BIKE: Commuter Rails with Trails

[Patrick Goetz]

Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
> RwT may add yet another bankable element to planned and proposed Transit
> Oriented Developments (TODs), a building block of the transit vision and
> Envision Central Texas. To begin with, imagine building out the -red-line-
> commuter rail WITH trails (RwT): On day one linking the Saltillo District,
> the Featherlite tract and Mueller TODs (by then each likely under
> development).
> 

I'm deeply disturbed that otherwise sensible individuals like David 
Foster and Eric Anderson have drunk so deeply of the commuter rail 
kool-aid.  Like crack, commuter rail promises to solve all our 
(transportation) problems.  Unlike crack, the illusions of which are 
dispelled in roughly 30 seconds, waiting around for commuter rail to 
prove itself ineffectual is going to set us back another 2 years before 
we get started on really solving our transportation problems.  If the 
peak oil experts are correct, this might very well be too late.  The US 
dollar is already hovering around 80 Euro cents; we might not be able to 
afford a real solution by the time local politicians come to their senses.

On a brighter note, at least we might get a few trails out of it this 
time around; last time all we got was "I'll take the A Train!" baseball 
caps.

People on this list should know by now that if Mike Dahmus and I 
actually agree on something, you can probably take it to the bank, and 
we agree that the All Systems Go! proposal is not going to solve any of 
the region's transportation problems.

At Monday's UTC meeting, a Cap Metro representative talked about TOD - 
transit oriented development - in the context of the Red Line, and Eric 
Anderson repeats this misleading juxtaposition.  Certainly TOD is what 
makes a rail system financially viable.  Unfortunately, there is no 
evidence whatsoever that commuter rail is going to result in *any* TOD. 
  As far as I know, there isn't a single commuter rail system in the 
entire country that has resulted in any significant TOD, and there are 
plenty -- South Florida's Tri-rail, for example -- which were supposed 
to stimulate TOD and haven't, after 15 years of operation in the case of 
Tri-Rail.  The proposed Red Line is a train that run 4 or 5 times in the 
morning and 4 or 5 times in the early evening to destinations no one 
wants to go to.  This is not going to lead to TOD.  Unless, of course, 
we count urban sprawl as TOD; commuter rail does facilitate urban sprawl 
by allowing people to live further out while still having a convenient 
way to get to their jobs in the city every day.  One of the big selling 
points of the Red Line, according to Cap Metro, is "all the new 
development" in the Leander area.  Note in passing that Austin's urban 
core provides 94% of Cap Metro's operating revenue, and our proposed 
rail system is designed to accomodate "all the new development" in the 
Leander area.  Wow, Excellent -- I can certainly get behind that!

The Cap Metro representative told us that they were anticipating 
eventual ridership numbers for the Red Line of around 17,000 per day, 
but, surprisingly, was unable to provide any comps from other regions. 
Let me take the liberty of providing a few comps:


The Everett to Seattle Commuter Rail Line:
http://www.soundtransit.org/sounder/RiderInfo/RidershipReport/RiderReport2004/July5/RidershipReport.pdf

Everett is about 25 miles outside of Seattle, and Seattle has a much 
healthier downtown than Austin, i.e. Seattle area residents have a lot 
more reason to go downtown than Austin area residents do.

Here are the comparative populations:

Everett-91,488  Mukilteo-18,019  Edmonds-39,515  Seattle-563,374
Leander-7,596 Cedar Park-26,049 Round Rock-61,136 Austin-656,562

AFTER 4 YEARS OPERATION, HERE ARE THE AVERAGE DAILY RIDERSHIP NUMBERS 
FOR THE EVERETT-SEATTLE COMMUTER RAIL LINE:

       1 morning train-150 and 1 evening train-150

150 people a day.  And Everett has more than 12 times the population of 
Leander.

South Florida's Tri-Rail:
After 15 years of operation, Tri-Rail, which is supposed to be providing 
rail service to 3 counties in the Miami area, is averaging fewer than 
10,000 passengers per day, has resulted in no TOD, and is currently 
costing taxpayers $9 per passenger per ride to operate.  Here are some 
comments from the press:

============================================================
Deriding the rails
www.clo-sfl.com

In its 10th year, Tri-Rail tells its suffering riders that things will 
soon be on track. Sound familiar?

By Jane Musgrave

If the number of people riding Tri-Rail doesn't double in five years, 
Linda Bohlinger says it will be time to declare South Florida's 
experiment with commuter rail a colossal and extremely expensive failure.

"If we can't do something in five years, either we don't know what we're 
doing or the public really doesn't need it," says Bohlinger, the new 
executive director of the perennially underachieving and constantly 
criticized rail system.
...
Since 1994 when ridership peaked at 2.9 million riders, passenger counts 
have steadily declined. Today, an estimated 8,400 people ride the train 
each day - roughly the same number who used it in 1991 during its second 
year of operation.

By comparison, traffic on I-95 along Tri-Rail's 80-mile corridor through 
Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties is burgeoning. In southern 
Broward County, there are 74 percent more cars on the road today than 
there were when Tri-Rail sputtered to life with the hope that it would 
relieve congestion on South Florida's main artery. In northern Broward 
and southern Palm Beach counties, I-95 traffic has increased between 32 
and 47 percent during the same nine years, according to figures from the 
Florida Department of Transportation.

So, it's not as if there aren't potential riders out there. Daily 
traffic jams on the Interstate are a testament to that.
===============================================================================

http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2004-04-15/news.html

Next Stop, Nowhere Just wait till you see what this bad boy can do out 
on the open track BY JEFF STRATTON
jeff.stratton

A week's worth of trips on the Tri-Rail, South Florida's poky, 
15-year-old commuter railway, recently confirmed the conventional 
rat-racing wisdom: The train serves not the region's most populated 
areas but the fringes. It doesn't offer riders destinations they truly 
need or desire, nor convenient times to get there. It's underutilized, 
even during rush hour. It's not located where people like Nick -- an 
unemployed construction worker who says he's "between cars" -- are most 
likely to use it.

It might be preferable to walking, but it sure ain't cheap: The sparsely 
traveled line is costing taxpayers plenty. County figures put the public 
subsidy for Tri-Rail at nearly $9 anytime anyone boards it. And it may 
be about to get a lot more expensive than that. Officials of the South 
Florida Regional Transportation Authority are considering a plan to open 
a new north-south line -- at a cost of at least $800 million.