The South Shore, as befits its interurban heritage, once terminated on street trackage downtown, but has long since been cut back, first to the current site of the South Bend Amtrak station, and then via a circuitous route to the airport. A marginal Midwestern airport makes a kind of silly terminus for a reasonably frequent commuter line, and while downtown South Bend isn’t exactly booming, it’s not in the worst shape relative to many Midwestern cities. It’s also got a progressive, pro-business, ambitious mayor with a certain determination to make his name on a national scale. So it’s not surprising to see some kind of reexamination. The question is whether South Bend and the South Shore can get together to do the right thing–and at the right price, because South Bend is still a cash-strapped quasi-Rust Belt city.
And there is a need to get it right–because, to put it mildly, not all of the analyzed station locations are of equal quality.
Studied station locations, from the AECOM report
According to the study, none of the station alternatives offers a decisive upgrade over the others in terms of travel time or projected ridership at commencement of service. So the question comes down to cost/benefit ratios and core planning principles such as ability to promote development; walkability of the station area; and connections to other transit services. AECOM has laid out the projected costs in fairly neat form.
Table from AECOM showing costs and complications of each station alternative
“Property acquisition for approach” perhaps belies some of the difficulty of the Chocolate Factory location; it would require takings, which can be difficult politically. The Amtrak, and to a greater extent the Downtown locations, require negotiations with the freight railroads, but room exists on the shared right-of-way to extend the South Shore tracks. Presumably as a result of its relative complexity–construction in an active railroad environment is expensive, particularly when Class I extortion is involved–the Downtown alternative also has the highest associated costs.
Still, the costs associated with the Downtown alignment seem too high. The AECOM report estimates a total of $60.5 million for construction, with soft costs and contingency adding another more than $40 million. While the line would need to be electrified, we’re talking an extension of just under three miles, the first mile and a quarter of which, as far as the Amtrak station, already has track and electrical infrastructure in place, although it would need to be rehabbed or rebuilt as it hasn’t been used for passenger service in decades. While NS would presumably demand significant compensation for use of its right-of-way, at least one trackway is clear and available for use all the way from the Amtrak station to the old Union Station site; given the short distance and that NICTD service isn’t all that frequent, a single-track approach and a single-platform, two-track terminal is probably perfectly sufficient. Done cheaply, three route-miles of track and electrification, plus one platform, should probably cost $30-$40 million, not $60 million, much less $102 million.
Overview of the core of the rail network in the South Bend area.
The “Downtown” location at the old South Bend Union Station, while not perfect, is pretty good. The “old” South Shore, as befits its interurban heritage, rolled right onto the streets and terminated downtown, around a mile from Union Station (which served the New York Central and Grand Trunk).
The old South Shore on the streets of downtown South Bend. Source: https://thetrolleydodger.com/2016/06/21/night-beat/
But the attractive Art Deco Union Station building is still there; a new minor league baseball stadium has been built across the street; and most importantly, the local transit system’s major bus hub is one short block away. Oh, and there’s lots of land to redevelop in the immediate vicinity; in a slow-growth but not hopeless case like South Bend, that’s a big deal (and, if we’re being honest, what makes the whole thing attractive in the first place).
As the graphic makes clear, the development potential of the Union Station/Downtown location blows every other alternative out of the water. And that’s not even counting its significantly greater potential for multimodal transportation connections. Put bluntly, South Bend has a choice between making the choice American cities have been making for decades along “commuter” rail lines–sticking stations in a quasi-suburban location on the cheap, with plenty of parking–or making a choice to anchor a truly urban redevelopment strategy that relies on multimodalism, TOD, and strategic redevelopment possibilities.
Luckily for South Bend, Mayor Buttigieg seems to be leaning toward supporting the Downtown option, but some powerful forces–such as the airport’s leadership–are trying to move the future station’s location in a more suburban direction. Given the economic potential–even exaggerated as such analyses almost always are–and transportation benefits, the Union Station site is almost certainly the correct one, even at a higher cost. But to get it done, cost control is key. The city has already authorized $25 million in spending, which would only get the entire project done if South Bend turned into Spain overnight, but given limited federal commitments–the South Shore’s double-tracking project is one of those whose grants the Trump FTA is inexplicably withholding–the more of the project local funds can pay for the more likely it is to get done. According to the South Bend Tribune article linked above, Buttigieg seems to believe for some reason that a Union Station location would “likely require vacating South Street along the south side of Four Winds Field,” which seems rather unnecessary to me. Presumably, someone has told the mayor that building a brand-new alignment over a city street would be easier than dealing with NS and CN and relocating some HVAC equipment that currently occupies the empty trackways behind the Union Station building; but this seems unlikely in the extreme.
Plenty of room on that viaduct for a few more trains.
The mayor should enlist some allies at the state and federal levels and play hardball with the Class 1s on the right-of-way issue. This could be a very promising project for South Bend and for the South Shore–but the way forward won’t be clear unless the whole thing can be competently managed and brought in at a reasonable price.
Northwest Indiana famously hosts one of the most complex rail networks on the planet. As a book I once read (I can’t remember which) argued, the “logical” place for Chicago to have been from a railroad perspective would have been about 30 miles east of its current location, perhaps near Whiting, IN. Instead, with the nation’s rail network divided at the location of an ancient portage, the “Eastern” railroads had to converge in the extreme northwesterly corner of Indiana and make a near-90-degree turn to run into Chicago. The result was a tangled mess of conflicting rights-of-way, industrial tracks, and infrastructure that has only been somewhat simplified by the mergers and consolidations of recent decades.
Two passenger railroads try to pick their way through this mess, with varying degrees of success over the years since the destruction of American passenger service in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Chicago, South Shore, and South Bend, “America’s last interurban,” now under public ownership as the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD) operates a relatively conventional commuter service into Chicago, blended with an intercity operation reaching South Bend. Amtrak operates two long-distance trains along Norfolk Southern’s ex-New York Central Chicago line between the East Coast and Chicago, the Lake Shore Limited to New York City and the Capitol Limited to Washington, D.C.; a number of daily roundtrips to points in Michigan that leave the Chicago Line at Porter, IN; and the Hoosier State/Cardinal to Indianapolis (and beyond, three days per week).
Northwest Indiana rail network. Legend applies to all maps in this post. Apologies for any sloppiness–I’m still learning QGIS–and for the general crappy resolution of the maps (I can’t get WordPress to upload them at anything near full resolution).
The Northwest Indiana rail network remains seriously congested (as does the entire extended Chicago area), but both the South Shore and Amtrak have begun infrastructure plans that would allow their operations through the area to become speedier and (especially) more reliable. Unfortunately, in typical American railroading fashion, these projects are being planned and executed in a terribly siloed and completely uncoordinated fashion, whereas a degree of sharing infrastructure and cooperative thinking could go a long ways toward speeding trips and cutting down on unnecessary spending. Since Ted asked me why they don’t work together (and I’d actually been thinking about it for a while), here’s my attempt at analysis.
