Kyle Kirschling Returns: Innovations in Transportation and the Gravitator Initiative

Foreign.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This is another episode of the secular Foxhole podcast. Today we are excited to have a returning guest. Kyle Kirschling is here again today. He was.He along with Ray Niles were together on our episode 50, which we call it our groundbreaking episode because the topic was substetting. And Kyle, he might touch upon that sometime during the show as well today. But Kyle is here. I want to read off this very impressive bio.Kyle is the transportation consultant who specializes in improving urban mass transit. He has a licensed cpa, holds a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia University.He spent over a decade at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority or the mta. He focused on the New York City subway, the world's largest metro system, which I did not know, but it makes sense.

They're, they're among the largest physically, not the busiest, but physically most number of stations, most miles of track.

I see, I see all right there.Among other things, he sped up subway trains, reversing a 23 year trend by developing a new operations strategy, saving two to four minutes per train trip and increasing on time performance from 67% to 81% in 12 months without any new costs. I'm sure they didn't even give you a raise.Anyhow, he's written several worse than that, but yeah, he's written several papers on the intersection of economics and infrastructure, including quote engineering the New York City subway subtitled the thinking behind the world's fastest and most convenient rapid transit System, end quote. Dispelling myths about why New York City has a subway. An economic analysis of rapid transit in New York from 1870 to 2010.A study of private public and hybrid institutions for transit ownership and operation and quote substetting a proposal to attract private capital to build brand new for profit transportation systems in the unused subsurface without eminent domain which he co authored with our previous guest economist Raymond Niles. Kyle, how are you?

I'm well, how are you guys? Great to be here.

We're doing great. Doing great.

That's great. So this impressive introduction. How many stations in the underground will you go over subway with that? Like two minutes or something like that.How, how fast is the train going?

The average speed is something like 20 miles an hour. Actually if you look at including stops the whole system but the express trains is closer to 30 and it'll hit, it'll go, it'll.The running speed is around 50 miles an hour. I mean it'll go to maybe 60, but actually most of the time is the, the real limiting Factor is the acceleration. Right.Because you start accelerating and then you can't do that fast before you have to start to slow down again.

And, and for our European audience, how, how much is that in kil. Kilometers.

Kilometers.

Oh, I will include that in the show notes.

But yeah, it's like an average speed again, including the times stopping at stations, something like 35 kilometers an hour. And the top speed would be like around 100. Yeah, something like that.

And you know, in Japan, how fast away the trains were very pretty.

I don't know. Again, looking at rapid transit, they're pretty similar. We used to do international benchmarking.They're around that same speed, around 25 miles an hour, 30, 35 kilometers an hour, the average speed. But again in New York we have the express trains which are quite a bit faster.And actually where New York stands out is the commuter trains like the, the Metro North Long Island Railroad.Their top speeds are, their average speeds are closer to 50 miles an hour, which compared to like other cities in Europe and also in Japan is much faster. I'm not sure, maybe it's just because our cities are less dense and New York is spread out geographically.

But so as I said in, in, in the green room.So with your far fetched ideas here about substeading and other things that you have on your plate, it, it, it could be a good thing to commute and live outside the central area and then going into the city. Right.

I mean, I think that that's like that the real value of transportation, at least within a city. I mean, if you're going to another city, you know, taking Amtrak, it's not really about speed.But I think within a city, the faster you can get somewhere, the less time it takes, the more opportunities you have. Like the more opportunities to live in a better house or in a bigger property or you can go to a better restaurant.Like if, if in general people have a certain amount of time that they're willing to travel. And in fact it's been since about 1890, which is the first data I could find from the census.On average commute times, it's been about 25 minutes and it's been about 25 minutes since 1890. So people kind of adjusted. If you can travel faster, people, you could save time. Okay, now I get to work in half the time. That's true.Some people will do that, but over time they adjust. And really what it means is now you have more opportunities, more places you can get to.So it's nice to have bike lanes and things like that, but it's not necessarily going to create new opportunities. So I'm a big fan of speed. I think speed is really important.And actually the, one of the ways fundamental to speeding up the New York City subway was to make speed not a dirty word. Because there was this idea that speed and safety are in, in conflict.And that if you talk about speed, you know, they always say safety is number one priority. Safety is number one priority. Which if that was literally true, you would just close it down because. To make sure no one got hurt. Right.Like being safe, free from injury or accident. Yeah, you want it to be. So the argument that I made because. Yes.I'm not going to say, well, let's, let's not worry so much about safety to make it faster because that's not going to be too persuasive. Really. We want speed. Speed and safety go together. We want to make it even safer so we can make it even faster.

