Tag Archives: Commuter Rail

The good and bad of Denver’s new airport transit line

Denver RTD A-Line map.

Denver RTD A-Line map.

Next time you fly into Denver, you’ll be able to hop on a train from the airport to downtown. There’s a lot to celebrate about this new transit line, and much to criticize. There’s plenty of effusive praise for Denver’s transit ambitions without much critical pushback in the popular press.

A few thoughts on the good and bad of the line and RTD’s rapidly expanding system, starting with the not-so-good.

  • This line is part of Denver’s large FasTracks system expansion. While ambitious in scope, many of the routing decisions are odd network choices. There’s a lot of reverse branching, use of freeway rights of way, and other opportunistic decisions to ease construction, but which may be regretted later.
  • FasTracks centers on Denver Union Station. DUS is a remarkable urban redevelopment project, but a huge missed opportunity in terms of transit operational design.
    • Union Station is now a stub-end terminal for regional rail trains, limiting the station’s capacity and preventing future intercity or regional rail use of the station.
    • Light rail trains stop 1,000 feet away from the regional trail platforms. The distance is creatively connected with an underground bus concourse, but the transfer environment is less than ideal – particularly given the almost-blank slate to work with.
    • Real estate development projects advanced before any understanding of the transit right of way needs, and have now forever closed those avenues for expansion. The real estate framework for expanding Denver’s downtown matured before the framework for transit expansion.
  • Rail service to Denver’s airport is important, but commentators often place too much emphasis on serving airports instead of overall improvements to the transit network. This is less true for Denver, given the systematic transit expansion as a part of FasTracks (and the network benefits therein).

 

Critiques aside, there’s a lot to praise with the airport line.

  • Frequent, all-day, electrified main-line rail service – much of it built in a greenfield right of way.
    • For all of the benefits of main-line rail as a means to offer rapid transit service, it’s great to see a project execute on those benefits
    • Electrification offers great promise for frequent transit – taking advantage of performance benefits from using electric multiple unit trains with quick acceleration, instead of diesel-powered peak-only ‘commuter’ trains.
    • Development of new regional rail transit lines along greenfield right-of-way opens up all kinds of planning possibilities for other regions.
  • The project demonstrates the benefits of risk-sharing public-private partnership deals. With the contractor responsible for long-term operating costs, their design efforts focused on the most efficient way to meet the parameters of the contract (all-day, frequent rapid transit service). For those reasons, the team embraced the electric commuter rail concept, opting for:
    • Mainline rail vehicles to better handle interactions with adjacent freight rail corridors and meet regulatory requirements
    • International standard electrification (25kV AC) to reduce the costs of substations while still providing the necessary performance
    • off-the-shelf procurement of a proven design (Silverliner V vehicles) to avoid development costs.

 

Renovating Penn Station as an institution, not a building

NYP Cuomo

Beware nostalgia for the old Penn Station. While the railroad station’s current iteration neither functions well nor provides an inspiring space, addressing these problems requires addressing the underlying issues of railroad governance, finance, and operations.

Writing in the New York Times, David Dunlap aims to demolish the myth of Penn Station’s demise as solely an act of civic vandalism. Penn Station’s decline was a symptom of major shifts in transportation finance, travel patterns, and urban development. Railroads were accustomed to their monopoly position and regulated accordingly.

With the rise of direct competitors for both intercity and commuter traffic from airlines and cars (both subsidized by the government), change was inevitable:

In “The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station,” Lorraine B. Diehl said the death knell first sounded in 1944, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law a bill to provide $1.5 billion in federal financing for new highways, including an interstate system.

It sounded again in 1947, when the Pennsy reported an operating loss for the first time in its long existence. One month later, in March, a United Air Lines DC-6 reached La Guardia Airport only 6 hours 47 minutes after it left Los Angeles.

It sounded again in 1949, when the railroads’ share of intercity passenger traffic fell below 50 percent. And again in 1956, when construction of the interstates began in earnest. And again in 1958, when National Airlines inaugurated domestic jet travel with a run between New York and Miami that took just 2 hours 15 minutes.

Intercity travel and freight were the most profitable business lines for railroads. Commuter trains provided some feed for longer distance trains, but were an otherwise marginal business. In reality, the business was in decline well before 1944; Ridership for transit of all forms declined during the Great Depression (along with the rapid expansion of suburbs and proliferation of the automobile), only propped up by travel restrictions during WWII.

Penn Station’s edifice was torn down because the economic model of American railroads, predicated on their monopoly on metropolitan mobility, collapsed. Looking to monetize their assets, developing their lucrative real estate seemed obvious. For Penn Central, it wasn’t enough to save the company. Still, the loss of the building draws most of our attention.

Even today, we tend to focus mostly on Penn Station as a place, rather than on the underlying tunnels, tracks, and organizations that operate them. Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled his reboot of the longstanding plans (with a throwback to Gov. Pataki and Pres. Bill Clinton) to redevelop Penn Station, complete with a rebranding.