Though it’s more or less been in stasis for 60 years, the South Shore is pursuing an ambitious slate of improvements. The West Lake Corridor would use an abandoned right-of-way to create a branch from Hammond to Dyer; the latter town is currently not directly served by passenger rail. Closing the gaps in double track between Gary and the South Shore’s hub in Michigan City would increase capacity and move the railroad further from its interurban roots. The Michigan City realignment project would move the tracks through that city out of the middle of 10th and 11th Streets–the last place in the country where full-size electric passenger railcars run in mixed traffic, true interurban style, with cars on a city street–and create a dedicated rail right-of-way. Shortening the currently convoluted route to the terminal at the South Bend airport might need some use of eminent domain but could shorten trips by up to 10 minutes. While local and state commitments have generally been forthcoming, federal funding for these projects remains somewhat uncertain.
Meanwhile, Amtrak’s Michigan Line–which is owned by the national carrier from Porter to Kalamazoo, and Michigan DOT from Kalamazoo to Dearborn–has been the target of a gradual improvement process, with running speeds now up to 110 mph along much of its length. Amtrak has also partnered with Indiana and Norfolk Southern on the Indiana Gateway project, a $71 million first crack at decongesting the Chicago Line to benefit both corridor and long-distance trains. All of these improvements exist in some relation to the long-standing multi-partner attempts to “fix” the Chicago rail network, most notably CREATE; Amtrak has contributed a report from its own blue ribbon panel on the Chicago gateway…which concluded that the Indiana Gateway project “will not increase speeds, or provide capacity for planned additional passenger trains” (p. 20), although it will increase reliability.
Notably, the South Shore and Amtrak efforts, while each ambitious in their own right, have seemingly proceeded completely independently, without any effort to coordinate service or investment. This is perhaps most remarkable given that Amtrak’s Northwest Indiana efforts mainly center around mitigating the impact of–or avoiding entirely–the congested NS mainline and especially the infamous Porter Junction, where the Michigan Line branches off. South Shore’s right of way, meanwhile, intersects with Amtrak routes at several points and avoids Porter entirely. While the South Shore’s capacity is currently constrained by single track, it is actively seeking to undo that constraint, yet lacks money; Amtrak often manages to pull in multi-state political support for a decent amount of funding, but none of the alternatives studied in the South-of-the-Lake Route Analysis involve bringing that funding potential to bear to consolidate trains from both railroads on a double-track South Shore. Indeed, depending on where the connections are made, a joint Amtrak-South Shore route from Michigan City into Chicago could be shorter than the route that trains from Michigan currently take. To the maps!
Assumptions I make in this analysis are as follows:
Both railroads are interested in avoiding as much freight congestion as possible.
The most nefarious and hard to avoid congestion is in Indiana, roughly from Hammond to east of Porter; from the Illinois line to Chicago Union Station, extra room exists on the NS ROW for dedicated passenger tracks, waiting only for funding. (indeed, Amtrak’s Chicago Gateway report says NS has promised access to a dedicated ROW–at cost, of course–from CUS to Buffington Harbor, contingent on Amtrak coming up with the money)
Amtrak values improvements to reliability as well as overall speed.
Long-Distance Trains
Let’s work our way from east to west, or from the perspective of a westbound train. Perhaps the most ambitious way for Amtrak and the South Shore to coordinate would be for the East Coast long-distance trains to transition from the Chicago Line to the South Shore in South Bend, avoiding almost all of the congestion on the Chicago Line. The transition could happen either in South Bend proper (perhaps in conjunction with bringing South Shore service to South Bend Union Station rather than its current terminus at the airport)
Or perhaps better near the hamlet of Hudson Lake, a few miles west; the lines are completely parallel between South Bend and Hudson Lake, but diverge after that.
Now, maybe the single track eastern end of the South Shore can handle two more round trips per day–and trips with less-than-reliable timekeeping, at that–or maybe it would need some capacity enhancements. There might be some clearance issues; while the Lake Shore Limited uses single-level equipment that can operate under catenary, the Capitol Limited runs with Superliners that might be too close to the wires for comfort–and can’t use the high platforms that the South Shore has at many stations. But the point is that in a potential scenario of maximum cooperation, the two LD trains could be diverted to a dedicated passenger track many miles from Chicago; whether the work necessary to make this possible is desirable is not really the focus of this post.
Fixing Michigan City
Let’s face it: there’s very little more fun for railfans or transit geeks than standing on the sidewalk of a small Midwestern city and watching trains rumble down the middle of a residential street (been there, done that; I’m pretty sure even my non-railfan parents enjoyed).
But it’s also antiquated, a massive constraint on capacity, and downright dangerous, which is why the South Shore and the city are in the process of relocating the tracks to a dedicated reservation. That being said, while it’s something of a judgment call, I’m less than fond of the alternative that was ultimately decided upon in Michigan City; I’d rather have seen something like Options 4, 5 or 6 as presented in the Alternatives study, moving the tracks off city streets entirely and onto an abandoned right-of-way that’s currently a trail, with a new central station near Michigan City’s Amtrak station, closer to the lake (it’s not really clear how the study team reached its conclusion, given that their evaluation matrix really shows Option 4 should have been chosen–it costs the same, has greater TOD potential, and eliminates more grade crossings than the chosen Option 1–but I digress). Notably, none of even these alternatives–which all proposed building a station adjacent to the Amtrak one–even considered running South Shore trains on the Amtrak tracks through Michigan City, even though not doing so required more property takings. Sigh.
Anyhow, perhaps the most important link in creating a joint South Shore-Amtrak line is the connection that’s possible just west of Amtrak’s current Michigan City station.
Whether or not the long-distance trains are re-routed onto the South Shore, the Michigan corridor trains can use an upgraded connection through the grounds of the NIPSCO power plant (the tracks are owned by the South Shore) to access the theoretically double-tracked South Shore main toward Gary and Chicago. This is one of the straightest, fastest sections of the South Shore; running largely through a state park, the intermediate stations see little traffic. Where the Michigan trains might switch to the NS alignment is covered below; but sharing the South Shore segment for the 10-15 miles west of Michigan City would eliminate the jog south and then north again that they currently make, as well as avoiding Porter Junction entirely, which is probably worth tens of millions in and of itself.
Western Connections
There are three possible locations for a western connection between the NS/Amtrak alignment and the South Shore main. The easternmost is where the two lines crisscross at Burns Harbor; a connecting track already exists and could be upgraded.
The middle is just east of Miller station on the South Shore, marking the point where the Chicago Line and South Shore diverge somewhat geographically. The two lines are parallel and right next to each other and a connecting track would be easy to install, though not already extant.
The South Shore alignment through Gary is interurban-y; while grade-separated, it’s somewhat twisty and slow, so transitioning back to the Chicago Line at Miller saves time and distance. But as I understand it NS has not guaranteed there’s ROW to be purchased for dedicated passenger tracks this far east; while I’m sure an alignment could be found, given the absolutely massive amount of legacy rail infrastructure in the industrial wastelands between Miller and Buffington Harbor, it might be easier in the short term to keep Michigan trains on the South Shore further west (which would also allow a stop at Gary Metro Center).
The westernmost potential connection point also involves the most infrastructure. The South-of-the-Lake analysis envisions an exclusive Amtrak line branching off the Chicago Line at Buffington Harbor, running south and east along abandoned and underutilized ROW to loop around Gary to its south. Such a loop would pass under the South Shore near Gary-Chicago “International” Airport; connecting there, rather than looping further south (what a truly silly idea the loop is) would be relatively trivial, although there is an elevation difference to be dealt with.