Yeah.

That's why I brought up the Japanese. Yeah. Because they are good at speed and safety.

They scheduled. Yeah, they are extremely. Yes, they were there in December. In December. You can use the Google. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's go back to the history of the subway that originally was private. Wasn't not. Was it?Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of that era and all the things that happened to where we are today, if you could?

Yeah. So. So before there was a subway, there was an elevated network and it was, it was much bigger than London's underground system. Uh, it was.So this is the late, this is the 1870s and it was this network of steam powered coal fired locomotives on these wrought iron trusses over the streets. It was this Jules Verne like, futuristic system that went, you know, all over the city. And then in the 1880s it covered Brooklyn.And it was originally just 10 cents a ride. And then it, they lowered it to 5 cents a ride and it became sort of. And this was a, this is a fully private system.Now the city still owned the street, so you had to get permission. But in, in around, in The, I think 1875, they created a law that essentially it was sort of like a general incorporation law.So rather than having to go and get.Persuade the legislature to let you build your system, there was a general way to, to build and own a structure in a certain street and it would be yours and you could run it. And. Yeah, and it was, it was kind of incredible. And it was pretty much entirely privately owned, privately operated. Then.Now there were, there were drawbacks. One of the things is that even the, the law intended to allow you to build underground. It wasn't really very clear.So no one wanted to dig up the streets or, or you know, there wasn't really clear if you'd be able to own it. So that's why it was kind of limited to above ground. Then what happened is in the 1890s it just became congested and they needed more.The city was growing a lot and in particular people didn't want more elevated trains. And so the city, the city became much more involved and, and they wanted to also force there to be a 5 cent fare, a flat 5 cent fare.Because a big part of the idea was, okay, we're gonna have the city come in, we want to, they want to spread people out. You know, density was seen as sort of a bad thing back then. They did not, you know, there.And there were problems with tenement districts, things like that. So the city's like, well we need it to be a 5 cent fair and a flat fare. We don't want to incentivize people to live closer in.So if you live further out on the end of the line, it's a flat fair, the same fair. We don't want to encourage, we want to encourage people to spread out.And so that the subways, so the first subways, the first one opened in 1904, they were more like a public private partnership, but the capital was mostly provided by the city and that was that subsidy was basically needed in order to allow them to run it and make money with a 5 cent fare, which they did. So they were privately operated and there are actually a couple different companies, a couple different systems which they did.And then they needed to expand it because the first subway line was pretty popular. But to expand it, the city just didn't have the credit to pay for it. So the.It actually became a little bit more private mo Most of the capital was provided by the private operators in this bigger round.And in fact about half of the existing subway was built in the 1910s as part of this really a public private partnership like a design, build, operate, maintain type agreement for. I think it was a 50 year agreement.

Okay, yeah, you mentioned like there was a period like from 1890 to 1904. So did it take that long to get the sub underground started or built or built out?

It did, it did because. Well there were a lot of.So the basically the design for it came out around by 1891 was pretty much had been developed but part of it was originally they thought, well we're Going to have this elaborate design in the flat 5 cent fair and it's going to be paid for privately.But it took them a while to realize, okay, it's not going to make money if you cap the fair at 5 cents and have this, you know, really nice design for it. So they couldn't, they were trying to get someone to build it, to pay for it and then, which they couldn't get.And then in 1898, New York City sort of consolidated. So originally New York City was basically just Manhattan island and then part of a little part of the Bronx.But then it took in the rest of the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island.And so the city, those were consolidated because Brooklyn I think was like by itself was the fourth biggest city in the country in 1880 or something like that. So then the city had the credit to pay for more. They, that they could pay for it, keep the 5 cent fare and ultimately then they proceed.I think it was like 1899, they let the contracts for that and it opened in 1904. So the 1890s was kind of like what are we going to do? Can we.People are saying well let's just build more elevated trains because that's working well. And they're like, well we'd really like to have it underground, but we can't find anyone who's willing to do it. We've got to subsidize it.How are we going to get the money to subsidize it? So there's quite a debate at that.

Time that was like places like the London Underground was they, was that being built around the same time era?

