An American 'union station' are a worst-case outcome

 An American 'union station' are a worst-case outcome - a traditional head station for multiple non-connecting railroad companies. Even after our commuter roads fell into public ownership, we kept the same operating paradigm, reinforced by station architecture that makes through-running difficult to impossible.

Passenger Rail and urban rail

When I started out in transportation consulting, I couldn't understand why the commuter rail and light rail couldn't just share track. (Especially baffling in Utah, where the same track that ran TRAX by day ran freight rail by night). 

I still sometimes find the division between passenger rail and urban transit kind of quirky. As a transit user, commuter rail is just another form of transit, a commuter bus on rails--lousy frequency but higher speeds. But as an operator, those are two unlike things: one is a railroad, and one is not. Partially, it's regulatory: railroads fall under the FRA, urban transit falls under the FTA[2], and the two have different standards.  But it's also historical, a matter of convergent evolution. Railroads start with steam engines, urban transit with the horse drawn coaches. 

My memory has it in Europe that the regional rail systems don't so much end as they peter out. The further out stations get fewer trains per day. (Less active station inline, also-not every train stops at every station). Which can be nice: it's possible to develop passenger rail into commuter rail simply by increasing frequency. Ie: There is an Amtrak train in California with more daily trains than most commuter rail systems. And hence to build a regional rail system by increasing headway further and running it outside of peak hours. The NJ-NY PATH train has followed that path to quite a peak: 15m headway, including subway sections[1]. 

There isn't really a division (technologically speaking), between passenger, commuter, and regional rail systems, as far as right of way is concerned. There are certainly operational differences in the cars used: different journey lengths require different amenities. A seat acceptable for an hours ride isn't for 8 hours. And long-distance journeys require things like outlets, reclining seats, a bathroom, a dining car, etc.  

Part of the confusion comes from legacy metro systems: in an urban context, the only way to get a railroad through a street grid is to either put it on an elevated or in a subway [1] . So some of the first 'subways' are just steam trains run underground (which is why some NYC subways have steam grates). But at the same time, STREET RAILWAYS are also being put into tunnels, via a sort of convergent evolution. (Stage-coach --> horse-drawn omnibus --> trolley->subway). That streetcars could also (safely) travel much faster underground made their operations more railroad like, and in turn required more railroad-like geometric design. 

Muddying the waters are inter-urbans. The supply of railroads had been overbuilt, truck freight on highways was a growing competitor, and there were some under-used railways available for conversion into a sort of railway/trolley highbred, running as a railway outside of cities, and as a trolley within it. Functionally an early light rail. 

Further muddying the brew is BART and WMATA: A Tomorrow-Land reinvention of urban mass transit, with more widely spaced rails, operating as a railroad in the suburbs, and as a metro in the city center (underground with widely spaced stations). 

But their is a well-maintained regulatory distinction, in terms of vehicles: heavy rail and light rail, and it has to do with crash standards. Since passenger rail sometimes shares ROW with freight railroads, the cars have to be designed to withstand crashes with heavier vehicles. While 'light' rail vehicles are much lighter and less sturdy. ('Light' is relative--your standard light rail vehicle can still shred the heaviest passenger car like it was an aluminum can).

[1] Indeed the whole subway/overground distinction is kind of a humbug--trains run best on flat/level, and the ROW gets built to reflect that, regardless if the undulations of the terrain means that results in the ROW being underground or overground. Plenty of subways have overground and/or elevated sections. 

[2] Originally the UMTA - Urban Mass Transit Administration. Original name clearly established what it wasn't about: non-mass transit (taxis, jitneys) or rural transit (stages, coach buses). 

