Commuter Rail’s Potential Is Untapped

[M II A II R II K]

Commuter Rail’s Potential Is Untapped


Sep 26, 2019

By Aaron Short

Read More: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/09/...l-is-untapped/

American commuter rail systems have long been wedded to the 9-to-5 work schedule, but as the 21st-century economy demands more flexible hours regional rail systems have not kept pace with those changes. Something has to change as leaders across the country are looking to overhaul one of the most underutilized elements of a region’s transit system in order to reverse falling ridership, reduce car dependency, shrink commute times, and curtail traffic congestion.

- Cities such as Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia have suburban rail systems that serve only 2 to 6 percent of commuters but better and more-frequent service could appeal to car drivers. Regional rail systems have “underutilized potential,” said TransitCenter’s Director of Research Steven Higashide. — “What’s really exciting for riders is a vision for all-day frequent service, that is, turning a transit system oriented around 9 to 5 commutes into a service that someone can rely on a much more diverse set of trips,” he added. Transportation officials from Toronto and the Bay Area, who led a discussion about rail service at TransitCenter on Wednesday, are already taking steps to modernize their rail systems and coax commuters out of their cars.

- Toronto has been expanding its transit service by increasing the number of rail trips by 50 percent and boosting bus trips by 20 percent from 2015 to 2020. Officials have also sought to keep stations and train cars clean and encouraged employees to assist with customer inquiries on concourses. Improving the frequency of trips in addition to revamping customer care has made Toronto’s Metrolinx rail system one of the most loved in North America, its Up Express service has customer satisfaction ratings in the 80s, and ridership has risen 4.1 percent over the past year. “One of the biggest lessons that we’ve demonstrated over the last two years is that you have to have a big focus on quality and customers not just cost and efficiencies,” Metrolinx President and CEO Phil Verster told Streetsblog.

- Northern California transportation officials are currently electrifying Caltrain, which could provide a loop of fast transit connecting San Francisco and Oakland’s BART service to San Jose on both sides of the bay. Electrified service should give passengers six trains an hour during rush hour and Caltrain’s long-term plan, which the board will consider next week, could increase service to eight trains an hour during peak times and four trains per hour throughout the day, a Caltrain spokesman said. The $2.26 billion in upgrades, which could be completed by April 2022, can’t come quickly enough with 1.2 million more people estimated to live along the route by 2040. “There’s pent-up demand, all day long all week long for much more frequent service,” Friends of Caltrain Executive Director Adina Levin told Streetsblog.

- Transit officials still have to improve connectivity between transit services in both San Francisco and San Jose. San Francisco’s Salesforce Transit Center is equipped for electric Caltrains but it will cost $6 billion to build a tunnel connecting the transit center with the Caltrain station at Fourth and King streets as well as an underground pedestrian walkway that leads to BART and Muni lines. Another extension connecting BART trains with downtown San Jose could cost $4.7 billion. — Both projects could conceivably take a decade to finish, but advocates say they’re on the right track by allowing more frequent service throughout the day. “Caltrain isn’t a commuter rail anymore because the Bay Area is a polycentric region,” Levin said. “Instead of a unidirectional commute into a center you have a bidirectional commute pattern, with people coming from different places and going to different destinations.”

- Some regions are already moving in that direction with piecemeal rail projects. Massachusetts transit advocates want the state’s transit authority to institute electrified regional rail along the Worcester-Framingham line while the Mass Pike undergoes a reconstruction. In June, Los Angeles’s Metro Board approved the LinkUS Union Station project which would reduce delays and idling at Union Station, allow a one-seat ride between San Diego and San Luis Obispo, and accommodate high-speed rail. And Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is wants to reduce fares and increase service on the Metra Electric and Rock Island train lines in Chicago’s South Side and south suburbs, but Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who worries fewer people would ride local subways as a result, opposes it.

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[M II A II R II K]

Can commuter rail save our suburbs?

https://www.curbed.com/2019/10/8/208...opment-suburbs

.....

