Why Is American Rail So Costly? - Bloated Station Designs

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Doady

Commuter rail service will need grade separation anyways when ridership and train volume reaches a certain point, and the BART people must have thought they would need it from the very beginning. Considering the ridership per km is much higher than Metro-North or Long Island and approaching Chicago L, maybe they weren't exactly wrong.

BART ridership is nowhere near Chicago L ridership. And grade separation is a red herring. No one is saying that BART should be crossing major streets. That has nothing to do with building a system from scratch rather than utilizing existing rights of way. BART could be fully grade separated without building palatial stations and underground platforms and virgin rights of way.

Chicago L doesn't have full grade separation, BTW. LIRR and Metro North (and NJT) do have full grade separation on the core trunk lines.

[Busy Bee]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Yes, absolutely. There is an existing rail right of way that follows BART down the East Bay. They chose not to use it.

I don't know what this means.

Using a railroad right-of-way is not the same thing as using their actual tracks. Are you saying the BART right of way is not within the former Western Pacific Railroad right-of-way through much of the easy bay?

Originally Posted by Crawford

Obviously you don't need to have grade crossings. Busy suburban rail routes don't have grade crossings. But that doesn't mean they build 50-mile "subway" routes from scratch, they just eliminate grade crossings on existing tracks.

Plenty of busy suburban rail routes have grade crossings. BART isn't a "50-mile subway route from scratch." I've lost track of what you are even talking about.

Obviously BART's goal was to construct a segregated electrified metro rail/commuter rail hybrid and not a diesel (or electric) pulled coach commuter rail line interlining with freight on a traditional rail line ala current Caltrain ops. Obviously whether or not one favors one or the other is a subjective matter but it's spilt milk under the bridge at this point.

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Again, I don't think the design of the station is the core issue. But this station will be lightly used, and has 5x the infrastructure of the busy BART stations.

Well, they couldn't go elevated at Milpitas because of the existing elevated VTA light rail stop. Or it would have required tracks so high they would have failed environmental review for their impacts on adjacent neighborhoods.

BUT the station is absolutely overbuilt. The huge headhouse is unneeded, it looks like an airport terminal but serves maybe 5% of the passengers on a good day. The bus turnaround is 3x as large as it should be, and the station includes a huge garage that is a waste of prime TOD land.

[Busy Bee]

^ I can agree with that.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Yes, absolutely. There is an existing rail right of way that follows BART down the East Bay. They chose not to use it.

The whole branch between Oakland and San Jose is built adjacent, above, and at times entirely in place of a freight rail corridor. The recent two station extension toward San Jose was built on this same corridor. A freight spur crosses over the new BART tracks just north of the new Milpitas station.

Back when Obama was President:


Now:


The new BART tracks travel beneath three cross streets and a freight railroad spur within a stone's throw of the Milpitas station. It might have cost less to keep the BART tracks depressed in this area than to elevate them.

Just north of the Milpitas station, the line is still in a trench:


The current terminus has a huge amount of non-revenue track. The active corridor continues for 3,200 feet past the terminal platform, with a crossover and spur totaling 7,500 feet of track. There is space to park no fewer than seven of BART's 710-foot trains. Much of this non-revenue track is on an aerial structure.




Anyway - this line will serve downtown San Jose and the California High Speed Rail station in San Jose, meaning the East Bay BART extensions in recent decades will eventually have significant bidirectional traffic.

[hammersklavier]

Here's what some of youse are missing.

The problem with Milpitas isn't the physical rail infrastructure. It's the behemoth headhouse-by-the-acre and adjacent parking garage built to the same absurd scale. Milpitas would have been perfectly well served with a mezzanine that just ran right over the trackway and a temporary parking lot awaiting TOD activation. Ardecila understands the issue at hand better than anybody else on this thread, I think.

(Also IMO the Milpitas extension itself highlights a fundamental failure on BART's part, one stemming from the early design decision to use Iberian gauge and third rail instead of standard gauge and overhead rail. BART by necessity must overbuild its own rail infrastructure because it is a sealed system, unlike other operators who can reuse existing infrastructure along old RR alignments.)