FrontRunner Double-tracking and electrification

I've generally been negative regarding FrontRunner double-tracking and electrification. Partially because for most of my riding life, it's been an hourly commuter rail with PnR access. Not real useful for those living the car-free or car-less lifestyle. More recently I realized what double-tracking and electrification would do: Transform FrontRunner into something much more like the PATH train. Viz: an electrified heavy-rail system with (potentially) 15 frequencies. FrontRunner was built on the cheap (not a criticism), including a lot of single track, so in many segments the only place two trains can pass each other is at stations. So one train has to wait for the other, so if one train is late, the other train is made late. It's also a diesel train, so the amount of torque it can produce is limited, and hence how fast it can accelerate. (Diesel trains are great for long distances--for cheaper than stringing catenary for the whole distance, and rolling-friction efficiency of trains aside, a better option than carrying batteries the whole way). FrontRunner is also the only way the whole Wasatch Front can be on one train system. TRAX is great, but it's light rail, which means it can't share track with freight trains, which means it's limited to being on it's own ROW. (TRAX does some 'time separation', which is why the blue line will never have an 'after hours' train home for people who want to drink and not-drive.)

Rail to Logan?

North Carolina (barring Charlotte) lacks rail transit. But they do have state sponsored Amtrak, the Piedmont service. Makes me reflect on commuter rail and passenger rail. In Europe, the two represent a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Inter-regional passenger trains and commuter trains share the same track, just at different frequencies.

Utah has FrontRunner, running from Provo to Ogden. And it faces regular calls to extend FrontRunner, even unto Logan (Utah's other Metro region). Efforts to extend FrontRunner north haven't really worked out--simply not enough demand. But there might be enough demand for something less than the hourly commuter rail frequency, but something more like state sponsored Amtrak. There is an existing rail line between Ogden and Logan, it is very indirect, running an S-curve around the mountains.There is also an existing highway (HWY-91) that runs directly between Brigham City and Logan. So it would be very difficult for the train to compete with driving.But there might be a demand for passenger service regardless, for the non-driving population--Logan is home to Utah State University, with 27,000 students.

That said, that said, if it will be feasible for rail, it should be feasible for Commuter Express Buses.  And if it’s worth $100m in rail investment, it’s worth $100m of asphalt investment in dedicated lanes. (No implication that 100% of the lane need to be dedicated--just the most congested section). 

I mapped all the commuter rail in the United States. Take a look.

I made a map of commuter rail in the United States. Admittedly, it's not as nice as the one at  TransportPolitic.com, but at least on mine you can click 'download as KML' and use the data.

Commuter Rail Musings

Reading a fair bit about commuter rails for work, getting a bit more in-depth than simple curiosity can furnish time for.

First off: The Darwin awards are numerous. The number of people who attempt to drive around lowered railroad gates is staggering. It's a reliable cause of death, as the railroad changes from use by low-speed freight to higher-speed commuter rail. Made worse when some grade crossings aren't signalized, and lack gates. One sad story was of a woman whose car stalled on the tracks, and the sat there, turning the key, until the train hit her.

Second, I find the contracting of commuter rail operations to be a bit obscene. It's like leasing a car--it lowers the up-front and daily cost, but at the end of the day, the purchaser is left with nothing. When talking about a major public investment, this seems a bit....odd. It makes sense in a 'let's try this out' sort of sense, but that implies a possibility of failure. And if leasing the track, it implies that the rolling stock and maintenance facility ought also be leased.

Third, maintaining track is expensive. An off the cuff number for a freight railroad noted that $10,000 per year per track mile was a reasonable estimate. Think of that--60 miles of track implies $600,000 a year, just to maintain to (far lower) freight standards.

FrontRunner - on the perils of commuter rail

This morning finds me less than enraptured of FrontRunner. Not because what it is not (fast, frequent, reliable), but rather because of what it is: Commuter rail. Read somewhere (likely Twitter) criticising transit agencies for dumping billion of dollars into creating high-cost but lightly ridden suburban commuter rail networks. Today, looking at Denver, this sort of strikes home.


In a related vein, the Transport Politic had a good article up on "What Kind of Network to Build?" The relevant part of the article was this:

"Denver, Minneapolis, and Portland are developing primarily radial networks, focusing on expanding access into their downtowns. Their lines—not only those that already exist, but also those under construction and proposed—are widely spaced across the region. On the other hand, Atlanta, Montréal, and Toronto are largely pursuing a grid of new lines that focus on their respective regions’ densest areas. This approach is likely to increase overall transit use more effectively, though it may not provide as useful an alternative to regional traffic. Los Angeles and Seattle are pursuing transit investment programs that tow the line somewhat between the two."