- Amid recent reinvestments in Olde Town Arvada, a neighborhood of brewpubs, independent stores, and restaurants, the arrival of a rail link to Denver this past spring, after years of delay, is another catalyst in the suburb’s growth. Arvada has already seen $400 million in investment since 2006, including streetscaping and downtown redevelopment, according to Daniel Ryley, executive director of the Arvada Economic Development Association, but it’s the arrival of the rail link that has fueled even more new development and a spike in economic activity. Sales tax revenue in Olde Town grew 75 percent between 2013 and 2018 as new businesses opened in anticipation of the train’s arrival.

- Within a half-mile of the station, more than 1,100 new apartments, condos, and townhomes have gone up in the last few years, according to Maureen Phair, executive director of the Arvada Urban Renewal Authority, as well as a Hilton Garden hotel. An additional 250 units will break ground next year right next to the station. “What we don’t want to do is contribute to sprawl, traffic, and pollution,” says Phair. “The best way to avoid that is building density around these stations, and really building a place, so people can ride to work and walk to dinner.” The new rail line, Ryley says, and the 20-minute ride to downtown Denver, is making it easier for businesses to retain and attract workers.

- Growing metros in the West and the Sun Belt are betting big on improved suburban transit, including expanding light-rail lines and building new commuter rail services. It’s a trend that’s taken off over the last 15 years, according to Paul Lewis, vice president of policy and finance at Eno Center for Transportation. The American Public Transportation Association says commuter rail use has been steadily increasing since the late ‘90s, and grew 9.2 percent, or by more than 42 million additional trips, in the last decade alone.

- Mimicking the commuter rail lines that stretch out from Northeast cities like New York, these new suburban transit options tend to be renovations of underutilized or unused freight lines. Similar plans propose or plan to open new lines in the next five-plus years in Seattle, Houston, Massachusetts, Dallas, and Miami. “As cities grow and want to be world-class and compete on a global scale, they need to show a map with transit and rail lines,” says Lewis. The price is certainly right: By repurposing existing lines, transit agencies forgo costly land acquisition and rail construction costs and focus on stations, parking lots, and passenger cars.

- Texas cities also have high hopes for rail-led development. Houston will ask voters to approve a $7.5 billion expansion of transit, including more light rail and a rail link to Hobby Airport. Dallas’s Silver Line, a $1.2 billion investment in a radial line linking northern suburbs and other existing rail services, aims to better intertwine a crescent-shaped swath of emerging cities and job centers from Plano to the stockyards near downtown Fort Worth. According to Leininger, the former DART exec, the suburbs see commuter rail as a significant infrastructure boost, and have responded with investments and policies stimulating new development.

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[SFBruin]

I agree that Caltrain has a capacity problem during rush hour and should expand to 6 or 7 trains per hour southbound and possibly 8 trains per hour northbound.

[mhays]

The Seattle metro has an extreme lack of rail ROW. There's literally one heavy rail route northward. It's along the waterfront (vs. in the middle of the population), heavily used by freight, and prone to small landslides in the winter despite some upgrades. Southward it's better but not that good either. As for eastward...that starts at Everett and Tacoma, not Seattle.

This means it's next to impossible to get expanded time for passenger rail service amidst the freight.

[digitallagasse]

Perhaps re purpose or utilize road ROW. It will have a high cost due to lack of existing rail ROW but far cheaper and likely to succeed than buying up properties for a rail ROW.

The computer rail could be built elevated in middle of street ROW. Think something along the line of what the rail in Hawaii is doing. Rail could be put in the center of freeway ROW and take advantage of the grade separation the freeway ROW has. Either is not a perfect solution but at least gets a rail network going.

[hammersklavier]

Something to keep in mind here is that most large prewar cities have both extensive radial rail networks and former railroad suburbs along those networks. This is true not just of cities like NYC, Boston, Philly, and Chicago, but also cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, etc. Cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Seattle, with relatively limited railroad corridors are, in the American context, more an exception than a norm.