Yeah, so that, so that was older. So the London Underground was, I think the first line opened in 1863. Oh, and that was older.And that was really, I think the first line was more just to connect two railroad terminals on different sides of the city and know would go underground and, and connect. And it wasn't, it wasn't quite like a full rapid transit system. It was more like an extension of the, the commuter railroads.But it was, it was certainly the first. And then there were more lines built like the Circle Line.Some of the, the older lines were built in the 18, I don't know, 70s, 1880s, but New York's system, so, so, so London absolutely has the first underground lines. But New York system was much bigger and busier.Even though London was still a bigger city at this time for whatever reason in New York there are a lot more people using transit, you know, commuting or you know Mechanized travel. Like if you look at like the, the number of rides on either a streetcar or a. They didn't really have buses, but like a streetcar or a, or a train.Per capita was like something like three times as much in New York. So like the average was like about one trip per person per day in New York. So there were a lot of kids.So like a lot of people were using trains, streetcars, every day, whereas in London was only a fraction of people were using it on a regular basis. I don't know if they were just walking or the way the city was set up, but.So that's part of why New York City, it had a, it's elevated system was much bigger, but London's was certainly older and earlier.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.In our correspondence you, you mentioned things like Tokyo and Hong Kong and I, I, I asked, I had assumed obviously that Tokyo had subway, but all you hear about is the bullet train.

From what I guess.

And let's, but let's jump. I know my, my wife will probably especially want to hear about this because she lived in Chicago.What do you, what kind of knowledge do you have about the loop in Chicago, if any?

Well, I mean I, as I understand it, it was a. The loop. Well, literally, I mean the loop, it's kind of used to refer to downtown Chicago or the central business district.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, and it's literally it's like a rectangle. It's a loop. I have a big picture of it actually over here. I had this great.It's a lithograph from 1898. It shows the whole central business district of Chicago and all the, the trains and stuff on the waterfront and the elevated lines.But from what I understand, it was sort of like a, a, a cooperative agreement with the different elevated line because Chicago had a sort of a similar system. It was built later, but with steam powered, coal fired elevated trains running over the streets.And they all came downtown and they decided to build a loop.You know, different lines were owned by different companies and they sort of came together so that we can all loop, turn our trains around and go back to our separate routes. But we'll share this loop and that. Yeah. Have you guys heard the term like Union Station?

Sure.

A lot of cities have a Union Station. Yeah. I was like, why is it called Union? Well, it was because often if there were several railroads in town, they would kind of realize.Well, it's actually makes more, it makes each of us better off if we share a station, not just because of efficiencies but because people can transfer and it will kind of improve everyone's business. So they get together and you, you know, as a union, it's something to do with like, labor unions or.

Right.

Civil war or anything like that. It's just the companies coming together voluntarily because it makes sense. And this was sort of like that.

That's smart. Again, back to our correspondence. As a young boy, my family, my older brother, my parents, we took a train from Cleveland to Pittsburgh and back.But anyway, I just. That. That was in the late 50s, early 60s, but that was my only experience on a train.And of course, now what, 60 years later, I haven't been on a train since then. So, I mean, it's sad to see the demise of the railroad or certainly the passenger train system here in America.Yeah, I mean, obviously several factors were involved. I think there's.You're still paying conductors or caboose engineers or something from some sort of union fund or something that was established by Congress, even though those people are like, I don't know. But as far as I know that Amtrak, if you will, has. The speed train is called. Was it the Acela from, like, New York to Miami or something like that?Is that a. So that's the fast train. You know anything about that or its inception or history?

Yeah, I mean, gosh, there's such a. It's a. Railroads are such an interesting story because they're.

It's.

It's kind of sad in a way, the way it got crushed, but it really. And.And it was really sort of the first industry to become regulated with the Interstate Commerce commission in the 1880s, sort of like the first big. I think Harry Vincenter said it was like, kind of like the first big step away from laissez faire was the Interstate Commerce Act.But there was also still, despite all the regulation and extremely productive force in the economy. And. But the, The.For whatever reason, I don't know if this is because of some of the regulations or just the economics that the railroads made a lot more money on moving freight than on moving people. And of course, people didn't like to see passenger service get cut.And at some point it was that the freight railroads are required to operate this passenger service. They were forced to. They said, you gotta operate it. You can try to make money if you want, but you gotta keep operating it.And different railroads tried certain things, experiments to make money. They just couldn't do it. And then all kinds of other regulations, price controls and.And as well as like, competition from trucking and Airlines and buses and things and which were in some ways had, you know, their right of ways were subsidized. Well, so eventually Congress was like, okay, we'll, we'll take over the. The passenger part and then created Amtrak in the 1970s. It's. It's still.It's technically a private corporation. I guess they still aspire to one day make money, although they do actually make money on a cella and in the Northeast Corridor on those trains.They make quite a bit of money. Um, and they use that to subsidize like the intercity trains around the rest of the country. Hmm. So you could. So that part of it is so.Which means probably they're not investing in like there are some areas in the US where it seems like we could use more train service. But if. I'm not really sure what would be if you had a purely free market, how it would work out in the United States.Because I mean we're a big country and we like to fly. I mean Americans fly like passenger miles per is much more than Europeans or any anywhere else in the world. So I wonder about that.