The full presentation slide deck includes lots of flashy renderings of what’s possible, building off of the same basic concepts as before: relocating Amtrak functions to a new facility within the Farley Post Office building; removal of Madison Square Garden’s theater and a complete redevelopment of Penn Station’s concourses below.

There’s a lot to be said in marshaling the political will to get something done. Cuomo’s presentation doesn’t shy away from that ambition. But ambition alone isn’t enough. Given the challenges in executing complex projects, it’s not surprising to see figures like Robert Moses viewed favorably. But are you executing the right projects?

Slide #6 from Gov. Cuomo's presentation, complete with Robert Moses.

Slide #6 from Gov. Cuomo’s presentation, complete with Robert Moses.

Not only does the focus on the building itself miss the real capacity challenges for Penn Station’s infrastructure, it also elides over the very real challenges for operations and governance. Adrian Untermyer reminds us of the key governance challenges to success for any plan:

In 1970, one railroad controlled the transportation hub. After it went bankrupt, New York State took over trains to Long Island, New Jersey took over trains to the Garden State, and the Feds took on the rest…

Even with a reinvented station complex overhead, the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, and Amtrak will still share the mostly same tracks, cramped platforms, and underwater tunnels. It’s unlikely that decades of dysfunction will disappear after the ribbons are cut.

Finding effective governance solutions for both the physical station as well as the underlying railroads that use it is a much bigger challenge. During the monopoly era, before the creation of either the MTA or Amtrak out of the remnants of Penn Central, that kind of vertical integration clarified things. Current governance is muddled.

Lack of integration and coordination among various stakeholders isn’t a new problem. When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed the ARC project, some advocates celebrated the demise of a flawed project with the hope for a better one. ARC’s primary flaws stemmed from an inability for the key stakeholders to effectively coordinate investments. Instead of one railroad forcing coordination, Penn Station was a battle between three entities (Amtrak, NJ Transit, and NY’s MTA – each with different priorities and different leadership).

The unwillingness to share turf isn’t just a challenge for Penn Station, coordinating between two states and Amtrak; but even within the MTA. East Side Access, connecting the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Terminal is an extraordinarily expensive project, opting for a deep cavern terminal station under Manhattan instead of a potentially cheaper and more useful option that would’ve required better coordination and integration between the MTA’s own commuter railroads. Instead of tackling this issues, the MTA opted for the more expensive solution.

Integration isn’t easy. The MTA’s split personality for regional rail dates back to the differences between the PRR and NY Central railroads. The merged Penn Central couldn’t integrate; it’s not a surprise integration hasn’t happened without some larger outside incentive to do so. The past decade of airline industry consolidation in the US shows how hard this can be, even with incentives.

The real challenge isn’t in finding the right design for a new Penn Station, but in reforming the institutions that operate and govern our transit systems.

WMATA, the NTSB, and the FRA: or, what do you mean the Metro doesn’t count as a railroad?

FRA Type II Safety Glass in a WMATA rail car. Photo from nevermindtheend.

FRA Type II Safety Glass in a WMATA rail car. Photo from nevermindtheend.

Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board issued an urgent recommendation to the US Department of Transportation and the US Congress to re-classify WMATA to be regulated under the authority of the Federal Railroad Administration. The NTSB usually waits until their full report on an incident is complete to make recommendations. If the preliminary conclusions from a report warrant immediate action, they will issue an urgent recommendation – this recommendation falls into the urgent category. The NTSB’s reports are thorough, but usually not released quickly (the full report from WMATA’s June 2009 Fort Totten crash was approved in July 2010). There will likely be more recommendations in the NTSB’s final report.

Looking at the NTSB’s letter, there are two distinct conclusions:

  1. WMATA’s existing safety oversight is inadequate.
  2. The Federal Railroad Administration has the appropriate regulatory tools to address these inadequacies, and therefore should have safety oversight over WMATA.

The letter documents the numerous occassions the NTSB has asked for strengthened safety oversight: “In general, the NTSB investigations of WMATA found that although safety program plans were in place, they were not effectively implemented and overseen.”

The curious part is the specificity of the second recommendation. Instead of suggesting that the existing safety oversight authorities through the Federal Transit Administration be strengthened to include the kinds of tools available to the FRA, the NTSB instead recommended a dramatic shift. The NTSB’s previous investigations specifically recommended that Congress act to increase safety oversight for the Federal Transit Administration:

In the NTSB’s investigation of the June 22, 2009, WMATA accident near the Fort Totten station, we called for increased regulatory oversight of rail transit properties and recommended that the DOT seek the authority to provide safety oversight of rail fixed guideway transportation systems, including the ability to promulgate and enforce safety regulations and minimum requirements governing operations, track and equipment, and signal train control systems.