It's also worth keeping in mind that the "small town America" ethos is largely one of railroad suburbs, "towns" whose wealth is a byproduct of their proximity to a major city. It's not an accident that New Urbanism developments ape those of railroad suburbs!

A good argument to be made here is that there are two major investments we need to make in our suburban rail infrastructure: (1) return rail alignments that serve obvious railroad suburbs to active passenger use, and (2) modernize commuter rail movements through the core in accordance to European norms (e.g. Germany's S-Bahn or Paris' RER networks).

The latter is actually surprisingly easy in practice in most American cities, as the large railroads liquidated the bulk of their stub terminals in favor of through stations during the early 20th century. It is not a question of whether the infrastructure for commuter rail exists at all in a place like Kansas City; rather, it's one of whether there's popular and political will to rebuild it.

[jd3189]

I would hope to see commuter rail playing a bigger role in the future since many of our major cities are too expensive to build on at a rate to offset the supply/demand imbalance to a moderate level. As suburbs continue to grow and increase in density and highways continue to have deep traffic and commute times, it’s now important than ever.

[Hatman]

Missing from this discussion is Salt Lake City, which is home to the UTA FrontRunner. In the first half of the year this one 89-mile line in little ol' Utah carried over 2.5 million passengers, which is makes it the 11th busiest commuter rail line in the country. It beats out Sound Transit in Seattle, Virginia Railway Express near Washington DC, Trinity Railway Express in Dallas, and Tri-Rail in Florida, just to name a few. These cities are much larger than Salt Lake City, so how is UTA able to get more riders?
The answer is they run a lot of trains: Sixty three departures from Salt Lake City every weekday, and 42 departures on Saturday. People hate being trapped by a transit schedule, so the best thing to improve ridership is to run more often and expand the hours in which trains operate.

[NikolasM]

Sound Transit in Seattle is bullcrap. Really low frequencies and really weak hours of service. I wish they could extend it down to Olympia and make it more usable.

[pdxstreetcar]

Electric Multiple Units are used extensively in Europe and Asia but are little used in the US outside the NE (for a variety of reasons). These are what we should be using a lot more. Denver was smart to go this approach for many corridors but too often light rail is the default option.

Much of Seattle's Link system really would have been better suited to EMUs instead of light rail (although generally using the current and proposed Link route) because of the long distances to Everett and Tacoma. (I am not referring to the Sounder corridor, although if built this way they could have been somewhat interchangeable). What this also would have been, had they used EMUs, is a second and passenger-only major rail corridor north and south that could have also been used for Amtrak Cascades.

[hammersklavier]

Originally Posted by pdxstreetcar

Electric Multiple Units are used extensively in Europe and Asia but are little used in the US outside the NE (for a variety of reasons). These are what we should be using a lot more. Denver was smart to go this approach for many corridors but too often light rail is the default option.

Much of Seattle's Link system really would have been better suited to EMUs instead of light rail (although generally using the current and proposed Link route) because of the long distances to Everett and Tacoma. (I am not referring to the Sounder corridor, although if built this way they could have been somewhat interchangeable). What this also would have been, had they used EMUs, is a second and passenger-only major rail corridor north and south that could have also been used for Amtrak Cascades.

Not just EMUs! European operators extensively use DMUs as well, as these are better for non-electrified lines. American passenger rail technology is wildly obsolete, but, unfortunately, the relaxation of FRA standards will take some time to make it to market because American operators have built their operations around those standards.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by pdxstreetcar

Electric Multiple Units are used extensively in Europe and Asia but are little used in the US outside the NE (for a variety of reasons). These are what we should be using a lot more. Denver was smart to go this approach for many corridors but too often light rail is the default option.