The Buffington Harbor-Gary Airport connector would subject Amtrak trains to a relatively slow slog through Gary on South Shore trackage, as well as somewhat congesting the busiest part of the South Shore system, and it would require the most new infrastructure (several miles of track). But there is definitely room for dedicated passenger tracks west of Buffington Harbor, meaning that placing the connector here would for sure allow reliable all-passenger running from CUS through to Michigan City and beyond (once funding is found, of course).
Recommended Course of Action
With separate planning, funding, and construction processes proceeding apace, it may be hard to really coordinate Amtrak and South Shore infrastructure improvements to the extent I’m recommending here. And of course I haven’t answered the question of why the two agencies haven’t tried working together; I rather suspect NICTD guards its infrastructure and capacity jealously and doesn’t want to give Amtrak (which wants to ramp up Michigan service to ten round trips per day) a toehold on their main line. But I’m not familiar enough with the local politics to know, exactly.
That being said, the South Shore double-track project is not particularly expensive, will give a solid ROI, and seemingly has a strong local funding commitment. Adding in a connection to the Michigan Line through the NIPSCO plant in Michigan City and a link to the NS Chicago Line at Miller would allow Amtrak corridor trains to bypass Porter and many miles of the congested Chicago Line (although an overlay of Amtrak’s ITCS PTC system might add some costs). Hell, NS might even pay for some of the costs, just to get the Amtrak trains out of its hair. Amtrak should angle to join the double-tracking project; help pay for it; and consider its options for the western end. Probably, Miller makes the most sense for the western connection; but if the various parties can’t find room for passenger tracks between Buffington Harbor and Miller, the westernmost connection option might be more reasonable.
With the core piece in place and protocols for cooperation in place, Amtrak and NICTD can consider whether diverting the LD trains to the South Shore makes sense. The variables are probably too numerous to prognosticate here: whether Superliners can be squeezed under catenary; whether the single-track eastern end of the South Shore has room for more trains without more double track; platform heights and clearance; whether the new Michigan City alignment can accommodate Amtrak trains; and the like. But it’s at least worth thinking about; while both LD trains are highly unreliable and encounter delays along the entire route, the section between South Bend and Chicago tends to be especially bad.
Addenda
A few further notes:
I’ve treated the Amtrak Michigan trains here as if they all use the Michigan Line, but there’s one that doesn’t: the Chicago-Grand Rapids Pere Marquette, which runs once per day in each direction, diverging from the Chicago Line onto CSX rather than Amtrak’s own trackage at Porter. The Pere Marquette route actually crosses the South Shore just east of the latter’s Carroll Street yard and headquarters in Michigan City, and an interchange track exists for freight. It then crosses the Michigan Line just north of New Buffalo, MI, and should money become available a connection should really be built there, in which case the Pere Marquette would become just another corridor train for the purposes of this analysis (other than the fact that it often runs with Superliners, which would mean platform issues at some South Shore stations…).
Austin brought up the idea of using the planned NICTD Dyer branch to divert Amtrak’s Hoosier State/Cardinal to the South Shore from Dyer into Chicago. These two trains currently encounter a significant amount of their massive delay problems west of Dyer as they traverse dense, congested rail infrastructure like Dolton interlocking. It’s not a bad idea; while somewhat roundabout, running the Indianapolis trains north along the Dyer branch and then along the South Shore/Metra Electric mainline to Grand Crossing would improve reliability considerably, though it would require completion of the CREATE Grand Crossing connection first. Perhaps Austin or I will explore this more in the future.
Running Amtrak’s Michigan trains along the South Shore west of Michigan City would make the Amtrak-owned tracks between Porter and Michigan City redundant; perhaps they’d be retained for emergency diversions, or perhaps the South Shore freight operator could find a use for the line.
At the beginning of July I was invited to do my first radio spot, appearing on the local radio show Capital Green Scene (WVCR 88.3 FM, Siena College’s station) to talk about transit and transportation in the Capital Region. We recorded the show on July 1st and it aired July 2nd, but I’ve only just now gotten the audio files, so here they are. The interview is in two segments, embedded here separately. I had a blast doing this; hosts Bill Helmer and Brian Nearing, who found me after a few of my articles on All Over Albany intrigued them, are great guys who ask really interesting questions.
Watch for a new segment with me on Capital Green Scene appearing on Labor Day Weekend as well…
Let’s get one thing straight: Wickford Junction and Pawtucket/Central Falls are completely different scenarios. Pawtucket has regular service throughout the day (albeit at crappy frequency), while Wickford Junction…doesn’t. And then there’s this:
The physical setting of Wickford Junction station
The physical setting of future Pawtucket/Central Falls station
Wickford Junction is completely cut off from development of any kind, while Pawtucket station would be located in one of the densest areas in all of New England. Comparing them, in other words, is pointless at best. No wonder Providence blogger Jef Nickerson, in his own words, “went ballistic” when the legislature approved funding for a garage in downtown Providence after ignoring the train station.
I want to dig a little deeper into this, though. Let’s consider quotes such as this, from Patrick Anderson’s Providence Journal article linked above:
The free-market Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity has put the station plan in its cross-hairs, adding the funding bill to its “five worst” list for the year and saying it aligns with a “submissive philosophy” that Rhode Island should be considered a suburb of Boston.
Although the Center for Freedom and Prosperity critique of the station is unnecessarily couched in parochial provincialism (and, likely, in deep denial of the benefits that closer links to the booming Boston economy can bring to Rhode Island), it almost unintentionally touches on a serious critique of the “commuter rail” mode: it serves one kind of trip, and one kind of trip only. The libertarians substitute a critique of the station for what should be a critique of the mode of transit, perhaps because the answer to the question “how does commuter rail become useful to all users?” is “more service, not less.”
When framed this way, the critique not only becomes more sympathetic, but reminds me of another anecdote I turned up in the process of researching my master’s paper. When the Providence Foundation studied intrastate commuter rail from Woonsocket to Providence in 2009, the project team met with planners along the route to gauge interest in the potential new service. All showed interest, except for the town planner in Lincoln, where a station was proposed in the hamlet of Manville. The reasons given were fascinating, and a little bit sad:
The proposed Manville site is located near a low-income neighborhood, where residents could typically be expected to benefit from additional transit services. However, commuter rail – with its peak-oriented services – may not be a good fit for these residents who tend to work at jobs with nontraditional schedules. Moreover, the town planner in Lincoln indicated the most town residents were not interested in a new commuter rail station. (p. 71)
Justifiably or not, Lincoln’s town planner believed that commuter rail, as a mode, is not for “us” (us being anyone working in a job that is not white collar or 9-to-5). That’s not too far off from the idea that investing state money in a commuter rail station would only increase Rhode Island’s dependency on Boston, if we assume that “Boston” here stands in for white-collar jobs with little access for middle- or working-class Rhode Islanders. It may not be entirely apparent to the people I’m quoting here, but I believe the pattern indicates the very tiny glimmer of a kernel of a coherent, trenchant critique of the commuter rail paradigm.
Rhode Island has ambitious plans for commuter rail, both expansion of Boston-oriented MBTA service and intrastate, not to mention random private ideas for Providence-Worcester service. That’s admirable for a state of Rhode Island’s size, and the Providence Foundation study projected very positive results for Providence-Woonsocket service.