Unsatisfied with both the pace of progress as well as the likelihood of resolving this conundrum soon, the NTSB is recommending shifting WMATA to the FRA’s jurisdiction as the most expedient option. Neither the legislation to expand safety oversight under the FTA, nor the region’s plans to replace WMATA’s existing safety oversight committee with the Metro Safety Commission would rise to include the regulatory tools available to the FRA:

Based on testimony from representatives of the TOC and the FTA during the NTSB’s June 23, 2015, investigative hearing on the January 12, 2015, WMATA Metrorail accident, the NTSB further concludes that neither the regulatory changes the FTA can make as a result of MAP-21 nor the proposed creation of a Metro Safety Commission will likely resolve the deficiencies identified in safety oversight of WMATA.

The only rapid transit system under FRA regulation is the PATH system connecting New York and New Jersey. Only four rail rapid transit systems that cross state lines – WMATA, the PATCO Speedline between Philadelphia and New Jersey, Metrolink in St. Louis, and PATH.

The NTSB suggests that PATH’s regulation under the FRA is due to the cross-jurisdictional nature of the service, but this doesn’t seem correct. In the NTSB’s accompanying blog post for the letter, they make the case that other transit agencies are regulated under the FRA (even though the use of the plural here is incorrect – there is only PATH):

There is precedent for the FRA oversight of WMATA that we have recommended because there are some transit agencies in this country that are currently under FRA safety oversight. For example, the FRA provides direct oversight over the New York and New Jersey PATH system instead of using state safety oversight agencies.

PATH’s regulatory jurisdiction is an anachronism. Because PATH previously shared a short section of track with the Pennsylvania Railroad, it was also considered a railroad. And while it remains under FRA jurisdiction, it only operates as a rapid transit system under several waivers that grandfather the system from FRA regulations aimed at mainline freight and passenger railroads.

Even with waivers, the impact of this unique set of regulations is substantial:

Before each run, PATH workers must test a train’s air brakes, signals and acceleration, Mike Marino, PATH’s deputy director, said in a telephone interview. When a train gets to its terminus, workers repeat the test.

In addition, every 90 days all of PATH’s rail cars undergo a three-day inspection at a facility in Harrison, New Jersey. Brakes, lights, communications, heating and air conditioning, signals and odometers are all checked, Marino said.

Many of these FRA regulations carry over from past generations of railroading. They’re extraordinarily detrimental to the progress of high-speed rail and passenger rail. This memo gives some regulatory background to the FRA’s role. It specifically discusses light rail transit operations and the potential for shared use of mainline rail tracks (as PATH used to do), and by doing so highlights exactly how many FRA regulations make little sense (by mutual agreement between the FRA and transit operators) for rail transit operations. Numerous waivers of these regulatory requirements would be required from the start.

Like PATH, WMATA is not a mainline railroad. It’s not hard to understand why the NTSB would think that the FRA’s authority to inspect, fine, and shut down non-compliant operators is necessary; but those authorities also come with a rulebook that won’t make much sense to apply to WMATA.

Ultimately, the division between what is under the FRA’s jurisdiction is almost entirely arbitrary:

FRA will presume that an operation is a commuter railroad if there is a statutory determination that Congress considers a particular service to be commuter rail. For example, in the Northeast Rail Service Act of 1981, (3), Congress listed specific commuter authorities. If that 45 U.S.C. 1104 presumption does not apply, and the operation does not meet the description of a system that is presumptively urban rapid transit (see below), FRA will determine whether a system is commuter or urban rapid transit by analyzing all of the system’s pertinent facts. FRA is likely to consider an operation to be a commuter railroad if:

  • The system serves an urban area, its suburbs, and more distant outlying communities in the greater metropolitan area,
  • The system’s primary function is moving passengers back and forth between their places of employment in the city and their homes within the greater metropolitan area, and moving passengers from station to station within the immediate urban area is, at most, an incidental function, and
  • The vast bulk of the system’s trains are operated in the morning and evening peak periods with few trains at other hours.

Examples of commuter railroads include Metra and the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District in the Chicago area; Virginia Railway Express and MARC in the Washington area; and Metro-North, the Long Island Railroad, New Jersey Transit, and the Port Authority Trans Hudson (PATH) in the New York area.

Despite PATH’s history, it’s regulated by the FRA because Congress said so. The three specific criteria listed don’t particularly apply to PATH, or WMATA, or any other rapid transit system (nor some mainline rail systems that offer a high level of all-day passenger service).

A few things to note:

The NTSB can only make recommendations. The NTSB is not a regulatory agency, they are charged only with investigating safety-related transportation incidents. Their independence is by design – any regulatory agency must consider both costs and benefits to a regulation, while the NTSB’s purpose is to conduct independent investigations and offer their recommendations solely on the basis of improving safety.

This particular recommendation is for the USDOT to seek reclassification of WMATA as a ‘commuter railroad’ via congressional action. Perhaps in considering any action, Congress might consider addressing the other shortcomings in transit safety oversight.