Much of Seattle's Link system really would have been better suited to EMUs instead of light rail (although generally using the current and proposed Link route) because of the long distances to Everett and Tacoma. (I am not referring to the Sounder corridor, although if built this way they could have been somewhat interchangeable). What this also would have been, had they used EMUs, is a second and passenger-only major rail corridor north and south that could have also been used for Amtrak Cascades.

I’m going to strongly disagree with you that EMUs should be preferred over DMUs on rails owned by the freight railroad companies, and strongly disagree with you that electric commuter rail should be preferred over light rail.
The average retail price for diesel fuel in the USA is around $3 per gallon ($0.79 or E0.72 per liter), in France the retail price for diesel fuel is $6.10 per gallon (E1.46 per liter, E5.542 per gallon, $6.10 per gallon).
Railroads in America buy diesel fuel at wholesale prices by the truckload, I assume that also holds true in France. With diesel fuel costing twice as much in Europe than in America, that is going to effect the economics over using DMUs or EMUs, and even in Europe you are going to find DMUs running just about anywhere.

Light rail is not only cheaper to build than EMU commuter trains, they are also cheaper to operate and maintain. Most high speed commuter EMUs trains running significant distances use several thousand ac volts on the catenaries above the tracks, most light rail trains running shorter distances use 600-750 dc volts. Most commuter trains sharing tracks with heavy freight trains require 130+ pound tracks vs the 110 pound tracks required by light rail trains. So, building light rail systems is cheaper than building EMU systems.
Denver RTD uses a mix of light rail and EMU trains, depending mainly on sharing the tracks or not with freight trains, along with who owns the tracks. At a mile above sea level, it’s thinner air affected their decision on using DMUs or EMUs. Most American cities are not located a mile above sea level. New York City also discourages using DMU or diesel locomotives and it is located at sea level, but access to Manhattan using mostly tunnels resulted in a local law encouraging electric power over steam and diesel locomotives. Both Denver and New York City have different reasons why because of different physical conditions, conditions not found elsewhere in America.

Every train company and transit agency should look at its own needs and requirements over and beyond a national one size fits all mind set. if a one size fit all mind set overrules local requirements, many New Yorkers would be choking on diesel fumes at Penn Station and Grand Central.

[bobg]

Originally Posted by electricron

Denver RTD uses a mix of light rail and EMU trains, depending mainly on sharing the tracks or not with freight trains, along with who owns the tracks. At a mile above sea level, it’s thinner air affected their decision on using DMUs or EMUs. Most American cities are not located a mile above sea level. New York City also discourages using DMU or diesel locomotives and it is located at sea level, but access to Manhattan using mostly tunnels resulted in a local law encouraging electric power over steam and diesel locomotives. Both Denver and New York City have different reasons why because of different physical conditions, conditions not found elsewhere in America.

I live in Denver, was at most RTD public meetings, read all the impact statements and public materials. I don't recall altitude ever being mentioned.

What was mentioned often was the train frequency. RTD was planning on (and is curently) running their commuter rail at RER/S-bahn frequency levels. They did the math, and saw that at that frequency with projected fuel costs it made sense to electrify over the long run.

Because RTD isn't sharing tracks on the G, A, the open portion of the B line, and the under construction N line it was easy to electrify. If they ever are able to fully extend the B line they will have to share tracks with the BNSF and plan to use DMU's.

In short, as a generalization the more frequently you run commuter rail the more electrification makes economic sense. Obviously, if you are sharing tracks that may not always be feasible.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by bobg

I live in Denver, was at most RTD public meetings, read all the impact statements and public materials. I don't recall altitude ever being mentioned.

What was mentioned often was the train frequency. RTD was planning on (and is curently) running their commuter rail at RER/S-bahn frequency levels. They did the math, and saw that at that frequency with projected fuel costs it made sense to electrify over the long run.

Because RTD isn't sharing tracks on the G, A, the open portion of the B line, and the under construction N line it was easy to electrify. If they ever are able to fully extend the B line they will have to share tracks with the BNSF and plan to use DMU's.

