I've largely ignored the UTA FrontRunner. I don't ride it. It doesn't go where I need to go, at the times I need it to go places. It's a commuter rail, ferrying office works. It doesn't serve my transit oriented lifestyle. But not everyone is me, and transit riders come in many varieties.
The new (draft) WFRC-MAG long range transportation plan is out. And looking at transit, one of the things that really catches my eyes is the money being put into FrontRunner--extension, electrification, double-tracking. I'll admit all are worthy: a) a regional rail network needs to serve the region; b) It's a dirty secret that FrontRunner's diesel engines actually produce more pollution than the cars they replace; c) doubling tracking is strictly necessary for more frequent operations.
But a whole pile of articles I've been reading have me thinking about through-running regional rail (see end of post). In a nutshell, the 'Réseau Express Régional' (RER) works because Paris is polycentric. The center is historic, so they exiled all the new skyscrapers to the edge of historic Paris--literal Edge Cities. So when people commute to/from these edge cities, they do so using the RER to cross central Paris. Despite much hope, such an approach seems unlikely to work in NYC, because it has one central CBD.
But it makes me wonder if it might work in the Wasatch Front--that long skinny ribbon of urbanity west of the Wasatch Mountains. The biggest 'CBD' is SLC, but neither Provo nor Ogden are exactly tiny. So it's possible to imagine a transit network connecting all three, flowing through and across them. Not just a CRT, but a regional rail network.
My first objection would be: "We already have TRAX!". But when I look at the Long Range Plan, I see 'infill stations' at 1700 S. and 2700 S. Infill stations improve the local access, but reduce network access. Every station requires an additional 3 minutes, making every commuter 3 minutes longer. Mode-share is very time sensitive, so adding 6 minutes the commute for someone coming from Sandy may lose UTA riders. (Whether the new stations add enough riders/trips to offset that requires serious analysis). But, less us presume things do go that way: That the TRAX corridor becomes more urban, with a stop every mile, such that the entire corridor is within a half-mile of a Trax Station--a veritable Transit Oriented Corridor (TOC--see Cervero's article on it). If that happens, SOMETHING is needed to replace the high-speed regional access formerly provided by TRAX. And if I'm reading the planning right, the idea is to have FrontRunner fill that role: A RER ('Regional Electric Rail'), touching Trax at North Temple, at 6400 South, and (sort of) in Sandy. LRTP is also showing cross I-15 at 102nd south, to connect Trax to FrontRunner, with a shared corridor down to 135th. (While still on the map, I view extending the Draper line as a dead letter. Nothing but miles and miles of single family out that way.) The South Jordan FrontRunner station would be a reasonable terminus. But, given the pressure to reach the Point of the Mountain and prison site, I can't imagine them stopping there. Draper FrontRunner would be the next reasonable terminus for extending Trax, and would make Ebay happy (they were long-ago promised a train). Past that gets muddy--reconnecting to east-side rail would require jumping I-15 again (not cheap), and is highly dependent on what happens with Utah County Trax.
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