Projected costs and operational figures from the Providence Foundation study
That being said, I think the difficulty of gaining political traction for commuter rail in places like Pawtucket (which has been waiting for a station for decades, since its legacy one closed in 1981) and Lincoln reflect both the normal anti-transit animus of certain groups AND something deeper and more profound.
I devoted much of my master’s paper to developing the idea that American commuter rail has been socially and politically constructed as a luxury mode of travel for the middle and upper classes, one that serves only a niche subset of trips. In many other countries, mainline rail systems–often branded “regional”–operate frequently all day and on weekends, allowing use for numerous kinds of trips to numerous destinations. Perhaps, to build political momentum and promote a system that can be truly useful to a broad swath of Rhode Islanders, state leaders should consider something not less, but more ambitious–a regional rail system along the lines proposed by Peter Brassard over at Pedestrian Observations several years ago. Maybe even that wouldn’t quite redeem Wickford Junction–but it might be the only plan that has a chance to.
Just a quick post since I’ve been doing lots of senior paper writing and haven’t put anything up here for a while…
As part of my senior paper research I’ve been looking quite a bit into the sociopolitical context of commuter/regional rail, and I’ve come across a number of interesting tidbits. Here’s an anecdote that’s worth sharing. It comes from the 1980 PhD dissertation of Sy Adler, today a respected professor at Portland State University, which is about the political economy of transit in the Bay Area in the immediate postwar era, especially the leadup to the building of BART.
In 1950 Southern Pacific found itself before the California Public Utilities Commission for the third time since the end of World War II to ask for a fare increase on its Penninsula Commute service–today’s Caltrain. As Adler tells it (pages 97-99):
SP had been facilitating the growth of “stockbroker suburbs” down the peninsula since the nineteenth century. Revenue patronage was slowly but steadily increasing on its trains between downtown San Francisco and San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. However, despite the patronage gains and the previous fare increases the railroad claimed to be losing more than one million dollars per year in out-of-pocket operating costs alone. The fare increase SP was now proposing would only cut losses in half; the company believed it had already reached the point of diminishing returns in regard to increased fares.
The concentration of traffic on rush hour SP commuter trains was virtually complete. Seventy-five percent of the total movement to San Francisco traveled during the morning peak hour. Eighty-three percent of all passengers paid commutation fares to go downtown and back home. The railroad found that two-thirds of its locomotives and coaches utilized in peninsula passenger service were used for only three hours per day. All costs were increasing, as they were for every transit operator, with the exception of fuel oil (!)…[in short, the railroad was losing lots of money]…
A coalition of real estate interests, home builders and commuters opposed the SP fare increase proposal before CPUC. The opposition hired its own expert; he agreed that SP was losing money, but $340,000 less than the railroad claimed. The coalition was led by the David Bohannon organization, one of the largest real estate developers in the Bay Area. All protestants charged that increased fares would be a deterrent to home building and buying on the peninsula; property values would be threatened. The coalition argued that it was entirely appropriate for the SP to subsidize passenger train losses from profitable freight operations. This was the progressive thing to do.
One of the key elements to the argument that’s unfolding in my paper is that commuter rail, as an American mode, is heavily tilted toward the interested of the wealthy. This anecdote provides a fascinating example of that; rarely these days do we hear the Sprawl Machine arguing for better rail service. Rarer still is to hear them co-opt the language of Progressivism, still potent in California at the time, to make their point. But the coalition opposing the SP fare increase was more Growth Machine than Social Justice; it consisted of the landed wealthy and those who stood to profit from greater suburban development. And their agenda was not necessarily to improve SP service, but to continue its stasis as a mode that served the commute well, but could not provide comprehensive transit in the growing suburbs. In some ways, a lot has changed since then. But is this not still the underlying logic that supports the paradigm of “commuter” rail?
It’s been a while since I’ve gotten anything up here. Sorry!
The idea that public transit comes with class and racial connotations in the American imagination is hardly new or surprising. That the desire to avoid “those people” has long driven aspects of US transportation policy is hardly a new suggestion; many people who drive to work cite the desire to be alone or to avoid “crowded” or “smelly” transit vehicles as driving (pun intended) their decision-making. Fights over supporting transit with class and racial overtones are common. As Cap’n Transit points out, the driver/transit rider divide is the fundamental stratification of American transportation policy–and it’s clear who’s on top.
But there’s also stratification within our transit system. And we don’t talk about it enough.
It’s been that way for a long time. I recently found this 1975 article by Paul Barrett in the Business History Review, titled “Public Policy and Private Choice: Mass Transit and the Automobile in Chicago between the Wars.” It contains a particularly striking passage about the social stratification of transit in Chicago:
But here is another reason why the status connotations of mass transit per se should not be overemphasized. Chicago’s mass transit system had long provided ample opportunity for skittish riders to choose the character of their fellow travelers. As early as the 1880s one South Side woman, complaining of the lack of “heating” straw on the floors of streetcars, observed to the Tribune that “the rich have their [Illinois Central commuter] trains to ride.” And early streetcar routings took class into account, as Northwest Side community leader Tomaz Deuther discovered when he asked Chicago Railways president John Roach to send cars directly down State Street from Deuther’s working class neighborhood. “You can’t mix silk stockings with picks and shovels,” Roach replied. Deuther was satisfied and marked Roach down as an honest man. As late as 1947 patrons in many districts could choose among streetcar, elevated, interurban, boulevard bus, and commuter railroad service for a trip to the CBD. Each line had its own fare structure and routing and, we may assume, its distinctive clientele. In short, the argument that aversion to class mixing helped to kill mass transportation must be considered in the context of the unique transit system each city developed for itself by means of local policy decisions.
Barrett’s point is that analysts should not assume mass transit declined in the postwar years mainly because of social mixing, since it was frequently already stratified. I think he is, to some extent, wrong–the explosion of suburbanization and sprawl in the postwar era created (indeed, was premised on) new forms of exclusion–but the point that we shouldn’t idealize the egalitarian nature of some prewar transit systems stands.
And here’s the thing: it’s still like that in a lot of places. The Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union has long been vocal that LA Metro’s expansion of the rail network prioritizes a small cadre of white riders over the system’s much more numerous bus ridership, which is heavily composed of people of color. The point that capital spending on rail expansion ignores or even hurts the majority of a transit system’s riders has a lot of validity (arguably more in non-LA contexts, actually), but also lacks significant nuance–Metro’s last biannual onboard survey found that while twice as many white people ride trains as buses, the respective percentages are only 9% and 18%.
But there are other examples. I was in Philadelphia over the weekend, and took the opportunity to ride one of the nation’s most interesting transit operations, the Norristown High Speed Line. The High Speed Line is interesting not just for its unique combination of technology, but because it parallels and complements other SEPTA routes, in particular the Regional Rail Paoli/Thorndale Line (the former Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line, which has lent its name to the corridor of wealthy suburbs along it) and the ex-Reading Norristown/Manayunk Line. Norristown, a struggling collar city, is served both by the High Speed Line and the Regional Rail route–and the social stratification of the services is clear. As I rode the NHSL, Stephen Smith educated me about the line’s social aspects:
@sandypsj In Bryn Mawr (where the station is very close to the RRD station), it's the "poor people" train
Because of a suspicious object under the NHSL viaduct, we ended up taking Regional Rail rather than the NHSL back to Center City. Midday, Regional Rail runs at hourly headways, while the High Speed Line runs every twenty minutes. NHSL is a premium service relative to other SEPTA rapid transit services, with a base fare of $2.75–but a Regional Rail fare from Norristown, which is in Zone 3, is $5.75, and $7.00 if purchased on the train. And the Regional Rail ticket office is only open until 12:45 weekdays, and not at all on weekends, meaning you have to pay the higher fare at those times, period.