Despite the FRA’s impact on PATH operations, it’s worth considering if additional safety inspections might help improve WMATA’s operational discipline. The FTA’s Safety Management Inspection report (the first such safety report for the FTA, under the new safety role authorized by Congress as a part of MAP-21 but deemed insufficient by the NTSB) identified several shortcomings in WMATA’s procedures and practices. Stronger safety oversight might help address those problems; the question is if the FRA is the right regulatory body and if their rulebook is the right one to use.

Towards a DC S-Bahn, part 2

VRE train at Franconia-Springfield. CC image from nevermindtheend

DC’s existing (yet fragmented) commuter rail network is a huge low-hanging fruit for expanded and improved transit service (see this previous post). Writing at Pedestrian Observations, Alon Levy makes the statement that nobody likes riding North American commuter rail.  Alon compares two locations in New York that have both subway and commuter rail service – and in each case, the subway ride wins a much larger share of riders despite often faster rides on commuter rail.

Though the data isn’t easily available for the commuter rail operators, the differences in ridership are substantial.  The Rockville Metro station alone has more boardings than the entire MARC Brunswick line.

Alon identifies four reasons – a poorly structured network that does not serve non-downtown destinations; poorly designed transfers, often with financial penalty; cost differential and a lack of an integrated transit fare structure across all modes; and low frequency service.

Addressing the DC region specifically, some of these are undoubtedly true.  A lack of through-routing prevents serving non-downtown destinations on the other side of Union Station MARC could easily serve dense employment clusters in Crystal City and Alexandria, VRE could offer service through to Rockville, Silver Spring, Fort Meade and others. Likewise, train frequency isn’t good – structuring it more like urban rapid transit could be a huge improvement.

Alon’s four points open the door for a comparison between Metro and the area’s commuter rail services. The commuter rail network shares several stops with Metro. Shared stops are as follows (stations in bold are those along the shared track segment of a conceptual through-routed network):

Maryland:

  • Rockville
  • Silver Spring
  • College Park
  • Greenbelt
  • New Carrollton

DC:

  • Union Station
  • L’Enfant Plaza

Virginia:

  • Crystal City
  • King Street
  • Franconia-Springfield

While transfers aren’t particularly easy, some of the physical connections aren’t terrible.  Some stations share the same basic platform access (New Carrollton), while others easily could do so (King Street) with a little construction.  The Crystal City connection is a bit of a stretch – it involves several blocks of walking, either along Crystal City’s streets or through the warren of tunnels and underground retail space.  L’Enfant Plaza does not have an actual connection to the Metro platforms, just adjacency.

Financial transfer penalties are another story.  MARC offers an add-on TLC pass (at the cost of $102/month on top of the cost of a monthly MARC pass) that allows for unlimited use of local transit (rail and bus) in both DC and Baltimore; VRE offers a similar product with a similarly-large surcharge per month.

Using MARC’s $102 per month figure, and assuming 40 last-mile Metro trips per month, that would require a minimum of a $2.55 peak fare to make the pass break even on commute trips alone (roughly the equivalent of a ~15 minute Red Line ride from Union Station to Van Ness).

The fare structures aren’t entirely integrated either, though the disparities aren’t as large as in Alon’s example from New York.  Thanks to Metro’s time-and-distance based fare structure, you don’t find the same disparity of a flat-fare subway system up against a graduated fare commuter rail system.  The example of Far Rockaway shows the disparity – a subway ride to Midtown is a flat $2.25, while the LIRR to Penn Station is $10.00 at the peak, $7.25 off peak.

Compare that to the single ride fares for MARC/VRE and Metro – all fares to Union Station as a point of comparison.

Maryland (Penn Line fares, Camden and Brunswick line fares; Metro fares from Union Station):

  • Station – MARC fare to Union – Metro fare to Union
  • Rockville – 5.00 – 5.75 (time: 35-42 mins via MARC; 34 mins via Metro)
  • Silver Spring – 4.00 – 3.35
  • College Park – 4.00 – 3.65
  • Greenbelt – 4.00 – 4.30
  • New Carrollton – 4.00 – 4.20

Virginia (VRE fares – single ride price used; Metro fares from Union Station)

  • Station – VRE fare to Union – Metro fare to Union
  • Crystal City – 6.20 – 2.60
  • King Street – 6.20 – 3.70
  • Franconia-Springfield – 6.80 – 5.60 (time: 36-41 mins via VRE; 45 mins via Metro)

MARC fares are all rather close to Metro; VRE fares have a different problem of the LIRR-Subway comparison at Far Rockaway; the longest  possible competing trip (from Franconia-Springfield) has the smallest fare differential, it’s the shorter trips that are out of whack (a one-station VRE ride from L’Enfant to Union Station costs $5.55 on VRE, compared to the minimum Metro rail fare of $2.10).  This structure obviously reflect’s VRE’s role as an AM-peak-inbound, PM-peak-outbound operation, but certainly discourages usage within the core of the region for rapid transit.

