August | 2025 | Pedestrian Observations
3 posts published by Alon Levy during August 2025| Pedestrian Observations
3 posts published by Alon Levy during August 2025| Pedestrian Observations
Thijs Niks made a web applet for calculating high-speed rail network ridership estimates. This is based on the gravity model that I’ve used to construct estimates. The applet lets one add gra…| Pedestrian Observations
4 posts published by Alon Levy during May 2025| Pedestrian Observations
Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote this piece about our Northeast Corridor report. Much of it was based on a series of interviews William Boston did with me, explaining what the main needs on the corridor are. One element stands out since the MTA responded to what I was saying about schedule padding […]| Pedestrian Observations
David Schleicher has a proposal for how Congress can speed up infrastructure construction and reduce costs for megaprojects. Writing about what further research needs to be done, he distinguishes reasons from explanations. I have argued that many of the stories we tell about infrastructure costs involve explanations but not reasons. There are plenty of explanations […]| Pedestrian Observations
There are a few examples of rail projects that fail in a way that poisons the entire idea among decisionmakers. The failures can be total, to the point that the project isn’t built and nobody tries it again. Or the outcome can be a mixed blessing: an open project with some ridership, but not enough […]| Pedestrian Observations
A recent discussion about the Nuremberg U-Bahn got me thinking about the issue of transfers from infrequent to frequent vehicles and how they can disrupt service. The issue is that driverless metros like Nuremberg’s rely on very high frequency on relatively small vehicles in order to maintain adequate capacity; Nuremberg has the lowest U-Bahn construction […]| Pedestrian Observations
The greenhouse gases emitted by the production of concrete, called embodied carbon, are occasionally used as a green-NIMBY argument against building new things. A Berlin Green spokesperson coauthored a study opposing U-Bahn construction on the grounds that the concrete used in construction would raise emissions. More recently, I’ve seen American opponents of transit-oriented development in […]| Pedestrian Observations
People in my comments and on social media are taking it for granted that investments into modernizing commuter rail predominantly benefit the suburbs. Against that, I’d like to point out how …| Pedestrian Observations
For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution| Pedestrian Observations
9 posts published by Alon Levy during October 2019| Pedestrian Observations
Dutch high-speed rail is the original case of premature commitment and lock-in. A decision was made in 1991 that the Netherlands needed 300 km/h high-speed rail, imitating the TGV, which at that po…| Pedestrian Observations
A new high-speed line (NBS) between Hamburg and Hanover has received the approval of the government, and will go up for a Bundestag vote shortly. The line has been proposed and planned in various f…| Pedestrian Observations
I’m sitting on a EuroCity train from Copenhagen back to Germany. It’s timetabled to take 4:45 to do 520 km, an average speed of 110 km/h, and the train departed 25 minutes late because …| Pedestrian Observations
After writing this post about the urban layout of Germany and high-speed rail, I got interested in city size in Europe and Asia more generally. East Asians live in much larger cities than Europeans…| Pedestrian Observations
It’s been a while since I last wrote this series, where I covered the American, Soviet, and British traditions of building urban rail. I’d like to return by focusing attention on the Fr…| Pedestrian Observations
I’ve been asked on Twitter about the differences between various kinds of urban rail transit. There is a lot of confusion about the term light rail in English, since it can be used for urban …| Pedestrian Observations
Continuing with my series on scale-variance (see part 1), I want to talk about a feature of transit networks that only exists at a specific scale: the Soviet triangle. This is a way of building sub…| Pedestrian Observations
Note on definitions: for the purposes of this post, a tramway is a light rail line that runs predominantly on streets, interfacing with cross-traffic even if it has signal priority. It can be a leg…| Pedestrian Observations
A few hours ago, the MTA presented on the latest of Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. The presentation includes information about the engineering and construction of the three stations – 106th, 1…| Pedestrian Observations
I made an off-hand remark about subway-surface systems, called Stadtbahn in German (as is, confusingly, the fully grade-separated east-west Berlin S-Bahn line), regarding a small three-line single-…| Pedestrian Observations
The Northeast Corridor has eight movable bridges in Connecticut; other than one that was replaced in the 1990s, all are considered by Amtrak and Connecticut DOT to be both critical priorities for r…| Pedestrian Observations
A few years ago, when I started writing timetables for proposed regional rail lines, I realized how much faster they were than current schedules. This goes beyond the usual issues in Boston with el…| Pedestrian Observations
The Regional Plan Association ran an event 2.5 days ago about New York commuter rail improvements and Penn Station, defending the $16.7 billion Penn Station Expansion proposal as necessary for capa…| Pedestrian Observations
I was reticent to post about this topic; I polled it on Patreon in December and it got just under 50% while the two topics I did blog, difficult urban geography and cross-platform transfers, got 64…| Pedestrian Observations