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by hammersklavier

Here's what some of youse are missing.

The problem with Milpitas isn't the physical rail infrastructure. It's the behemoth headhouse-by-the-acre and adjacent parking garage built to the same absurd scale.

Please post the budget line items if you're going to make that claim. It's more likely that the expense of the station extras were dwarfed by unseen items like consultants, engineering, utility rerouting, etc.

Originally Posted by hammersklavier

BART by necessity must overbuild its own rail infrastructure because it is a sealed system

You're basically arguing for Cleveland's 1950s Rapid.

[Busy Bee]

Originally Posted by hammersklavier

(Also IMO the Milpitas extension itself highlights a fundamental failure on BART's part, one stemming from the early design decision to use Iberian gauge and third rail instead of standard gauge and overhead rail. BART by necessity must overbuild its own rail infrastructure because it is a sealed system, unlike other operators who can reuse existing infrastructure along old RR alignments.)

Outside of rolling stock procurement likely being slightly higher in cost due to the gauge specification, please explain how the 20th century decision to use Iberian gauge (made in large part due to wind sheer concerns for a Golden Gate BART crossing) has exacerbated costs in any epic way? Also, the choice to use third rail. You seem to be proclaiming that the decision to use ground level third rail has a made for higher construction costs vis a vis OCS? How so? If you are saying is that if the choice for ground level third rail was not made, BART would have been able to operate on shared tracks with grade crossings? Honestly I don't know what you are saying is so different about the decisions BART made versus the decisions any other ground up rapid transit system made i.e. DC Metrorail. These are all "sealed systems."

[ardecila]

I think the point he's making is that BART should have been an RER system given its geography. The ability to interface with mainline rail would have been a huge asset in allowing the continued expansion of the system.

Unfortunately given the realities of transit planning in the 1950s when BART was conceived I dunno if we can blame them. Paris had yet to build the RER! German S-bahns and Tokyo's integrated suburban system were still in tatters after WW2. Mainline rail in the US was still in the dirty steam era and controlled by corrupt/ruthless corporations.

Should also note here that the RER came into being on a Parisian legacy rail network that was already largely electrified and grade separated through the banlieues. The Bay Area didn't have those advantages, they had to build not just the core of the network but the outlying branches from scratch.

[tayser]

On paper it might look all fine and dandy to design a system that could eventually use/interface with existing tracks not currently taking passenger services. But take it from cities that have done that for 100+ years and are now spending big on projects to enhance the separation between freight, metropolitan (the RER and partial metro-like services of Australian urban rail systems) and regional (inter-city) services: BART being separate (or 'sealed' away from everything else) is not a bad thing.

[jmecklenborg]

Say what you want about the Key System being scrapped but the fact is that BART trains travel much faster in the transbay tube than the Key trains traveled over the Bay Bridge. What's more, the Key System terminated in Downtown SF whereas BART brings East Bay commuters directly into the downtown and allows them to easily transfer to Muni light rail to reach other parts of the city.

If the Key System had remained, the argument for building a high speed rapid transit tunnel under the bay would have been hard to make since it would have been an incremental improvement over an existing service rather than an all-new rail service in the complete absence of one.

People can argue about BART's rails and wheels and the voltage and everything else all they want, the fact is that they got it exactly right in building the four track subway under Market. No other city the U.S. with the exception of New York has anything similar.

[Busy Bee]

^ Ditto

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by biguc

Why would any other country comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act?

hows that again?

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

This isn't 1970, most developed and developing nations are accommodating the disabled in new infrastructure with or without ADA-style legislation - it's just universal design.

it is definitely not universal.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Also, everywhere else in the world, multiple lines are often under construction simultaneously, allowing specialized workers, engineers, and consultants to continue to work for long periods of time. Building the four phases of the Second Ave. subway with orders to proceed spaced about 1 year apart would have been a lot cheaper than waiting 10 years in between each phase.