Commuter rail isn’t always more expensive, either.  Looking at Rockville, (which, again, draws more boardings than the entire Brunswick line) a monthly pass to Union Station costs you $125 with the various discounts, while 40x trips per month via Metro at $5.75 a pop totals $230 ( !!! ); a weekly MARC pass totals $37.50 compared to $57.50 for ten peak-hour rides on Metro.  A person who was dropping $230 a month on Metro fares could easily purchase a $125/month MARC pass, add on the $102/month TLC pass and still get unlimited Metro usage off-peak for about the same cost.

A unified fare structure would likely involve lowering fares within the inner VRE territory (further integration would assume a single fare table for a through-running merged S-Bahn-like operation between MARC and VRE) to better mirror the various Metro fares for similar distances.  I would imagine this to be an easier organizational lift than, say, trying to bridge the gap in peak fares at Far Rockaway between $2.25 and $10.00.

The biggest difference in usage (thereby indicating usefulness) would appear to be frequency.  MARC’s Penn Line features the most frequent service, and even that is 20-40 minutes between trains at best during the peak, hourly trains at mid-day, and longer headways in the evening – plus, no weekend service.  Frequency is freedom, after all.  Thus, the purpose of any effort for through-running commuter rail services should be to help the transition of DC’s commuter rail network into a frequent S-Bahn-like network of interlined rapid transit services.

Towards a DC S-Bahn

S-Bahn logo. From wiki.

This week, Greater Greater Washington has run a series of posts on the hurdles to implementing through-routed commuter rail services in DC. The technical reasons include many basic incompatibilities between the region’s two commuter railroads (MARC and VRE), ranging from type of locomotion to platform height, as well as the infrastructural shortcomings of DC’s rail infrastructure to handle high frequency transit-like operations.

Lost in the wash, however, is the reason to do this.  The reasons are two-fold: First, through-routed service expands the transit network relatively inexpensively, offering mobility benefits to current and future riders.  Second, such a service (and the technical changes required to implement it) help solve some of the other challenges of DC’s commuter rail network (such as insufficient storage capacity at Union Station for trains to layover mid-day). Through-running is both a means to an end as well as an end itself.

This isn’t exactly a new concept, as it has been raised in numerous places over the years:

Plus the southern intentions of intercity rail:

CSX’s plans for increasing freight traffic will also mean added capacity through DC, with implications for passenger rail.

None of these plans hints at even the possibility of the kind of S-Bahn integration potential that through-routing unlocks.

The goal should be to turn the core of DC’s commuter rail network into a system like Germany’s S-Bahns (touched on previously here and here).  David Alpert essentially suggested the same thing with his conception of the ‘Metro Express.’  The level of service would be more like rapid transit than commuter rail.  The geographic extent might not be as expansive as the current commuter rail network (there’s no sense in running rapid transit to Martinsburg, WV) but those outer extensions could easily be serviced by a service that mirrors today’s commuter rail.  The core of the network (say, to Woodbridge in the south, Manassas in the west, Germantown or even Frederick to the north, and Baltimore to the east) would see higher frequencies, through-routed service, and all-day, full week service.

One common characteristic of S-Bahns is the use of interlining and shared tracks in the core of the system (this Wiki diagram illustrates), where interlining produces short headways on the shared portion while the outer parts receive less frequent service due to the branching of the network. The three MARC lines feeding DC, each running on 30 minute headways would combine for 6 tph in the shared segment (Union Station to Alexandria).

VRE’s timetable shows Alexandria-L’Enfant at about 17 minuntes; Alexandria-Union Station at about 25 minutes.   There’s room for massive improvement here – Metro’s trip planner shows King Street to Union Station (Yellow to Red) as 20 minutes on Yellow, 4 minutes on Red; King Street to L’Enfant Plaza is the same 17 minutes on the Yellow line.

Give a DC S-Bahn transit-like service and that can be reduced.  Electric multiple unit trains would accelerate faster; level boarding and more frequent service would shorten station dwells; etc. Then, the commuter rail infrastructure would function as a key part of the region’s rapid transit network.

 

Rail transport links – carry that weight

CC image from Rob Swatski

Some illustrative links from the world of rail transportation:

From Reason and Rail: Why the freight railroads will never electrify.

This is the problem which freight electrification faces. While electrification would represent a lessening in fuel expenses, especially as the price of oil is expected to rise another 20-30% over the long-term, this is a fairly minor savings for the railroads.

Some discussion in the comments asking if government subsidies would change the calculus.  It might, but perhaps the better question is about ensuring common usage of key track segments between commuter and freight traffic, between double-stacked containers and electric multiple unit passenger trains.

Why commuter railroads will electrify:

Firstly, operational costs have a far greater prominence than do capital costs owing to the nature of government agencies as opposed to private agencies. An investment that is hard to justify for a freight operator becomes much easier for a public agency that is receiving “free” funding from another agency and in the process is able to reduce its operational costs to those to whom it is immediately responsible. In such a way does spending hundreds of millions of dollars to save a few million per year become an attractive financial option.

More importantly, however, is the fact that electric trains accelerate much faster, and electric multiple units, compared to a diesel locomotive hauling several rail cars, accelerate like a bat out of hell.