Yeah, I have a thought about that because I like to fly when it's working. But now with all the hassles, of course, if you go very long distance, you have to fly.But to go to a train, if it's working and you could sit down, you could work, you could sleep, you could. A view. Watch the landscape. Train is. I mean you could do. But try to do something on that, on a plane, try to work, try. It's. It's crowded. It's. It's.You're stuck. I have no problem to sleep.So I could, I could sleep at the airplane, but it's not comfortable if it, if you're not in first class or whatever, business class or so on and all the hassles to go to the airport and go away from the airport and standing in the line.

But the train, especially if you're trying to go downtown to downtown, like often the train stations take you right there.

Yeah, but. And also with you. And so we could come back to that as a. It's a backdrop in a way. But it was a reason why Ms. Rand picked trains for. Adler shrugged.Right. And this pioneer era and connecting a country and the business, you know. But it, it was also traffic with individuals going. So I've seen.Maybe it's more in Canada, but I've seen some documentaries about train travel with some of the modern trains, you have a glass ceiling and you could watch and you have fine dining and you stop at stations and you could walk around a bit if you have a time and you have great company whatnot. That could be a very enjoyable travel. So I think it's a market for it but of course you have to get paid for it in a way.And here in Sweden I could tell you an example similar to in America you had a state owned company and now they have divided. So one part is owning the track and one is the train and it's they, they measure, you know how if they are on time or whatnot and the quality.But then it came a company only for certain routes like from Stockholm and Gothenburg. It was originally a Hong Kong based coming from the subway underground in Hong Kong.Now they have changed the name, but I think it was MTR and they were faster, quicker and cheaper. But of course they had only a few routes.But that made the state owned train company to at least you know, do something about some part of their business, so to speak.

So yeah, I mean we benefit a lot from having private freight railroads at least because they're improving the technology and the rails and the locomotives and so at least we have that. That we can learn from as well and kind of keep some check.

Yeah, I know that I've seen, I saw this is some years ago, but I saw like a, you know like the Smithsonian Channel or something. They had, they went inside like an operations center for one of the railroads or, or at least like and this is incredible banks of, you know, you.All these, you can see the big screen of all these lines and, and this little big console and these. It's like one guy's watching everything. And you know that's.To me that was fascinating and you know that's, that's really modern and, and sophisticated and, and excellent. But yeah, it hasn't transferred to the passenger side yet at least.

I mean it sort of speaks, I mean it speaks to your, your what you're saying Martin, about how they, they try to. They'll often have different companies own the right of way the tracks and different companies operate the trains.And I think like in Britain they've also tried to do that as a way to like let's create competition, you know.Well, I think similar look with public utilities like okay, the people who own the generation versus the distribution lines, we're going to have those be separate.And in the railroad industry, at least just from my firsthand experience, that's difficult to do because you need like a control center to see where all the trains are to your equipment has to be very compatible with the clearances and the signaling system and everything. It's not like a road where you can just, well, let cars drive on and toll them.It really makes, I just, it makes more economic sense to, to control the right of way yourself and the vehicles on it because they're just, you can't. It's not as easy to just have people come and go.So like, they think they're creating competition, but actually, of course, we know that the way to have competition is to just have freedom and let people figure out. No, there are exceptions, like the loop in Chicago where they thought it made sense to come together. We're going to have to coordinate.It's going to be complicated, but we think it's going to be worth it. But when the government comes in and says, no, you can't own the tracks and the trains. It often doesn't.Even just doing maintenance on the tracks, you have to coordinate that with the, you know, the traffic that's out there. I mean, there are all kinds of things that make it really complicated.