NHSL trains and a SEPTA bus at Norristown Transit Center. Regional Rail station to the left.
A Regional Rail train approaches Norristown Transit Center
Indeed, though diverse, the (small) crowd that ended up on our Regional Rail train was clearly better-dressed and more professional-looking than the NHSL clientele.
Indeed, what Americans call commuter rail is, arguably, a fundamentally inequitable mode reliant on social exclusion. It’s a high-cost service whose fares are frequently unintegrated with other forms of transit and that runs only frequently enough to be useful to those who have significant flexibility in their schedule, or the privilege to define their own time management. But it has a powerful constituency that keeps it going–and just functional enough to suit their needs.
For example, there’s been a ton of talk in the Boston area about cuts to the MBTA–but, while expansion may be slowed some, there’s been little talk of cuts to commuter rail, even though it’s by far the most highly subsidized of the agency’s modes on a per-ride basis:
In a nutshell, this is why my senior paper research focuses on making commuter rail more egalitarian. The fundamental inequity of American transportation policy is the privileging of automobile use and abuse over everything else, but too much of the inegalitarian stratification that defined transit before World War II still persists. Indeed, in some ways it may have gotten worse. And that’s something planners and transit advocates need to address.
Boston’s North-South Rail Link is in the news again. And while blog readers know I think the project should have been finished a century ago, and anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I’m a big fan of the idea, I’m a little frustrated with the way dialogue about it seems to be going.
The current round of NSRL discussion was set off by former Massachusetts governors Michael Dukakis and William Weld, who penned an op/ed in the Boston Globe arguing against the Baker administration’s plans for expanding North and South Stations and for building NSRL instead. Perhaps Dukakis and Weld are working through some of their own culpability for not getting the project built as part of the Big Dig, as originally planned; regardless, I certainly agree with them that expanding the dead-end terminal stations is utterly foolish and wasteful.
I also, however, agree with some of Gabrielle Gurley’s rejoinder in Commonwealth Magazine, which argues that Dukakis and Weld’s piece failed to factor in the realistic politics of taxation and spending in Massachusetts, or present a realistic plan for building the very expensive tunnel. Gurley’s piece is far from perfect–she lumps NSRL, a project that would massively increase system efficiency, with South Coast Rail, a boondoggle that continues in the T’s long tradition of overengineered, efficiency-sucking outward expansions–but she does have a point that the politics of spending on large infrastructure projects are tricky at best. Boston has had some traumatic experiences with massive infrastructure projects, and the T’s problems with project management are both well-known and ongoing.
Dukakis is nothing if not determined, though, and he wrote back to Commonwealth, arguing the Gurley’s math had failed to take operational savings and new ridership into account:
And third – a point your piece totally misses – because the thousands of new passengers will produce approximately $120 million dollars a year in new passenger revenue and $80 million in maintenance savings. And that doesn’t even factor in the “value added” that will come from private leasing and development along the route, some portion of which can be captured as additional revenue.
Those combined funds will support a 20-year bond issue that can pay for the project. That is why it will be far easier to win public support for the project and why your column today totally misses this key point.
Dukakis’ numbers (he seems to assume a project cost of $4.4 billion) may or may not be accurate; it seems to me that he states them with far too much certainty for a project that hasn’t been extensively studied in at least 10 years. What bothers me is that both he and Gurley treat NSRL as if it’s a a standalone project. It’s not, and it can’t be.
Currently, the entire MBTA commuter network–even the Providence line that runs under Amtrak-owned catenary–runs traditional (for America) commuter rail trains consisting of a diesel locomotive and towed coaches. Diesels won’t work in a long tunnel, for obvious ventilation reasons, so any NSRL will of course be electrified. Some past studies have assumed that the MBTA and Amtrak would switch to using dual-mode locomotives on some or all lines once a tunnel is built, but that’s kind of nuts; while New Jersey Transit uses dual-modes in regular service, they’re heavy, slow to accelerate, and inefficient. Realistically (and desirably in terms of service efficiency, quality, and reliability), large-scale or complete electrification of the MBTA network must accompany NSRL.
And that’s a good thing! Electric trains are faster, quieter, and more reliable. Electrifying the whole network and treating it like a regional rapid transit system would be a huge boost to mobility for the Boston area. But it also adds considerable expense to the NSRL project. Alon ballparked a figure of $1.5 billion for complete electrification in his post on the topic. Amtrak’s New Haven-Boston electrification was contracted at $2.3 million per double-track route-mile, though Paul (and others) think the final number was higher. $3 million per route-mile seems reasonable; you might save some on single-track sections (although the underlying infrastructure is the expensive part), and save in other places. Using the $3m/mile number, and excluding the already-electrified Providence Line (though that line, as F-Line points out, would need upgrades to the electrical infrastructure because of Amtrak’s cheapness), I come up with a number lower than Alon’s, just under $1 billion: (information from here)
Line
Route-Miles
Cost @ $3 m/route-mile
Newburyport/Rockport
34.9
104.7
Gloucester Branch
16.8
50.4
Haverhill
32.1
96.3
Lowell
24.5
73.5
Wildcat Branch
3
9
Fitchburg
48.8
146.4
Worcester
44.3
132.9
Needham
9.3
27.9
Franklin
27.4
82.2
Stoughton
4.6
13.8
Fairmount
9.2
27.6
Middleboro
35
105
Greenbush
17.3
51.9
Kingston/Plymouth
24.2
72.6
Total
331.4
$994.2
At a minimum, we can say that complete electrification will add $1 billion to the cost of NSRL, and quite likely more. There are ways to reduce that number; most transit pundits think the Needham Branch should be converted to an extension of the Orange Line, and you might not bother electrifying Kingston and Greenbush because of low ridership. On the other hand, Amtrak might want to electrify the all the way to Portland and convert the Downeasters into Regional extensions.
Lest anyone accusing me of scaremongering, I will clarify that electrification of the MBTA system is something that should happen regardless. This is especially true of the South Side network, which persists in the bizarre situation of running aging, slow, unreliable diesels under catenary on the Providence line. It’s about bringing an aging system into the last century. But it needs to be part of the conversation on NSRL–both because of the additional costs and because making the case for NSRL should be only part of making a comprehensive case for modernizing the whole MBTA system.
Electrification, of course, comes with additional costs. The biggest is rolling stock. By my count, based on Wikipedia, the current MBTA commuter rail fleet has almost 67,000 seats split among 457 or so coaches. Depending on configuration, Metro-North’s M8 EMUs seat about 110 people, meaning you’d need over 600 equivalent units to replicate existing MBTA fleet capacity. At $2.54 million per unit for the initial M8 order, that’s over $1.5 billion to buy EMUs. Things could get a little cheaper; Metro-North is clearance-limited by the Park Avenue Tunnel, whereas MBTA uses a large number of bilevel coaches and NSRL would presumably be built to clear them. The newest (only?) US bilevel EMUs, Metra’s Highliners, cost $3.6 million per unit, and seat 128 (not that great a capacity improvement over single-level coaches, because Metra’s gallery-car setup sucks–MBTA bilevels seat up to 185). MBTA could also choose to buy electric locomotives to haul the existing coach stock.
