Slashing Northeast Corridor Rail Travel Time Can Be Achieved For Much Less, NYU Report Finds

A new report from New York University researchers on the prospects for vastly speeding up rail service on the Northeast Corridor finds that this long-deliberated goal can be achieved for about $17 billion, far less than estimates to date.

Issued today by the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, the report, "How to. Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor," explores what it would take to accelerate and regularize train travel on the heavily traveled corridor between Washington, D.C., and Boston at reduced public costs.

To keep the project costs down, major public works plans like the Gateway rail tunnel renovation between Newark, N.J., and New York City, could be reoriented, according to the report. Their redesign would allow improved speed and reliability throughout the 457-corridor corridor to improve both intercity and local commutes.

In this way "an infrastructure program totaling about $12.5 billion and new high-speed trainsets costing about $4.5 billion, both in 2024 prices, are enough to build a high-speed rail network permitting trains," the report from the Transit Costs Project, part of NYU Marron, states.

As the Marron team's report envisions it, high-speed trains would take under two hours between New York and Boston and between New York and Washington instead of the current three hours and three hours 40 minutes, respectively, departing once every 10 minutes.

Past proposals to modernize the Northeast Corridor "have been more expensive, running into the hundreds of billions of dollars," the researches note. The NYU researcher avoids sticker shock through "total integration of planning between intercity and local commuter rail, and across infrastructure and operations- "rather than siloing those aspects, leading to overbuilding."

The 129-page report was authored by NYU Marron fellows Alon Levy and Devin Wilkins, with team director and clinical associate professor Eric Goldwyn and research scholar Elif Ensari. It complements recent Transit Costs Project studies of delivering high speed rail and electrification.

Among the recommendations are:

· Intercity and commuter rail improvements with coordinated timetables. The $12.5 billion price tag for infrastructure includes $3 billion in electrification and high platforms to speed up the commuter trains using the corridor, so that faster intercity trains don't get stuck behind them.

· Integrated infrastructure planning, rolling-stock purchases, and the timetable. This means rebuilding the timetable from the ground up based on simple, repeating patterns, including avoiding the addition of new tracks for capacity through better scheduling when possible, as well as strategic bypasses and overtakes to boost speed and capacity.

· Separating out new infrastructure planning from infrastructure maintenance and renewal, which are routine, regular capital projects and should not be funded as if they were megaprojects.

In their research, the authors interacted extensively with European vendors and used European technical standards, which are "generally legal per American regulations but not used in American railroading tradition." This allowed the researchers to "propose systems that speed up the slowest sections near major stations, lifting the worst slow zones on the NEC [Northeast Corridor]. These also limit the costs of necessary repairs to the aging NEC catenary, using cutting-edge technology to avoid having to replace masts at high cost," according to the report.