Yeah, just that made me think of the, the electric power here in, in Connecticut, where I live, you know, okay, you have the power generating there. Okay. And then you, oh, now you have the people who own the lines and you have the people that, who have the fiber optics.And so instead of, okay, one price, now everything is escalate. All the price for everything is escalating.Instead of, you're not creating competition, you're creating a boondoggle, if you will, that's more expensive. And then you're blaming capitalism. So it's, it's just, it's, it's a circus.

Yeah. Although I envy that.I envy, I wish that, that our mass transit systems were merely regulated by the government rather than the government owning it and saying, okay, fine, we'll just buy it and we'll completely own it and we'll have government employees do everything. So at least the power grid, it seems to work pretty well. I mean, it's more reliable than the subway, I have to admit. You know, I mean, it's, it's.So at least there's some, there are some incentives there. It seems like it's kind of stable.

Or, or, you know, okay, okay, okay.

Compared to, you know, the massive and growing subsidies that are required to keep the mass transit systems going that we have.

I know. Again, I. You mentioned two more things in your original email to me, and I had never heard of this Florida thing called Bright Line.What do you know about that?

Oh, yeah, I'M glad you asked because we now have a private. Whatever. The first private passenger railroad in the US in around 50 years, I think. Yeah. And they're building. Yes. It's from Miami to Orlando.Now they extended it to Orlando. It's was a private equity that came and pulled it together. And it's a. It was.They brought in people from the cruise industry, you know, who know hospitality. So it's very. And I, and I went down like two years ago and wrote it and it's very. Oh, it's a wonderful experience.I mean, it's sort of like the lounges. You feel like you're in an airport. Sort of very, very modern and spacious. And they have this proprietary scent. It's almost like a fruity scent.So when you and I, when you. I didn't even realize it until like I went back this. Because I, I was meeting someone there who, who works there and I thought, I just.I don't know, I thought it was like him or something. And then I went back the next day and I was like, oh, this is the smell. And then it's a proprietary scent that they have on the train in the station.So it's, it's really like they really put a lot of thought into the look and the feel. And the seats are comfortable and the service is great. And I mean, it's a really. And they're making. Seems like they're making money now.They actually had to shut down completely during COVID But they really, you know, and that. Which I was kind of where that was going to just be a disaster. But they restarted after a few months and they're now making more money than or.Or more revenue than ever. And I think they're actually making money.

A passenger train where you have a dining car and so on and so forth or. And lounging and so on. Or is it just like.

I remember what class of seats I was in. It was. The seats were very spacious. So I didn't really. I didn't even think to. If I don't think there was an observation car of that type of thing.I think it's only a few hours. There's not sleeper car.

Yeah, that wouldn't be.

And they, they come to your seat with the service and stuff. So I'm not sure. I didn't see if there was a, A lounge car or something like that.

But I mean, I. And again, a short trip like that, you wouldn't have a dine. Maybe you wouldn't have a dining car, but would.So you could eat at your seat maybe or have snacks or.

I'm pretty sure they had service like that. Yeah. I just wrote. I was in Miami. I wanted to take it. I went just I think one stop to Fort Lauderdale and then came back.

Oh, okay.

So I, I don't, I don't. I didn't get the. They're kind of expensive. So it's more like.Although some people apparently they do use it for commuting and, and they, they, they don't own their. Most of their. Right away. They don't own. It's Norfolk Southern that they have to share the tracks with. But they're able to. To do that.They're building another line from. To connect Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It's under construction now. Bright Line West. Yeah. And that, that I believe is going to be.Not sure what the speed, but it'll be pretty fast. Um. And yeah, the same. Similar with like the, the hospitality focus.I was speaking with one of their engineers and he was saying it's tricky because it's so hot in the desert and it's going to be electric and what if you break down or you lose power if you can't like let the air conditioning fail for very long or you'll just get really hot and anyway, so there's. That doesn't really. I don't know if that's important. It's just interesting. So they're, they're figuring that out.I think they're getting some subsidies in the form of, you know, in like some of the bonds are tifia or whatever it's called where they get. Where they're. They're tax free but they're. But it's mostly private though. It's. It's almost entirely.

Well, I hope so. I hope that, you know, I hope that, that it'll be profitable and stay that way once it does get finished.But yeah, I was going to say that LA to Vegas is all but desert. It's pretty much flat heat, something like that. But I'm. That's encouraging at least. Yeah, I'd like to. I'd like to see that continue to.