The final major expense that might accompany NSRL is the cost of building high-level platforms at all, or almost all, MBTA stations. Many already have them; it’s just good practice. Most of the MBTA network sees little or no freight traffic, so clearances really should not be considered an issue. Having level boarding is especially important at outlying stations when all trains are running through a constrained central segment such as a tunnel, and thus must keep to exacting slots. I count 132 stations on MBTA lines that might need high-level platforms; I’m too lazy to look up how many already have them like I did for the Morris & Essex Lines, and how many stations have 1 as opposed to 2 platforms. Cost estimates for high-levels vary; somewhere in the ballpark of $5 million per platform seems reasonable, while MBTA’s fairly simple new Fairmount Line stations cost $6.9-$9.4 million each. If each of the 132 stations costs $5 million for a high-level platform, the total cost would be $660 million; if it’s more like $9.4 as on Fairmount, it would be $1.2 billion. The actual number would likely be somewhere in the middle.
For the record, Dukakis’ estimate of $4.4 billion in tunnel construction costs seems reasonable if (a HUGE if) the project is managed correctly. Though he and Weld failed to get the tunnel included in the Big Dig, despite it being included in the initial plans at various points, the construction did leave “slurry walls’ underneath the freeway tunnel that make future tunneling easy. The real complication is the need to construct portals for various lines, winding them between many layers of infrastructure. Including my estimates here, the costs of a modernized MBTA rail system would be:
$4.4 billion for the NSRL tunnel
+
$1 billion for electrification
+
$1.5 billion for new rolling stock
+
$900 million (roughly splitting the difference) for high-level platforms
=
a total of $7.8 billion for complete modernization.
That might be optimistic; one cannot count on the T to manage projects well, and the projected electrification costs may well be low. But it should be fairly comprehensive.
I’ve just spent 1,300 words talking about how expensive it would be to build NSRL and the other improvements it requires. The final number is truly massive, almost twice what Dukakis seems to assume in his recent writing. And yet, I’m doing this as a fan of the NSRL project. Why? Because not acknowledging the true price of the project also risks obscuring its true benefits. Seeking to win over opponents by minimizing the projected cost of NSRL isn’t going to work; Americans are too paranoid about government spending for that.
It’s very easy for skeptics to point to a multibillion dollar price tag and compare the NSRL project to disasters like the Big Dig. But there’s a key difference: the Big Dig represented a choice for path dependence, for continuing Boston’s dependence on highways at massive cost. It was the natural next step for the highway network, representing a relatively minor improvement in functionality–and a major improvement in aesthetics. But it didn’t provide a new function the road network had never provided before.By contrast, NSRL would be revolutionary, not evolutionary. It’s not “just a tunnel,” and if you’re having the discussion on the grounds that it is, you’ve already lost. Proponents of NSRL need to talk about it in terms of its potential to truly transform the entire system, and that means detailing all of the additional functionality that NSRL can provide–and acknowledging its cost.
Readers of this blog know I have a particular interest in intercity rail in New England stemming from growing up in New Haven. So when Eitan Kensky sent me a February presentation I hadn’t previously seen from the Northern New England Intercity Rail Initiative (NNEIRI, not to be confused with the Northern New England Regional Rail Association, or NNEPRA, which runs the Downeaster), I was seriously intrigued. There have been numerous efforts over the years to revive the Inland Regional service that Amtrak and predecessors once ran between Boston, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford, and New Haven, and this document presents the general outline of the group’s current vision for the return of such service. Much of the research seems to have been done by contractors HDR, and the predominant vision is clearly that of MassDOT, with secondary input from Vermont and other stakeholders.
NNEIRI study area map
Massachusetts has, of late, been focused on two major goals for non-Northeast Corridor intercity rail: a link to Montreal and restoration of Inland Regional service. The current study (logically) links these two together. Tough previous service to Montreal has run along the Central Vermont line, turning off the Boston & Albany at Palmer to serve Amherst before heading north through Vermont, the current vision has Boston-Montreal service using the recently rehabbed Connecticut River Line from Springfield to Greenfield before continuing north. It’s a little bit longer, but serves Springfield, Holyoke, Northampton, and Greenfield instead of just Amherst, and takes advantage of the state-owned Conn River trackage.
The predominant challenge to intercity rail in New England is that the trackage is in most places exceptionally curvy. The build alternatives envisioned for the NNEIRI service thus focused on regular-speed trains, with no ambitious plans for even moderate-speed (110 mph) options. It’s important to remember that “maximum speed” here means Maximum Authorized Speed, or MAS, rather than average speed. On curvy legacy tracks the trains are unlikely to obtain the maximum speeds for very long stretches, given FRA restrictions on tilt for conventional equipment (although the 90 mph MAS alternative does make brief mention of the possibility of acquiring tilt equipment).
Table of service alternatives
A Boston-to-Springfield time of right around 2 hours would be extremely competitive with driving, which is about an hour and a half without traffic (yeah, right) and realistically usually at least a half-hour longer. It’s also about the same time as Peter Pan’s bus offerings, but a train would presumably offer a much higher level of comfort and reliability.
Costs would fall in the billion to billion and a half range for the bottom two alternatives, which seems on the high end for relatively simple double-tracking work within an existing right-of-way; I assume most of the capital expenses would be on the Vermont sections, since the B&A right of way is built to accommodate at least two tracks.
Overall, the conclusion seems to have been that bumping MAS from 79 to 90 mph would result in considerable extra expense with little time saved or gain in ridership. The study team’s Draft Build Alternative is a modified Alt 2, with 79 mph MAS and slightly fewer trains:
Eight trains per day would run through from New Haven to Boston, a kind of mini-Inland Regional service. These trains would function as extensions of the current New Haven-Springfield shuttle service. There would be one round-trip per day from Boston to Montreal, and another from New Haven to Montreal, while the Vermonter would continue as it currently operates, with an extension to Montreal. Springfield would get 9 round trips per day to Boston, and presumably the New Haven-Montreal train would have a timed connection with a westbound Boston-New Haven train at Springfield, giving Boston in effect two daily round trips to Montreal.
All trains are envisioned to make all local stops, which is interesting to me; I would have run the Inland Regional/shuttles as expresses in Connecticut, stopping only at Hartford. As it is, the additional 9 corridor trips will provided important added frequency to the NHHS/Hartford Line service that should be beginning in 2016. A 2011 NHHS document envisions full cross-ticketing between NHHS and shuttle/Regional trains, and the boost from NHHS’ 25-32 trains per day at launch to 34-41 including the corridor services is nothing to sniff at. However, that many trains would clearly require Connecticut to finish double-tracking the Hartford Line between Hartford and Springfield. That task isn’t itself all that complex but has been deferred to Phase II of the NHHS project (though it is included in Governor Malloy’s 5-year transportation ramp-up plan) because of the considerable expense of rehabbing the Union Station viaduct in Hartford–which is, somewhat amazingly, believed to no longer be able to hold two trains at once–and the bridge over the Connecticut River.
