Go Slow to Go Fast

Incremental Development of Rapid Transit Systems

This is Part 4 in a series about Albuquerque Rapid Transit. Read the previous installments here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Despite a somewhat popular belief that ART is a failure, the reality is that ART performs very well. While there were setbacks, they weren’t actually especially substantial for a transit project (including roadway projects by the way). I’ve already discussed in Part 2 why the narrative of ART as a lemon doesn’t really pan out. Urban ABQ’s Jordan McConnell has also written a defense of ART. That leaves the question: what did the city do engender their success, and what could they have done to avoid the problems ART did have?

A subsection of political science, called incrementalism, gives us some good insights into these questions. Scholars like Charles Lindblom, David Collingridge, and Edward Woodhouse have examined what makes technological projects more likely to succeed. By proceeding flexibly, in small, incremental steps, and learning from trial and error, complex technological projects are more likely to succeed, and less likely to make costly, sometimes project-ending mistakes. In what ways did ART proceed incrementally and how did that help the project? How could ART have proceeded more incrementally, and what lessons does that offer for future transit and urban projects in Albuquerque and beyond?

Incrementalism

Twenty years ago, when the city of Albuquerque first started considering a rapid transit project along Central Ave, the idea was to install a light rail project. In fact, some portion of transit advocates in Albuquerque turned against ART because they saw the switch from rail to buses as a downgrade. Rail has a lot of advantages, but one of the disadvantages is that it has high initial development costs compared to its operational costs. ART cost about $15M per mile to construct, whereas the average to convert existing infrastructure to light rail is $50M per mile, and a whopping $100M per mile for new lines. So Albuquerque saved a lot of money for only modest capacity and frequency trade-offs by selecting Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) over light rail.

High development costs have two problems: it leaves very little money for solving unpredictable problems that come up, and it tends to trap people into a sunk cost fallacy. Both prevent the adoption of alternatives in response to failures. In the case of ART when battery operated buses failed, the city was able to switch to diesel operated buses for only $7.5M. In neighboring Colorado, the minimum cost per light rail car is $2.38M. Thus by selecting a BRT over a light rail system, Albuquerque saved themselves from expensive mistakes as well.

Some also criticized ART for being limited to a single corridor. But scaling up the project too fast would have also scaled up the errors. While many other areas of the city do need more transit investment and there are many places where people live and many destinations that need to be connected to one another, building out the entire network all at once would have been very risky.

Station construction for Albuquerque Rapid Transit.

The errors that ART experienced, in the end, proved surmountable. Albuquerque now has one of the nation’s best BRT corridors. But if those errors had been extended to an entire BRT network, the story might not have such a happy ending. The contractors hired to construct the stations clearly suffered from a lack of experience. Stations were built too close to intersections, and at inconsistent heights. Rather than a few stations to correct, had Albuquerque been building out a whole network, they would have had a whole network’s worth. Rather than a few non-functional electric buses to replace, they would have had a whole system’s worth as well. Rather than businesses along a single corridor hurting due to construction, they would have impacted the whole city’s economy. Rather than increased traffic along one road…you get the picture.

The costs of errors scale with the scale of the project. But the lessons learned from smaller projects can also be scaled up for future projects. Although Albuquerque scraped the project to expand ART along University Ave to the Sunport, if they were to do such an expansion, they can avoid the problems with electric buses and station construction fairly easily. ART buses also currently run without dedicated right of way to destinations like Uptown. With a new transit center slated for that area, and it already being the site of plans for new infill development, adding right of way to this existing ART line would also likely be far easier to do after lessons learned from the original project.

An early plan to build a second BRT route connecting the Sunport to ART and the UNM Hospital. Albuquerque seems to no longer be actively planning this line.

Central Avenue also had a lot of things going for it, from an incrementalist perspective, as the location for the first BRT in the city. First, it already had the “rapid ride,” a BRT lite system that had larger stops, articulated buses, and an express route. This provided important ridership data about any future transit systems in the corridor. Given that the rapid ride’s ridership grew rapidly enough that the service was expanded from one to three lines over the course of five years. If Albuquerque decides to continue to expand its BRT system, as the city should, similar BRT lite plans might make good precursors for future development of systems similar to ART.