Yeah. Compared to like the, the California high speed rail, which is, you know, taking a lot longer, costing a lot more.There's another initiative for a. I, I don't know where it's at, but in Texas, I think it's called the Texas Central Railway that they're actually working with. I don't know if it's JR east or. But they want to use the, the Shinkansen technology from Japan. Oh to connect. I. I forget which cities it is in.In Texas, I assume, Houston, Dallas, something like that. It's been kind of like starting, stopping, so I'm not sure where that's at. But that would be private as well, at least privately operated.

I'll have to look into that just to see what's going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's called Texas Central Railway.

Okay.

Yeah. So there's a couple of things.

That's good. That is good. Now you have a pet project of your own called Gravitator, is that correct?

I do. I do.

What go into that for us, if you would.

So it actually in some ways came out of subsetting the work with Ray. Yeah, because we. And that actually came out of. I was trying to think, how would you privatize the MTA transit in New York?And you can't, you can't regulate the fares. Because I've seen, you know, from the history, all of the problems that that causes.That ultimately is what bankrupted the private operators because they had this 5 cent fare and they forced them to keep it. You know, these deals were signed in 1913, right. As we were about to begin this period of inflation after about a century of stable prices.And the gold, you know.

Yeah.

And bankrupted. So you can't, you've got to somehow get the government out of regulating fares. And to do that, you need to have some way to have competition.If you just sell the MTA to a private owner, you need to have some way for a new competition, at least the threat of it. So that is part of what led me to subsetting. Like, okay, here's a way that you can, if you have this in place, it'll allow you to fully privatize it.You know, then I realized, well, you could do subsending on its own and it would have great benefits.But then in writing the paper with Ray, I wanted to think of like, what are some actual concrete projects that would pencil out, Because I think the people who might be excited about it, like, wow, okay, that's cool. But who's going to build anything? Trying to think what would actually be profitable today underground, like urban mass transit.And so that's what led to the idea of, of Gravitator. It's basically. It's like a conventional subway system.It's underground, but it uses gravity assist, so gravity to help you speed up as you're accelerating and then just slow down. Because it, the line goes down as you leave the station and then it comes back up to the station. At the surface.And then there are, you know, in penciling it out, there are some other really nice benefits about this design. So the. So first of all, it's faster.It's much faster because if you use gravity to accelerate and to slow you down, you can actually achieve much higher speeds. But you don't. You don't feel the acceleration or the braking like you would if it was. If you were going level.So you're, as you're dipping down below the surface, even though it's not at a great angle, maybe 10 degrees or so, you can accelerate relative to the surface much more rapidly than you can if you were going straight. Because like on the subway, on the New York City subway today, the main limiting factor is just passenger comfort.You can't accelerate faster or brake faster because it's just the forces on people would be too much. They would fall over or whatever. So that's kind of the limiting factor. Now, if you're talking about going from.From, you know, New York to la, then okay, it doesn't. It's not. You can accelerate gradually. You get up to 700 miles an hour, like a hyperloop or something, that's fine.But that wouldn't help in New York City because by the time you got up to 700 miles an hour, you'd be way past your stop.

That's right.

So you need. So. So the thing is, like, to actually have faster urban transportation, you need faster acceleration and deceleration.And we're limited by human comfort. So what this allows. By using gravity, you can actually just get much.Achieve much higher speeds without causing that discomfort because you're sort of accelerating downhill and gravity is helping to pull you forward. So you can have. You can achieve much higher speeds than is possible with any other mode of transportation.And then the other benefit is that you have the stations at the surface, which is much cheaper to build and more convenient to access. You, you know, you walk in, you get in the station. It's right there.And then because the tracks go underground, as soon as you leave the station, you have much more options in terms of where you route the. Where you put the lines. And so as a result, it's about. It's a lot. It's about half as much to build as a conventional subway.And the average speed is about twice as fast. So that would be more revenue. So it might. It would be, I think, profitable in many. In. In a couple of different situations.And that's just using conventional. Basically just using conventional rail technology that.

We have today because, yeah, I was thinking of that because I talked about the situation in Sweden and you have also this prepper thing that it has to be safe and you have to.If you go to other countries, you have to know that if it's the same, you know, system with the length and how the different cart could go on different trains in different areas and Sweden haven't prepared that. So now they are sitting there that they have to do something if they are now in European Union and different things.So you have standards and push from other countries. So that's pretty interesting. But I was thinking of this. Did you have an. How do you call that in Greece?You know, America or How do you say that player? I. I got it. When you, when you put in the oh gravitator. Yes. Did you have an aha movement or how do you come up with that with the gravity?