The upshot of this is that more time is spent at higher speeds, reducing the time penalty for any individual train stop and greatly increasing the average speed, making it more attractive to travelers and increasing its patronage, and political support, as a result.

Alon Levy notes in the comments that commuter lines are talking about electrifying only a fraction of the track that would be required for a transcontinental freight route.  Greater payoff and a smaller up-front investment makes sense.

Some confounding factors: speed and weight.  Alon Levy takes note of three challenges in meshing fast passenger trains with heavy but slow freight – a conflict inherent in mixing passenger and freight traffic.  They are 1) schedule conflicts, including the challenges of meshing disparate speeds together; 2) different track geometries required, particularly superelevation (e.g banking) of the tracks; 3) damage to tracks inflicted by heavy trains.

Another confounding factor: US regulations.  Systemic Failure takes note of a recent US railcar procurement.

The FRA is soliciting bids for a $551 million contract for 130 bi-level railcars. As a condition for the contract, the railcars must be manufactured entirely with American steel and components. If you do the math, that comes to 4.2 million dollars each – double the global market price for a bi-level car.

In other words, the FRA is pissing away a quarter billion dollars. Imagine all the projects that might have been done with $250 million. Imagine all the jobs that might have been created with that money. I’m talking real jobs — not bureaucrats enforcing Made-in-America rules. Jobs like installing new PTC signaling, repairing bridges, or expanding the transit network. You know, things that have tangible benefit to riders.

The really crazy thing is that there is a glut in the passenger railcar market. The last thing needed is yet another product (a hopelessly primitive one at that). And since few operators besides Amtrak will be interested in this railcar, a lot of design and development will just go to waste.

Our regulations prohibit purchasing rolling stock off the shelf from other nations, while our history of divestment in passenger rail has largely dried up rail car manufacturing in this country.  These regulations also make the adoption of the faster electric traction commuter trains mentioned above more expensive and more difficult.   They also mandate inferior performance:

Now compare that to the example of the FRA compliant Colorado Railcar as given in theFairmount DMU study. With two single level multiple units and two trailers, Colorado takes 123 seconds to accelerate to a speed of 60 miles per hour. The Talent, however, has blazed past Colorado, reaching 95 km/h (~60mph) in 40 seconds. Indeed, by the time that Colorado has reached 60 miles per hour, the Bombardier Talent has reached the FRA’s normal speed limit of 130 km/h and been cruising at top speed for 50 seconds.

The implication here isn’t just about speed for speed’s sake – the better acceleration makes it easier for the trains to keep on schedule, improving reliability and cutting travel time.

Links: The new American Dream

House for rent. CC image from Sean Dreilinger

Foreclosed sprawl – the next frontier of renting?  The New York Times looks at the practice of firms buying up foreclosed, cookie cutter sprawl housing at relatively low prices with the idea of renting these houses out to tenants.

As an inspector for the Waypoint Real Estate Group, Mr. Hladik takes about 20 minutes to walk through each home, noting worn kitchen cabinets or missing roof tiles. The blistering pace is necessary to keep up with Waypoint’s appetite: the company, which has bought about 1,200 homes since 2008 — and is now buying five to seven a day — is an early entrant in a business that some deep-pocketed investors are betting is poised to explode.

With home prices down more than a third from their peak and the market swamped with foreclosures, large investors are salivating at the opportunity to buy perhaps thousands of homes at deep discounts and fill them with tenants. Nobody has ever tried this on such a large scale, and critics worry these new investors could face big challenges managing large portfolios of dispersed rental houses. Typically, landlords tend to be individuals or small firms that own just a handful of homes.

Cities usually have more rentals, and for good reason.  Apartments have common structural elements and provide for economies of scale in managing multiple units.  Applying this to large-scale single family detached homes is a different and challenging model, but a seemingly inevitable result of the decline in home prices in these areas once built on speculation.

It’s also an example of housing market filtering in action.

This isn’t quite what the concept of filtering is about… Cap’n Transit disputes the concept of filtering, noting that such shifts are not permanent.  However, I don’t think anyone was asserting they were.  Filtering is a process, a description of the market responding to shifting demand.  It is not a description of an end state.

It’s true that most of those buildings were not well-maintained, but the causation is more likely the other way around: the landlords didn’t put a lot of money into them because they didn’t bring in much rent. So why were the rents so cheap? I’m guessing that there were several related factors: racism, city services, crime, noise, fads and the suburban ponzi scheme.

I don’t think any of those really disproves the filtering concept.  Filtering doesn’t really describe causation, just the correlation – as demand drops (and therefore the potential rent income), so to does maintenance, and the units on the margins will filter down to more “affordable” prices. Each of those factors listed at the end could be construed, one way or another, as an influence on demand.

The rest of the Cap’ns post on the politics and emotions of gentrification and filtering up are spot on, however.