Central Avenue also had the best chance for success. Before the project began, the corridor already transported over 40% of the city’s total ridership. Central also connects key city destinations and activity areas with the densest parts of the city as well as the places where people work. About a quarter of the city’s population and a third of its employment were within the area of the corridor in the year 2000. The population is also uniquely transit dependent, with about 30% of area residents living in a zero car household, likely due to high levels of poverty, minority, and elderly (over 65 years of age) residents.  All of these are hallmarks of good transportation corridors, making Central Ave. an ideal candidate for the first rapid transit corridor in the city.

I’ve already discussed how high development costs can hamper a project, and one of the reasons ART was so successful was because all of the funding wasn’t being footed by the city. ART was built with a $75M contribution from the federal government. This has the benefit of, essentially, reducing the development costs of the project. While obviously not every transit project can get federal funding, it is especially important for the *first* such project in a city, as the first project is likely to have the most mistakes. Funding first projects can make those mistakes less costly.

This proved to be especially true in the case of the electric buses which were originally part of the plan for ART. As I’ve discussed earlier in this series, the electric buses which Albuquerque contracted from BYD were plagued with problems.

The original electric buses for ART manufactured by BYD.

In part this was an issue with the use of electric buses at all. Albuquerque sits along the Rio Grande at the feet of the Sandia mountains. Its lowest elevation by the river is about 4,900 ft, while the highest elevation, in the foothills, is about 6,800 ft. It is not a flat city, and the route ART takes along Central Ave. has an elevation change of over 1000 ft. This dramatically reduced the battery range from initial estimates. On top of that, although the altitude makes Albuquerque temperatures more mild than other desert cities like Phoenix, it still gets hot, which further reduced the range of the bus batteries. BYD’s buses were supposed to have a range of 250 miles, but only managed 177 miles. Not enough to even run for a single day. While the city could have added more charging stations, these factors are generally hostile to battery powered electric buses.

In part this was an issue with BYD itself. The list of issues with buses was long. The doors would randomly open. Exposed wires were a fire risk. The brakes malfunctioned. The buses were a safety nightmare. This was the first time that BYD was manufacturing these particular buses, and clearly they hadn’t worked out all the issues yet.

Fortunately, in part because it was a requirement for federal funding, the city’s contract with BYD required that the buses pass a federal inspection before Albuquerque made any payments. Well, as you might guess, BYD didn’t pass. This kind of milestone performance based contract has a history of effectiveness, and ended up saving Albuquerque the over $20M the buses would have cost.

Instead, Albuquerque purchased a total of 30 articulated, five door buses from New Flyer. In doing so, the city made a much better, much more incremental choice. The buses are different than standard buses, they are long, articulating buses with more doors, and they have doors on both sides for both center and outside lane embarking and disembarking. But, unlike BYD, New Flyer had experience making these buses, and had made standard buses for ABQ Ride before. Albuquerque also didn’t purchase all of these buses at once. They did so in three waves of purchases over the course of a year of operations. The experience of New Flyer makes mistakes less likely, and purchasing buses in three waves makes it more likely to catch any mistakes that do happen before it gets too costly or time intensive to correct. Fortunately, there were no issues with these buses.

The currently operating diesel articulating buses manufactured by New Flyer.

The city also avoided cost overruns related to the construction of stations of pedestrian improvements with milestone performance based contracts. Again, I’ve already covered the problems like station being built too close to intersections, and unsafe lampposts. But the city didn’t have to pay for these mistakes. Instead the contractors promised to fix them at no extra charge. I’m sure, in part, this was a good faith gesture on the part of the contractors, who were local to Albuquerque and likely wanted to cultivate a good relationship with the city and gain the experience needed to give them an advantage for future transit contracts.

But even if this wasn’t true, Albuquerque had protected themselves. The contracts with the contractors include language setting a maximum price on the contract. Although the contract did include the possibility for early work amendments that could allow the contractor to increase the maximum price if they were ahead of schedule. This obviously proved moot as construction time doubled, but at least not at increased expense to the city.

The city did certainly have major problems with the electric buses and with the construction of some of the stops and pedestrian improvements. These caused massive delays that dramatically increased the financial pain for some local businesses. But by taking a moderately incremental tact with their contracts, Albuquerque managed to at least keep these problems from increasing the cost of the project. While not outright preventing problems, their incremental steps helped Albuquerque keep control of the negative consequences.