There was, there were a couple of different. There were other ideas for something like this that used gravity. But I think the oldest was this Kearney. Kearney like K A E A R N E Y Kearney.He was a British engineer in the 20s. But it used this, this weird sort of monorail type configuration and nothing ever came of it.But it was a similar principle that you could have higher speed and use gravity in this way.And then there was another idea in the 1960s in New York to do a gravity vacuum transit and that I don't know if it was going to be steel wheels or rubber tired or what it was, but it was going to create a vacuum, sort of like hyperloop. So you have a vacuum so you don't have any friction and you know, of the air and it would be very energy efficient.But again as with the monorail, that, that just the creating the vacuum. There's so many complexities. I mean first of all, if you, you evacuate the train cuz it sells, there's no air, you can't breathe.Like, I mean there's just a lot of problems. And you could.And I realized that what you could do is you get 80% of the benefits with 20% of the, you know, the cost by just using conventional technology, using this gravity assist.And then the other way that it saves money is because up to a distance of say about 2 miles or so you could have very frequent service with a single track, a single tunnel because they can go back and forth very quickly. So that cuts, you know, your tunneling costs in half right away. But so yeah, there were definitely some other predecessors that inspired me.The other thing that inspired me a lot and still does are elevators. Because they are like a little railroad.There's, there's stations, you know, where they stop, there's the right of way, the two, you know, the tunnel inside the building. And then there's vehicles, there's cabs. But it's so seamless that you almost don't notice it.In a way I'm making, you know, when you're riding a train, it's like I gotta transfer to another train and wait for. But you, you know, that's what you're doing on an elevator.You're transferring in a sense, but you don't notice it because it's so seamless and simple and so quick. And so that was part of my inspiration would be. Wouldn't that be great if you could just get from one place to another?Kind of like you're stepping on an elevator and then you know, what do you, what do you know? 45 Seconds later you get off. So it's like the gravitator. My idea would be it'd be so fast you don't even have to sit down.Like you wouldn't need seats because you just get, you're getting on, getting off like an elevator.

What is. You have a three minute video about that on your YouTube channel. Tell the audience. What's the name of your YouTube channel?

Yeah, it's Making Infrastructure Pay. And you know, because I'm interested in their infrastructure and economics. And so that's, that's sort of the idea.But I did, yeah, I made some videos on this gravitator concept. Oh. It was also partly inspired by the New York City subway because.

Sure.

One of the things that they do is that the stations, where possible, are at high points.So the tracks will slightly dip as you leave the stations just to make it a little bit faster and a little bit easier to slow down as you come into the station. So I'm like, well, if you take that idea and just do more of it that way, this.But it's perfect because then the stations are right by the surface where it's convenient. The tracks are deeper down, you can avoid utilities, things like that.But yeah, if they want to watch the video, I spent more than three minutes making it for sure.

Yeah, that's great.

Go to my YouTube channel making infrastructure pay. Or there's a website, Gravitator City. You can talk about some of the things that inspired me and, and, and example projects.

Got an idea there, Kyle. And we will talk more about that because I'm so fascinating with this. But as a so called cliffhanger for follow up and so on.Could you tell a little bit if you want who could be. We have a problem with that so called stakeholders concept. But we could say who could be interested in participating this and make money off it.I mean you mentioned for example to have your own entrance like in a hotel or in an apartment or. And now we hear something in the background there in, in New York air. Oh.

So yep, that's the. I don't even hear it anymore because it's so. Yeah. Yes. And I think there are several use cases.I mean one is just the government because like for instance in New York City they're building. We have two main train stations in midtown.One that serves, you know, NJ Transit trains and Amtrak trains in Long Island Railroad and then the other which serves Metro North Railroad, which is Grand Central and now also Long Island Railroad. But they want to sort of interconnect them.Instead of building separate connections from all these different railroads into them, you could just connect these two train stations underneath. Instead of spending whatever $11 billion, you could spend $1 billion.But I think privately some of the use cases for this gravitator would, would be like a shuttle. So if you are built, let's say you have a really nice waterfront property in Manhattan, but it's not, it's a few blocks from the subway.It's not a super convenient location, but it's a big beautiful site.You could put in one of these and that, that's one of the products I did run the numbers on including in the subsetting paper and just based on the difference how much it would. Because you would essentially have the same. What you could do is build your, build your office complex or residential complex on the waterfront.But essentially your lobby would be right in midtown or right next to Grand Central Terminal or something like that could be your address, that's your entrance. And for all it would be as if that's the entrance.That could be the address and you get on, of course you have to take a little elevator ride to get there.But then it would have almost this, you know, like the, the, the, the, the rental value would be very close to what it was if it was at that location, not far. So that would be a place where then that would add, you know, tremendous value to have that.Or if you're an airport and you want to connect to say another to somewhat destination or just to a train station or something nearby like you could, in New York you could connect LaGuardia Airport to a major subway line the EF and it would be something like 60 seconds to get there. That would be. That's. That, that's closer to. No, I think that one's 110 seconds. That's longer. That's closer to two. But that's about two miles. So.So for airport connections or maybe I think like. But a development site would be. I think those would be the most. There'd be a lot of opportunities like that, I think.