Interestingly, study staff clearly believe that Springfield-Boston service alone would be a poor use of resources, labeling it “Low Ridership” and “Ineffective and Costly.” As Alex Marshall pointed out on Twitter, much of the envisioned ridership to New Haven is surely people from Worcester or the Metro West region who want a two-seat ride into New York City without doubling back into Boston to catch an NEC train.
@sandypsj there's also a sizable Worc/MetroWest market>NYC this would give 2 seat ride instead of transfer>NHV shuttle or going east to Bos
Likewise, the study labeled plain Boston-Montreal service “Low Ridership,” while noting the potential for higher ridership in the New Haven-Montreal corridor. Despite decades of pleading for Montreal service, planners still seem to believe that Boston doesn’t quite deserve it. That’s not particularly surprising to me given how slow such service would be and how sparse population is along the corridors between the two cities. So for now, there will likely be just the one round trip per day, plus the possibility of a two-seat ride via transfer in Springfield, and that situation seems likely to stay the same for quite a while.
Other notes
Finish the Cross
As currently planned, the NNEIRI system looks like a sideways T, with the long axis pointing to Boston. I’m on record as a (self-interested) proponent of Albany-Boston service, and I think some of the improvements proposed here strengthen the case for finishing off a cross-shaped network with trains from Boston to Pittsfield and Albany. Double-tracking the Boston Line from Worcester to Springfield would leave less than 100 miles of single track from Springfield to Albany (it’s 102 track-miles, but there are existing sidings and stretches of multiple track). If trains can do Boston-Springfield in 2 hours, a time of 4 hours to Albany should be eminently achievable even without much in the way of speed improvements. With significant speed improvements (most of the line west of Springfield is limited to 40-50 mph, even though the trackage west of Pittsfield isn’t all that curvy or steep) a time in the 3:30 range–which my previous post identified as the time necessary to be competitive–should be achievable. That would open up the possibility of Boston-Toronto service via the Erie Canal corridor cities–a potential market for an overnight train?
Boston Line Capacity
One of the major ongoing dramas in New England intercity rail has been CSX’ reluctance to share the ex-B&A right-of-way with passenger service. Given current constraints, it is somewhat understandable; it’s a steep, curvy line that has suffered from decades of deferred maintenance (yes, part of that is CSX’ fault, but the neglect predates CSX ownership). CSX runs 25-30 trains per day on the line, which approaches the capacity of a mixed-use single-track line, even one equipped with advanced (by freight rail standards) CTC signaling:
From NCHRP Report 773, “Capacity Modeling Guidebook for Shared-Use Passenger and Freight Rail Operations”
Double-tracking the line, however, offers enormous potential, jumping the capacity from an estimated 30 trains per day to 75. In other words, CSX could double current traffic–a situation no one sees as being around the corner in New England–and there would still be 15 slots per day for passenger traffic. More realistically, a fully double-tracked B&A could easily accommodate 40 freights, the 8 proposed Inland Regional trips, 6-8 trips to Albany, and the Lake Shore Limited–a total of under 60 trains per day west of Worcester. Of course, fully double-tracking the line requires the states of Massachusetts and New York to cooperate, and the Cuomo administration has shown little interest in efficient passenger rail.
Pessimistic SPG-NHV times
The table of travel times above envisions a trip time of 1:40 from Springfield to New Haven given all local stops. This seems somewhat pessimistic to me, as the current shuttles and Vermonterare scheduled for 1:20 to 1:30 over the same route; perhaps the longer time takes into account that a few stops will be added under the NHHS scheme, but those should be counterbalanced by improved track speeds; it’s not a big deal, but I’m somewhat confused.
Who’s going to operate it?
Most commentary I’ve seen has assumed that any extension of rail service from Boston to Springfield would be operated by the MBTA. Running the trains through to New Haven would seem to preclude that possibility. Amtrak would seem the most logical choice, but the northeast state haven’t been thrilled with it of late; Connecticut, for example has opened the NHHS service to a bid competition. The NNEIRI network is an extremely complex system, involving at least three states, plus the province of Quebec and federal authorities regulating border crossings, the private railroads owning the tracks, and various other stakeholders. So perhaps now is the time to revive my call for a unified Northeastern passenger rail authority.
The utility or lack thereof of those two stations is up for debate, but I want to highlight another aspect of their addition to the New Haven Line. With the other two recent infill stations, Fairfield Metro Center and West Haven, there are now 21 stations (including the endpoints) in the 46 route-miles between Port Chester and New Haven, or on average one station every 2.19 miles. With the additions of Barnum and Orange, there will be 23, or exactly one station for every two miles. Though few trains make all local stops, that stop spacing is rapidly dropping toward that of a spaced-out urban rapid transit line, rather than a “commuter rail” system. And that, I think, offers a great opportunity to transform the New Haven Line into something unique in the US, an interurban regional rail system with a focus on moving people not just to and from New York City, but within Connecticut as well.
Here’s the thing about the Connecticut Shoreline region: while its economy and culture are intricately and inextricably linked to New York City, it is not a pure bedroom region. The region’s older cities–New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford–all have an economic identity and gravity of their own (though Bridgeport’s can be kinda hard to figure out), and Stamford has evolved into something of an Edge City, attracting corporations fleeing the costs of Manhattan and pulling in commuters from its own hinterlands. In fact, only a relatively small proportion of people living in the Shoreline region commute to New York City. 61.60% of employees in New Haven County work in the same county; Fairfield County takes second place with 16.10%, and only 1.10% of New Haven County employees, or 4,150, work in Manhattan; the other NYC boroughs and Westchester add about 3,000 people. Fairfield County follows the same pattern; 67.7% of employed residents work within the county, and another 9.2% work in New Haven County, with only 6.2%, or 24,086, work in Manhattan. 4.5% (17,514) work just across the border in Westchester County, and the other NYC boroughs have 0.4% each, or around 4,500 workers total. Full numbers (from Census LEHD data) are included here:
So, the Shoreline towns share closer economic links to each other than they do to New York City, but Metro-North’s rail operations are, somewhat inevitably, still quite NYC-centric. This is to some extent justifiable; people commuting to Manhattan from Connecticut are obviously way more likely to travel by transit than people commuting within the highly suburbanized Shoreline region. Yet, the Shoreline does have a core of transit-friendly, somewhat dense cities and towns linked along the New Haven Line, and it’s not just Stamford, Bridgeport and New Haven; Greenwich, Norwalk, Darien, Fairfield, Stratford, and Milford all have downtowns that are close to the train station and walkable or potentially walkable. The region also suffers from an insufficient transit system, aside from Metro-North (or including it, depending on who you ask!). Jobs, especially those in the service sector, are heavily suburbanized, making job access by transit for disadvantaged populations especially difficult. Given the close intra-regional economic links, and the close station spacing along the New Haven Line, using the trackage for frequent transit-like service makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Of course, I’m far from the first person to advocate this approach. Just to highlight one take, Alon Levy included the New Haven Line in his series on a regional rail system for New York on The Transport Politic. Rather than preserving an NYC-centric approach, though, I want to focus on the New Haven Line’s potential for intra-Connecticut journeys. The true difficulties of such a transition lie in operating practices and labor costs; the only capital investment I truly see as necessary is the replacement of the previous fourth track between Devon (the junction where the Waterbury Branch joins the main) and Woodmont interlocking, the only stretch that doesn’t currently have all four tracks active and electrified. That would also require the replacement of the NYC-bound platform at Milford, which sits on the former fourth trackway, but that platform is short anyhow and should probably be replaced. I’d also argue that, long-term, the New Haven maintenance facilities should be shifted to the old Cedar Hill freight yard north of New Haven, allowing all trains to run through both New Haven Union Station and the downtown State Street Station rather than turning, and opening the current land up for development.