Seems like Denver, Minneapolis and Portland are developing light rail networks that mimic commuter rail networks, sprawling out to the suburbs in all directions, while places with existing heavy rail networks are focusing on many (shorter, lower capital cost) lines within the already built up dense areas. 

Part of the appeal of Commuter Rail comes from the east coast, where commuter rail networks (LIRR, etc) are the outgrowths of profitable passenger service from years ago. Today, I question that they can be replicated: Their genesis is as railroads providing access to the walkable urban cores of (pre-automotive) towns. While small, such towns were based on a monocentric (pre-automotive) automobile model. When I visit FrontRunner stations, all I see are Park and Ride lots, and a bus depot. The PnR makes sense--it's the only way that enough people can be concentrated within walkable distance of the FrontRunner station. Parking has a density of about 1 rider/400 SF. Achieving the same thing with residential density (assuming one rider/household, and 1000 SF/household), requires a FAR of 2.5. At a 50% lot coverage ratio that implies something like 5 stories of residential. Nowhere is that present along FrontRunner.

So FrontRunner is not creating transit-oriented polycentric density. It's just congestion relief. Correlational research out there suggests that a mile of transit travel (a passenger mile) replaces 3 miles of automobile travel, and effect called the Transit Leverage Effect. Empirical evidence bears this out: When a transit strike ocurrs, traffic congestion gets truly gnarly. Research suggests that this is because it's the people with the worst automobile commutes (long commuters along congested roads) that tend to take transit. When deprived of that alternative, they drive anyway. 

What alarms me is the idea that commuter rail is actually supporting sprawl: For a few people, it makes otherwise infeasible automobile commutes possible. Because those people drive a long way (consuming a lot of road capacity), doing so frees up road capacity for others. Via the triple convergence (from other times, other routes, and other modes) that capacity gets used up, until the road system again reaches an equilibrium of barely bearable congestion. 

Which makes me wonder: What does FrontRunner actually achieve? What does any commuter rail actually achieve? To me, it seems like it only makes life better for a few extreme commuters, whose auto commutes would otherwise be awful. 

I'm sure it also benefits a few transit dependent people, for whom the alternative is not making the trip. But I seriously question if the benefit of this small number of people (and it is a small number--FrontRunner ridership numbers are not large) is actually worth the millions of dollars it costs. I feel like we'd be far better creating the 'Freeway Flyers' network of BRT, and making a freeway lane into a HOT lane, then spending millions on commuter rail. 

A decade ago, I supported FrontRunner as an 'express route', making is possible to travel between points that would take far too long to access by Trax. Not once (even while transit dependent) have I ever used FrontRunner for such a purpose. The frequency is too low to make it feasible as part of a transfer network.  FrontRunner is not part of the Frequent Transit Network. 

Why waste so much breath on this issue? Because UTA (and WFRC) are getting ready to spend hundreds of millions double-tracking and electrifying FrontRunner. Double-tracking so that FrontRunner can actually become more reliable (check UTA's twitter for records of it's perpetual delay), and electrification to reduce pollution. (The dirty secret of FrontRunner being that it actually produces more pollution, per rider, and an equivalent number of cars). Part of the pollution is also caused by the single-tracking, which means that the FrontRunner is constantly starting and stopping, waiting for other trains to pass so that it can proceed. 

Here is what is planned. I don't think I like it. That bit of the FronRunner at the south is $51 million dollars for 6.8 miles. Happily, a lot of the stuff on the plan is corridor preservation. Corridor preservation is the essence of planning: Buying cheap today what you are going to need tomorrow. 

