investments in competing roads. Indeed freight line business is growing for the same reason as passenger utilization: roads are too congested. But commuter-rail agencies want to run more trains on the same tracks that freight companies want to run more trains on, and conflicts are growing. And then there’s Amtrak. Defenders of Amtrak cite inadequate funding and Congressional meddling for the national rail agency’s poor performance. Others say it’s incapable of making high-speed rail work. “Lots of people want high-speed trains, but they don’t want Amtrak,” says Joseph Vranich, a consultant who has worked for the agency and served on a council intended to reform it. In Derailed: What Went Wrong and What to Do About America’s Passenger Trains (1997, St. Martins Press), Vranich has compiled a 258-page indictment of 30 years of Amtrak’s management mistakes and broken promises. Amtrak may be in for a restructuring, which may pave the way for a true high-speed rail network, but it’s one the General Accounting Office recently estimated will cost between $50 and 70 billion. It’s a lot of money to be sure, but a fraction of what airline bailouts and security upgrades are likely to cost. While the high-speed rail debate can be relegated to the realm of politics, perhaps it shouldn’t be. Today, there’s not a clear concept of how multimodalism could work nor how high-speed passenger rail fits in. A strikingly integrated vision was offered by Warren Manning, a landscape architect, one that contains many of the elements transportation analysts would like to see: a nationwide system of commercial highways with dedicated freightways that feed a parallel freight-rail trunk line system; of recreational roads that follow the nation’s geography; of high-tech means to switch between modes. Manning proposed his scheme in 1923. (For more, see Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America, by Keller Easterling, 1999, MIT Press). Maybe we need more Mannings now.
© copyright 2006 James S. Russell \| terms