The high costs of piecemeal construction are compounded when all of the provisions for future extensions that are built are never used or end up being used in a different fashion. For example, the MTA plans to not use one of the never-used 1970s-era sections of the Second Ave. line in Lower Manhattan.

unh huh, yep, and so now all you need to do is figure out how to get the loot rolling in regularly. good luck!

[biguc]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

hows that again?



it is definitely not universal.

Think really hard about your original post. Other countries don't follow American laws. We make our own laws and follow those. I shouldn't have to spell this out.

You seem to have trouble expressing yourself coherently and politely. The point you're struggling to make is that other countries don't build their cheaper subway systems do be accessible, and that makes up the whole difference in construction costs.

There's a lot of evidence against that. For example,90% of Barcelona's metro stations are accessible--getting there has called for retrofitting a lot of legacy stations, and building all new stations to be accessible--including the new, very, very deep stations on the L9/L10 lines.

Yet this line is still cheaper than anything in the US.

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/...st-comparison/


Do you seriously believe that London and Berlin aren't building new stations to be accessible? A lot of their older stations sure aren't, but neither are New York's.

[Qubert]

Just a thought:

How many transit agencies employ a "Universal Design Standard" for their systems so architects and engineers aren't reinventing the wheel for every new station stop? I always thought every major system should have an off the shelf station design ready to be duplicated with only location specific tweaks here and there with everything from ceiling heights, amount of escalators/elevators, platform widths, life system schematics, etc all ready pre-printed and ready to go....

[electricron]

I going to surprise some with my response, because I almost agree with everything BART has done. Every decision made along the way have really good engineering reasons behind them.

Richmond to San Jose is 53 miles or 85 kilometers long. it takes BART 5 minutes short of 2 hours to travel so far. Few metros have lines as long. Amtrak California trains on a parallel route and stopping at far fewer stations does so 10 minutes faster if on schedule. That's really not that bad for a metro rail to almost match an inter city rail on time over that distance. Why is it so fast?

They took their name seriously. Yes. BART is the Bay Area "Rapid" Transit, not Bay Area Transit (BAT). They made engineering decisions throughout to keep the system "rapid".
A) Not mixing operations with freight trains period, by using wider gauge tracks and full grade separations.
B) Avoiding at grade crossings to maintain full speed and reliability of service.
C) Larger spacing between stations than most metro lines to keep average train speeds higher.
D) Fewer stations serving many customers requires larger stations and station infrastructures.

Imagine how long it would take a street running light rail transit system to travel the same 53 miles. Let's use the Saint Paul's Metro Green Line as an example, street running with very frequent stations. The Green Line is 11 miles long, and it takes 50 minutes to ride.
Some math follows:
53/11 = 4.82
4.82 x 50 = 241
241/60 = 4 hours and 1 minute.

241/115 [5 minutes less than 2 hours]= 2.09 times longer.

So we can state BART system is twice as fast as a street running light rail system. Does that make it "rapid". I think so.

BART has been designed to be a High Speed "Metro" system much like High Speed "Intercity" trains using many of the same engineering techniques, like fully independent operations, grade separations, and larger station spacings. Yes it is more expensive to build relatively, but speed comes at a price.

For the cheapskates out there, Amtrak provides the Capitol Corridor service that parallels this BART run on freight owned tracks, 10 minutes faster than BART stopping at far fewer stations along the route. But they only provide 8 trains a day, compared to 4 trains each and every hour on BART. That's a significant difference in service being provided. And BART provides the same amount of service un many more lines as well, it is more than just this one line.

[Busy Bee]

^ Finally a comment that makes me want to have a beer with you.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

^ Finally a comment that makes me want to have a beer with you.

Well, I did leave off the fact in that earlier response that on a good day you can drive that same distance on I-880 in less than an hour - twice as fast as BART.
But that was not the intent of the earlier response - my intent was to point out the engineering decisions behind their project, not the political decision to build it.
In no way am I suggesting St. Paul should build other than the light rail system they built. There is a difference engineering task to face for a distance of 11 miles vs almost 60 miles. Not every solution works everywhere.