Transit Phases

Urban Transit in the United States has six major phases**:

1. Street Railroads
2. Subways/Elevated
3. Street rail
4. Bus-titution
5. M/ART
6. Light Rail

Street Railroads is exactly as advertised: Railroads reaching the city center, run on city streets. Noisy and dangerous, they are largely extinct. Most cities relocated several of them to a common corridor (typically as part of a Union Station effort). Building a 'viaduct' over them was a popular addition after WW2. Never electrified, they belched smoke and scalding steam as they traveled

Subways/Elevated were the first round of solutions to street railroads. Two solutions emerged: elevating them, and under-grounding them. As elevating is cheaper than excavating, it was the preferred alternative. (And railroads already knew how to build viaducts). Manhattan once had elevated rail-lines running down second and 9th avenue (of which the High line is the remainder). London forced another solution. The 'City of London', the original Roman square mile inside the greater metropolis of London has its own municipal government. Disliking the nuisance effects of railways, they simply banned them on city streets. (And now you know why London has so many railroad stations). But the value of bringing a rail-line INTO the center of London was simply too great, and so the Under-grounding began, in 1863. Chicago, with it's plethora of railways, still maintains its elevated stations ('The El').

Street rail: Everyplace with even a presumption of being a 'city' built a street railway. Using railroad track, these were smaller, lighter vehicles called 'trolleys'. There were a handful of attempts to draw them using engines, but electrification (using the pantograph) became endemic.* 

Inter-Urbans: A hybrid streetcar/railroad deserves a passing mention, if only for it's later importance for light rail. Combining street-running sections in urban centers, and railroad right of way between cities, they filled a niche market, typically by connecting urban destinations to entertainment or educational institutions. Some used trolleys, and some were special 'school trains'. 

Bus-stitution represents the dark age of urban transit. (To those who love trains, at least). Worn out trolleys were replaced were shiny new buses. (Cue Roger Rabbit). Streetcars were already in decline beforehand. The only rail routes to survive were underground/elevated systems, or places with awkwardly narrow tunnels. 

M/ART refers to the period between WW2 & the advent of light rail in the United States.  But in 1970, we recognized we had 'an urban transportation problem', which is the preferred euphemism for the explosive growth in traffic congestion.
Transit was the clear solution. But even the solution was a problem. Private companies had built most of the transit infrastructure before 1928, and municipalities getting into the game only in response to their failure. But no private entity was willing to build transit in 1970--competition from the automobile was just too fierce. Conservative pundits love to argue that this reflects the innate attractiveness of the automobile. They also love to ignore the billions of dollars in Federal subsidy provided for the Interstate Highway system. So, it order to compete with the automobile, transit projects required a subsidy. Given that the 70's were sort of the high-water mark of 'big government' and centralized planning, it became a Federal project.


None of them did terribly well, at least at first. They had very high costs per rider. For some of the systems, for some years, it would have been better to either a) buy everyone a cheap car, or b) put all of the money into buses. They've done better over time, as traffic congestion has worsened, and developers have responded to the accessibility premium of locations near them, so more things are near them. BART won its spurs when the Bay Bridge collapsed. The DC metro has become the most-ridden transit system in the US.

Light Rail The return of the inter-urban! Known as 'City-Rail' (Stadtbahn) in Germany, it made use of freight right of way, with street running portions in the center of cities. APTA called them 'light rail' so suburbs would accept them. Successful, at least judging by their popularity.  They make use of a variety of types of running-way.

Streetcars are history repeating itself. They are street-rail come again--trolleys operating in mixed traffic.  Portland has made them famous, and their use as a successful economic development project means that every major city in America is either building one, or planning to. The dividing line between street cars and light rail is not a clean one. (Salt Lake has a 'streetcar' in its own railroad corridor, and a 'light rail' on a city street'.)
Both make use of all types of running way. Streetcars generally have shorter lines, smaller vehicles, lower speeds, and more frequent stops. My analysis showed that average stop spacing is most distinctive. Portland, Tucson and the Tacoma Central Link all have an average stop spacing about half that for other systems. 

*Yes, cable-cars existed. Yes, a number of hilly places used them, most notably San Francisco. But even more places used funiculars, and I'm not mentioning them. Today, they are both simply exotic survivals. 