In short, as a generalization the more frequently you run commuter rail the more electrification makes economic sense. Obviously, if you are sharing tracks that may not always be feasible.

That reinforces what I wrote earlier, each transit agency and train company has to evaluate their own conditions and make their own decisions on what is best for them, not relying upon a one size fit all national mind set.

[Skintreesnail]

- Cities such as Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia have suburban rail systems that serve only 2 to 6 percent of commuters but better and more-frequent service could appeal to car drivers. Regional rail systems have “underutilized potential,” said TransitCenter’s Director of Research Steven Higashide. — “What’s really exciting for riders is a vision for all-day frequent service, that is, turning a transit system oriented around 9 to 5 commutes into a service that someone can rely on a much more diverse set of trips,” he added. Transportation officials from Toronto and the Bay Area, who led a discussion about rail service at TransitCenter on Wednesday, are already taking steps to modernize their rail systems and coax commuters out of their cars.

In regards to Philly, the SEPTA regional Rail is already built out like an s-bahn system with all lines through-running, but they don't use it that way. It could be vastly improved by just increasing frequency. The station spacing is close on many of the lines, especially within the city limits. If they added a couple more stations on the main 4-track trunk in north philly and west philly, that would probably also improve ridership; it runs through some pretty densely populated neighborhoods that aren't served by subway. They could run express trains from the suburbs on the inner tracks that bypass the local inter-city stations.

They're bringing all the different modes under the same payment system (septa key), which might help too, but all modes should cost the same within the city limits whether it's subway/trolley or rail. It's not much of a difference anyway, so not sure why they just don't simplify it. Also, PATCO would be used more if it wasn't on a completely different system as SEPTA.

[Busy Bee]

Originally Posted by Skintreesnail

...but all modes should cost the same within the city limits whether it's subway/trolley or rail. It's not much of a difference anyway, so not sure why they just don't simplify it.

Agreed. But when you are as chronically underfunded as Septa, you can kind of understand why they're trying to squeeze every ounce of blood out of the turnip.

[bobg]

Originally Posted by electricron

That reinforces what I wrote earlier, each transit agency and train company has to evaluate their own conditions and make their own decisions on what is best for them, not relying upon a one size fit all national mind set.

Of course each transit agency should.

What I was taking exception with is that it takes special conditions such as tunnels or high altitude for EMU's to make sense.

If you plan on running high frequency commuter rail at some frequency (each city will have a different break even point) it will make sense to use EMUs. Provided of course you can on that track.

[llamaorama]

The things that make an EMU different from an LRT don’t seem important for urban transit.

A bigger(for purposes of having toilets and more leg room) faster train that can share tracks with freight would be useful for regional or short distance intercity, but a local and frequent urban train doesn’t need any of those features.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by Hatman

Missing from this discussion is Salt Lake City, which is home to the UTA FrontRunner. In the first half of the year this one 89-mile line in little ol' Utah carried over 2.5 million passengers, which is makes it the 11th busiest commuter rail line in the country. It beats out Sound Transit in Seattle, Virginia Railway Express near Washington DC, Trinity Railway Express in Dallas, and Tri-Rail in Florida, just to name a few. These cities are much larger than Salt Lake City, so how is UTA able to get more riders?
The answer is they run a lot of trains: Sixty three departures from Salt Lake City every weekday, and 42 departures on Saturday. People hate being trapped by a transit schedule, so the best thing to improve ridership is to run more often and expand the hours in which trains operate.

yep great example -- and another way to grow it is to add more in-town stations. this is what mta is doing with mnrr in the bronx adding four stations with the new budget.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by bobg

Of course each transit agency should.

What I was taking exception with is that it takes special conditions such as tunnels or high altitude for EMU's to make sense.

If you plan on running high frequency commuter rail at some frequency (each city will have a different break even point) it will make sense to use EMUs. Provided of course you can on that track.

EMU commuter trains or EMU light rail trains?
In many cases light rail would be both better and cheaper to operate.