The fiscal benefits of density: While renting out old McMansions might be a challenge due to diseconomies of scale, Emily Badger looks at Asheville, NC and makes the fiscal case for density and urban infill development.

The whole idea is pretty simple. But it’s sort of baffling that we haven’t been looking at our land this way for years. Cities, Minicozzi laments, are woefully ignorant about exactly which types of neighborhoods and development put the most financial strain on public coffers and which kick in the most money. This is why Minicozzi has been deploying every metaphor he can think of – cash crops, gas tanks, french fries! – to beat home the math.

Fundamentally, this is the same concept as the Geoffrey West observation of urban agglomeration and the inherent efficiency it offers.

How to make use of the reverse commute: Perhaps someone should inform various secondary job centers along transit lines of their fiscal potential.  Alon Levy looks at what’s required to make for successful secondary CBDs along rail transit lines, and what’s wrong with our current land use around suburban stations:

But really, the kind of development that’s missing around suburban train stations in the US is twofold. First, the local development near the stations is not transit-oriented, in the sense that big job and retail centers may be inconvenient to walk to for the pedestrian. And second, the regional development does not follow the train lines, but rather arterial roads, or, in cities with rapid transit, rapid transit lines…

In both cases, what’s missing is transportation-development symbiosis. Whoever runs the trains has the most to gain from locating major office and retail development, without excessive parking, near the train stations. And whoever owns the buildings has the most to gain from running trains to them, to prop up property values. This leads to the private railroad conglomerates in Tokyo, and to the Hong Kong MTR.

Commenter Jim notes how the DC region has a decent track record in this regard with Metro, but not with commuter rail:

The experience in Washington has been that when a Metrorail station (either an extension or infill) is proposed, the planners tear up their existing plans and write new ones for the area immediately surrounding the new station. Metrorail-catalysed TOD is a well understood and appreciated phenomenon. But no-one cares about commuter rail. Planners don’t assume that commuter rail stations will change anything, so don’t change their existing plans to accommodate them.

That’s the disconnect you have to fix.

Indeed – creating that symbiosis requires solving a bit of a chicken-egg problem.  Still, some opportunities exist in the DC region.  New Carrollton jumps to mind, both for Metro access for DC reverse commutes, as well as its mid-line location on the MARC Penn line.  However, the challenge there is on the development side, not the transit service side.

Parking requirements matter: Downtown LA’s revival based on adaptive re-use might not have been possible without changes to LA’s minimum parking requirements.  Making a place built pre-requirement conform is unnecessary, and shows how influential and destructive the requirements can be.  It also speaks to the ability of changing regulations to make doing the right thing the path of least resistance:

Passed by the L.A. City Council in — yes — 1999 and at first applied only to Downtown, ARO gave the go-ahead for the conversion of historic and other older — and often under-used, under-appreciated or even abandoned — office buildings into residences. ARO was expanded in 2003 into various other parts of the city.

“[The Ordinance] provides for an expedited approval process and ensures that older and historic building are not subjected to the same zoning and code requirements that apply to new construction,” reads text on the city’s Office of Historic Resources site.

Fitting in with the econourbanist theory about reduced land use regulation allowing for the market to better address issues of supply, the response was impressive:

During an almost thirty-year period beginning in 1970, Downtown Los Angeles gained a grand total of 4,300 units in housing stock.

Then, between 1999 and 2008, Downtown gained at least 7,300 housing units just from long-term vacant buildings.

That said, it’s not like LA completely abandoned these regulations:

Shoup’s article notes that pre-ARO, developers were required per each housing unit to provide two or more parking spaces. Those spaces, Shoup emphasizes in his piece, were required to be on-site.

Post-ARO, Shoup’s piece says that the average number of on-site parking spaces fell to 0.9 in those converted, previously vacant buildings. Including off-site parking, the number was still 1.3 spaces per unit. That’s a 65% drop in required parking spaces in an area where many residents already self-select to reside in for reasons unrelated to having a multi-car garage.

Nearly one space per unit is still a lot of parking.  Granted, this is LA that we’re talking about.  The flexibility to meet that requirement off-site (flexibility likely required to make the adaptive reuse of historic buildings possible) speaks to the benefits of allowing such changes as a matter of right.

The point about residents self-selecting to live in such conditions is key, contrary to common NIMBY complaints – no one is forcing Angelenos to move in at gunpoint.

Different thoughts on transit service metrics: Jarrett Walker looks at San Francisco’s transit speed (same as it was 100 years ago, or slower) and offers thoughts on various metrics and the need to think about the reliability of the network as a whole.

My own work in this area has always advocated a stronger, more transit-specific approach that begins not with the single delayed line, but rather with the functioning of an entire network.  Don’t just ask “how fast should this line be?” which tends to degenerate into “What can we do to make those forlorn buses move a little faster without upsetting anyone?”  Instead, ask “What travel time outcomes do we need across this network?”  Or turn it around: How much of the city needs to be within 30 minutes of most people?  — a question that leads to those compelling Walkscore travel time maps, which are literally maps of individual freedom.