**BRT will require discussion elsewhere

**CRT too. 

A Concise History of Rail Transit in America

Modern transit comes from two historic lineages: Steam railroads, and horse-cart street railways. To operate in an urban environment, steam railroads underwent a number of modifications. To reduce conflicts with street level traffic, were either elevated or under-grounded. At some point, they were also electrified, typically use a third-rail system. Once that occurred, expansion required the continued use of grade separated, exclusive guideway, so no one touched the third rail and died. In contrast, street railways were electrified as trolleys, using a pantograph. (Cable-cars can be thought of as a 'dead branch' alternative to electrification). The converging modes of electrified heavy rail and street railways were hybridized as the "Inter-urban". Electrified the whole-way, using a pantograph, and running in a mix of at-grade and tunnels. After the second World War, almost all pure street running 'trolley' systems were 'bus-tituted' out of existence, while some inter-urban systems survived. The survivors all had some off-street running-way, viz: RTA Streetcars, San Francisco cable car, MBTA Green Line & Ashmont–Mattapan High Speed Line, SEPTA Subway–Surface Lines: Suburban Trolley Lines & Girard Ave Trolley, RTA Rapid Transit: Blue and Green Lines, Newark Light Rail, Muni Metro. Between ~1930-1972 is sort of a 'Dark Age' for urban rail--almost nothing new is built. Then there is a resurgence of heavy-rail systems to deal with traffic congestion: BART (1972), Washington Metro (1976), MARTA (1979), Baltimore Subway (1983), and Miami-Dade (1984). All run at-grade in the suburbs, and in tunnels in the city center. About 1980, America adopts the Stadtbahn/'City Rail' concept from Germany, and APTA coins it 'Light Rail'. It runs at-grade in the suburbs, and at-grade in the city-center, like the inter-urbans. Being regulated as 'light' rail, it is allowed to operate in mixed-traffic with cars, making it easier/cheaper to build. Over time, the surviving inter-urbans are rebuilt/revitalized, making use of the same vehicles as the new 'Light Rail' systems. Circa 2001, Portland reinvents the 'streetcar', which runs at-grade, in mixed traffic, with smaller vehicles, and making extensive use of single-track.

Now, to get back to what is 'Rapid' transit: Rapid transit is something that has it's own (unshared) guideway. Subways, elevated rail, commuter rail all clearly meet this standard, as do most of the 'Metro' systems of the 1970's heavy-rail revival. But the surviving inter-urbans and new light rail systems are a confusing mix: They have portions of exclusive guideway, so they have rapid transit portions. But LRT means 'Light Rail Transit' rather than 'Light RAPID Transit'. This gets confusion in the context of BRT, which actually means 'Bus RAPID Transit'. BRT gets developed in Latin America as a sort of bus version of a heavy rail system--buses with unshared guideway. But that's another topic. In summary: HeavyRail = Rapid, Streetcar !=Rapid, LRT !=Rapid...but does have sections that could be. (Cable-cars get lumped in with LRT largely on the basis of Cable-car != heavy-rail.)

And finally: Metro!=Heavy-rail, but Metro ⊂ Heavy-rail. Freight, Metro, Subway, Elevated, Commuter Rail ⊂ Heavy-rail.

=     Equal to
!=    Not equal to
⊂    Is a subset of.

UTA needs to plan more light rail

UTA needs to plan for some more light rail. It's like planning for arterials roads--it represents a key link in the transportation network. Think of it this way: Commuter Rail = Highway. Thus, without to connect to, a 'highway to nowhere'? Governance scale also relevant--Commuter rail is the MSA, light rail a County-level project, and street-car a city level project. However, for roads, the Feds pay for most of the highways, the state pays for the major roads (most arterials are 'state highways'), and only the smaller roads are actually handled by cities. On that analogy, there is actually no transit 'small' enough that a city can handle it.

Regardless, Salt Lake County has it's light rail, and Weber, Davis and Utah all have commuter rail now. But UTA wants to build something--they've developed the capacity, and well, 'when you've got a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail'. I'm unpersuaded about the value of streetcars (however awesome Portland's has been), but still devoted to light rail and it's capacity for doing the things a bus can't do.