Lack of Incrementalism

But ART was far from an unbridled success. The project had to overcome two lawsuits, a petition to subject the project to a city-wide popular referendum, and a dramatic unpopularity as shown by polling. On top of that, the project timeline was doubled. It was slated to finish in 2017 but didn’t enter full operation until 2019. Where did ART fall short? Where could more incrementalism have been helpful?

One of the main drivers of opposition from local businesses was the disruption from construction. Interviews from several local news outlets at the time indicated that business owners attributed drastic drops in customers to disruptions from construction. Many either didn’t think they could last until the end, or didn’t think ART would bring enough benefits to make up for it. These disruptions were made even worse by how much longer construction went on than was planned.

But was the plan too quick to begin with? While it would have extended the expected duration of the project, Albuquerque could have completed the project by constructing small segments of the project in series rather than in parallel. I’ve discussed how this strategy was effective in Paris for automating several of their subway lines. Such a process has two advantages. First is it minimizes disruptions. Second, it minimizes the consequences of mistakes. For example, rather than finding out about the poorly placed stations at the end of construction, the first one would have been discovered earlier in the process, and then time left to ensure that the same mistake wasn’t made for any of the remaining stations.

Including electric buses as part of the initial plan was doing too much at once. Experimenting with a new transit system simultaneously with a new type of bus and a new contractor for that bus was probably too much at once. Not only had Albuquerque not worked with BYD before, but BYD had not actually sold the electric buses which Albuquerque bought for operation before. There were clearly some kinks to work out. Consider that the bus stations weren’t aligned with the height of the buses. This problem might have been avoided if the city had simply used standard buses from a known and experienced company. Or consider the issues with batter range. Neither the city nor BYD had considered how the heat or elevation might change the performance. Eliminating the requirement for electric buses would have eliminated these extra considerations entirely, and therefore reduced the possibility of making mistakes.

While it would have been much better to simply purchase a diesel bus from an experienced manufacturer the city was familiar with, unfortunately electric buses were a requirement for federal funding. But even given this requirement the city could have been more incremental. They could have purchased from a more experienced company. Or they could have at least chosen a model from BYD that had actually been in operation before.

The intersection and pedestrian improvements look really nice, and make Nob Hill safer and nicer to walk in. But they weren’t done very incrementally.

ART was also a lot more than just building a BRT line. The project also included substantial pedestrian and intersection improvements along the route, especially in the Nob Hill area. While personally I am in favor of this sort of public spending, I must admit that it seems like the city plunged in over their heads trying to conduct essentially two infrastructure projects at once. Many of the complaints from local businesses focused on the loss of on street parking and the torn up sidewalks around their businesses. These were primarily done for pedestrian improvements rather than the BRT portion of ART. All of the lighting upgrades that subsequently had to be redone were also part of those improvements. When problems arose because of the pedestrian improvements, this extended the timelines for both projects. If they had been done separately that would not be the case. Problems cascade, expanding to problematize as many projects as are going on simultaneously. That isn’t to say that pedestrian improvements weren’t necessary or good. They certainly were. It is only to say that the city should have focused on those improvements as a distinct project rather than lumping them in with ART. Doing both at the same time was too much at once and had clear consequences to the schedule and popularity of ART.

For Next Time

I hope that ART is not the last rapid transit project that Albuquerque undertakes. In fact, I hope that they start working on more lines sooner rather than later. That is why I want the city to learn, both from what went wrong, but also what went right when planning and building ART. Moreover, the United States is filled with sprawling, car centric, mid-sized cities like Albuquerque. I equally hope that officials from those cities can learn from ART as well. Not only how to do a better job building their own rapid transit, but that rapid transit can work in those types of cities at all!

Honestly, Albuquerque did more right than wrong with ART. While they could have narrowed the scope of the project, split the construction into smaller scale chunks, and limited the implementation of new technology, the approach to the project overall was quite incremental. Using BRT for the city's first transit route, the careful selection of that first route to maximize the potential for success, and the performance based contracts that made fixing mistakes much less expensive all worked in the city’s favor. But this just goes to show how few mistakes it actually takes to ruin the reputation of a transit project. If Albuquerque, or indeed any city, wants to build out a rapid transit system from scratch, they are going to have to be very cognizant of how flexible and incremental their plans are. It can be very easy to bite off more than you can chew, and with real consequences for the future of the transit system.