Around the horn

Minneapolis

Back in my hometown, yesterday marked the first day of revenue service for the Northstar commuter rail line between Big Lake and downtown Minneapolis.  This is Minneapolis’ first heavy rail commuter line, which will look for a quick expansion to the originally planned terminus of St. Cloud, MN.

Yonah Freemark offers his assessment at The Transport Politic.

The $320 million would have been better spent on promoting transit that can be used round-the-clock by people who have a choice not to use cars — something that’s made virtually impossible by the design of Northstar’s schedule and stations. With several other peak-period-only commuter lines under consideration, however, Metro Transit will likely spend more on projects such as this before it decides to pull back.

One note – that capital cost number also includes the money to extend the Hiawatha Light Rail line from the previous downtown terminus at the Warehouse District to the new terminus at the new Target Field.  When all is said and done, that will be a great transit hub for the city, and considering that the project’s cost includes this LRT extension, the numbers look more favorable.

Service can always be increased at later dates.  Given the line’s terminus at the Minnesota Twins’ new stadium, I’m sure we’ll see ballgame service in the relatively near future.  Commenters also note that Minneapolis has a much stronger downtown employment core than other cities with new, struggling commuter lines.

MinnPost‘s excellent article (as per usual) from Steve Berg also notes the history of rail in the area:

“As far as I can tell, the Twin Cities probably had the largest commuter rail network in the U.S. to totally disappear,” said Aaron Isaacs, Minnesota’s foremost railroad historian. During the peak of local railroading in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as many as 15 commuter lines spread outward from the two downtowns, most of them from St. Paul’s Union Depot or Minneapolis’ Great Northern and Milwaukee Road stations. By the mid 1880s, three competing railroads offered trains over three different routes every hour between the two downtowns, Isaacs said, 74 trains in all.

Commuter trains also ran on a dozen suburban routes:

• From downtown St. Paul to White Bear Lake, Lake Elmo, Stillwater, St. Paul Park, South St. Paul, Inver Grove, North St. Paul, St. Anthony Park, New Brighton, Inver Grove and Taylors Falls.

• From downtown Minneapolis to Mendota, Wayzata, Hutchinson, St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Excelsior, Edina, Savage, Lakeville and Northfield.

At one point, four companies competed for passengers between both downtowns and Lake Minnetonka. Special trains to the State Fair and Fourth of July celebrations were also offered.

By the 1890s, electrified interurban streetcars began displacing the steam-powered commuter trains. Still the trains lasted through World War I and into the late 1920s before the Great Depression spelled their demise. A few stragglers lingered into the 1940s, Isaacs said, notably the gas-electric powered Dan Patch trains between Minneapolis and Northfield and the Luce Line trains between Minneapolis, Wayzata and Hutchinson. But by 1948, commuter trains were all gone.

Welcome back to the fold, Minneapolis. With all that old right of way sitting around, there should be more commuter lines in your future.

Denver

The crown jewel of Denver’s ambitious FasTracks project will be a revitalized and repurposed Union Station.

Denver Union Station

Denver Union Station - Photo by Author

Recently, they’ve released the 60% design for the transit hub and redevelopment project.  A PDF of the presentation is available here.  The project will link LRT platforms and Commuter Rail platforms via a 2 block long underground tunnel that will also serve as the regional bus concourse.

DenverUnionStation1

General Development Plan

Transit Infrastructure

Transit Infrastructure

Transit Architecture

Transit Architecture

It’s a cool document, well worth a look to see what a city with a developing transit system (not just line-by-line on a piecemeal basis) is thinking of for a hub.

Los Angeles

Out in LA, they’ve opened up the Gold Line extension into East LA.  Jarrett Walker notes many of the line’s shortcomings, and how they’ll inevitably be blamed on the “planners.”  Why is this line not a subway?

Ah, those nasty cruel “transportation planners”!  Sorry, but the answer to “why” is not “the planners decided …” unless your main goal as a journalist is to instill feelings of ignorant helplessness in your readers. Planners and political leaders made these decisions for a reason, and that reason is the real answer to the question.

Us planners can never seem to do anything right in the minds of some, however, and Jarret put out another post talking about the nexus of planning ideals and political realities:

In the end, I completely understand the frustrations surrounding this project, and agree that it probably will not really begin to show results until it’s flows through downtown as part of the Regional Connector plan.  It may be that the political pressure to put some kind of rail transit into East Los Angeles led to a project that will turn out to be premature and inadequate.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rapid transit subway extension proposed into this same area, perhaps under Chavez, in the next few decades.

Still, understanding how difficult rail transit development is in Los Angeles, I do think MTA and their partners in city and county government deserve a few days of good feeling for having gotten something done.

Nothing’s ever easy. It’s worth remembering that. The warts of the two newly opened projects show that here.  Even Denver’s Union Station has had to scale things back, with FasTracks facing some financial problems and the Station’s plans scrapping underground Light Rail and Commuter Rail platforms in favor of cheaper alignments.