Okay, okay.

If you've got a great site, a big site, but it's just not in a convenient location, then you could connect into the existing transportation system that's there. Then ultimately you might find that you could just go in and build your own and it could be sort of its own mainline mode of transportation.But I think originally, you know, you might just see little short things get built here and there as the technology kind of gets proven out.

Yeah, I was going to. Yeah, I think that's probably the smart way to start. Just, you know. Okay, here you've got this already so. But you want something over here then.Okay, just extend that to over there. Is that, you know that's. I think it's what you're trying to say.

I mean that's kind of how the railroads began. They were very short. It was like the, the Albany disconnected railroad or whatever, you know, I don't know, 10 miles, 20, something like that.And there are a bunch of little things like that that then eventually they kind of got linked together and instead of having to switch trains, maybe we could just buy that other line and run our trains on it and the technology matures and improves and standardizes.

Well, I do have one final question. As for our guest is any. Since our, since you were here last, I guess it's almost been. Almost two years perhaps.Has any interest been dug up on your sub stinting idea?

Not enough. I did, I did. I used. There's this thing called the David Prize in New York where you can you submit an idea and you get.I think it's like $200,000 or a hundred thousand something. They'll give you some. I got to like the second stage. But there's like five stages or something. I only got. I got one like one in you know, past.And then, and then Ray and I did try to. We applied for Y Combinator. We worked that. We didn't. We didn't get accepted. We should try again but just haven't gotten around to it.But I, I did want to at least. But we've got the, at least the ideas out there, you know, we've got the paper written, and then I wanted to get the.The gravitator idea out there as well. So at least it's there to kind of get people to think about it. But I would.But I think, you know, I haven't found anyone who can tell me why it won't work.

Very good.

So I think if I can find the right person or someone who would be interested in it, and it could totally. I think it would totally work. Absolutely. Because it's not. It's not really any radical technology. I think the hardest part is without.If you don't have subsetting, would be to get the permission to do it.But then that could be the way that you pay for subsetting, because that way you can come in on the moral high ground and say, look, I'm not asking for a special permission to build this line here. Just make a way for anyone to build something. I don't know, in my. At least my dream world, that would be the way it would work.

Well, that's. That's. I'm all for that. I'm all for it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Martin. I'll let you. I'll let you end up.But I'm just going to say that today's guest has been Kyle Kirschne. Kirschling. Excuse me. Former MTA Transit Authority member, an independent scholar, so to speak.

I'll take that.

Thanks for manning the foxhole with us today.

My pleasure. Great talking, you guys. Yeah.

And thanks, Kyle, here.And I'll do this shout out to you and others here that have now joined TrueFans FM and created an account there so we could add you to the split in an easy way. And the split is that when people think this.Because now when you hear this idea here on podcast, on a podcast, maybe you think it's a great idea and you value that.And maybe it's worth, like you said, 5 cents or 10 cents or whatever, like a ride when you're listening on the subway or underground, this episode around, it will be like 50 minutes or something like that.Maybe that's worth the time and you're listening and then because it's your attention as a listener out there, but you could put in value to that and send us a boostagram like a super comment. We did a small donation using a new modern podcast application like truefence fm. And you could also stream.As long as you're listening to the episode and this episode, then, Kyle, as you have created an account we will split. So you will get a third of the donations there.

That's the only reason I'm here, yeah.

So, again, where could the listener find you?

On the Internet?

Yes, on the Internet. Or on the subway.

They'll give us your personal address.

I'm on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect there. You can see my email address or go to my channel.My channel is not linked directly to LinkedIn because work doesn't, you know, they don't sponsor it. I'm a consultant. But you can go to YouTube making infrastructure pay. You can see my contact information there also.

Great.

Sounds great. Very good. Sam. Sat.