RPA/Getting Back on Track Report
In any case, running trains every 15 or 20 minutes shouldn’t be a problem even given current infrastructure; trains already run that frequently during rush hour. Though the half-hourly trains between New Haven and NYC are a start, I’d like to see those trains become what Metro-North calls “super expresses,” stopping only at Bridgeport, South Norwalk, and Stamford, with another 2 trains every hour running local between New Haven and Stamford and between Stamford and Grand Central. That would give the major stations service every 15 minutes all day, and considerably shorten running times between the major cities. Obviously, that’s just a start; I see no reason that once the four-track gap is closed and the signaling improved (and perhaps the power system improved some) the line shouldn’t be able to handle four locals and two expresses per hour.
There is one more element to my plan for improving transit along the Shoreline. Here in Albany, the local transit agency operates a successful limited-stop bus service, BusPlus, linking Albany and Schenectady along Route 5, the region’s major commercial axis. The buses, soon to be running every 12 minutes during weekday hours, have improved ridership in the corridor, cover the 15.5 or so miles in around an hour, carrying about 4,000 riders per day.
CDTA BusPlus (Route 905)
The concept of a limited-stop bus service linking close-together major cities along a major suburban arterial would, I think, be a perfect approach for transit supplementary to the New Haven Line along the Shoreline. The Shoreline even has its own counterpart to Route 5, the famous Boston Post Road (US 1). A tertiary through-route (since it parallels both I-95 and the Merritt Parkway) along the Shoreline, the Post Road has instead taken on an identity as the region’s main commercial drag. It’s a (fairly depressing) 50-mile-long cluster of mini-malls, full-scale malls, big-box stores, and the other stuff that accumulates along a suburban commercial arterial, but it does hit all of the region’s major towns, and intersects with the New Haven Line at multiple points.
CDTA’s plan for an extended BusPlus network (Red Line currently in operation)
Obviously the Shoreline is too long to be served by one bus service along the Post Road (and such a service would be redundant with the rail service anyhow), but I’d argue that splitting the stretch between Port Chester and New Haven into three segments makes sense. These links exist, to some extent, already, though they’re quite fractured; CTTransit operates (different) infrequent buses in both directions out of Stamford, Norwalk Transit operates a relatively frequent service (somewhat randomly) through Bridgeport to Milford, and CTTransit picks up again there. I’d like to see these services upgraded to an Arterial Rapid Transit standard, with signal preemption, turn and intersection pockets, nice stations, and fare integration with Metro-North. Split into three sections, each service wouldn’t be much longer than the BusPlus service, and though Post Road traffic is heavier than anything in the Capital District, the buses should be able to stay on time with decent scheduling and some signal help. The point of the buses wouldn’t be to carry people between the cities, but to distribute riders to local destinations from train stations, and to improve access to jobs along the Post Road from the urban cores. In essence, an ART system along the Post Road would be the local to the New Haven Line’s express service. Here’s a map:
The exact routings and boundaries of the bus services are only approximate. You could make the case that stopping a (long) block away from the train station in Stamford, rather than going right into it is good enough. Norwalk is also an awkward situation; should buses terminating there serve both the South Norwalk train station and downtown Norwalk? Nor have I accounted for the presence of trains coming off of the branches to New Canaan, Danbury, and Waterbury; and I’ve included a speculative re-routing of trains through downtown New Haven to turn at Cedar Hill. There are other infrastructure aspects of the line that need significant attention, especially the numerous movable bridges. But the overall structure, I think, is solid. The Shore Line Metro would be a relatively low-investment, non-capital-intensive way to create regionwide non-automotive mobility. It would involve service and fare integration between agencies, regional planning cooperation, and various other things American planning tends not to be too good at, but the payoff could be tremendous.
In the Boston suburb of Norwood, MA, there is a commuter rail stop called Windsor Gardens. It’s a pretty unassuming place, a single low platform on a single-track segment of the Franklin Line that sees 13 inbound trains per day.
There is one thing that’s unusual about the Windsor Gardens station amidst the MBTA’s constellation of park-and-ride oriented suburban stations: it has no parking. Instead, Windsor Gardens is intended to serve the residents of its namesake apartment community, The Berkshires at Windsor Gardens, a relatively upscale 1960s-era development with prices in the $1,000-$2,000 range. Though I haven’t been able to get an answer from the administrative office about how many people live in Windsor Gardens, the Norwood town history site notes that when opened it had “approximately one thousand units,” and the relevant census block, which includes a few additional houses, listed a population of 2,004 people in 2010.
Windsor Gardens at center.
The MBTA commuter rail system has some stunningly low-ridership stops, and one might expect that a station serving a single development, with no parking available for people who don’t live in that development, would be among them. Instead, according to the 2014 MBTA Blue Book (2013 data) Windsor Gardens ridership–inbound only, the way MBTA measures it–was 624 riders per day.
624 isn’t a huge number–the top-performing stations in the MBTA commuter rail system see around 2,000-2,500 inbound boardings per day–but it IS a big number in the context of a station that essentially serves one development and provides no parking for commuters. For the record, there appears to be no (legal, at least) pedestrian access to Windsor Gardens station from the east side of the tracks, and while it’s possible some commuters walk into the station from the subdivisions across Route 1A, that number seems unlikely to be large, and a private apartment community seems unlikely to welcome strangers tromping through it every day.
Windsor Gardens’ ridership numbers haven’t always been quite this robust; the Blue Book’s chart of ridership censuses over the last five years demonstrates:
April 13
Nov. ‘12
Nov. ‘11
Nov. ‘10
Feb. ‘09
Feb. ‘08
Jun. ‘07
624
464
423
414
313
454
309
Ridership does appear to be recovering with the economy, and in 2013 it was twice what it was in June of 2007. Even then, a ridership figure of 300 inbound riders per day would have represented approximately 15% of the total number of people who can be assumed to live in Windsor Gardens. If ridership now stands at 624 per day, that would be around 30% of the residents of Windsor Gardens who ride the commuter rail every day–a truly astonishing percentage. And remember, those are numbers of residents, not numbers of workers; the percentage of workers riding transit would be even higher.
The typical “rate of return”–how many residents actually ride transit to commute–on transit-oriented development is hard to calculate, but best guesses are that they average around 25%, with TOD around rapid transit skewing much higher, and around commuter rail much lower. With between 15-30% of residents riding transit every day, Windsor Gardens would appear to be an exceptional success by the standards of commuter-rail oriented TOD. It would also appear to be a demonstration of the power of proper land use near transit stations to generate transit ridership–and of the idea that TOD can be built, and still generate significant ridership, without massive amounts of parking.
Windsor Gardens as an apartment community isn’t what we’d think of as “true” TOD today; it’s a single-use residential community set in an area that’s not walkable and highly auto-oriented. I assume that virtually everyone who lives there owns at least one car per household, just to get to the grocery store and school. But even a development approaching 50 years old can demonstrate that if you make it convenient enough, you can house suburbanites in a transit-oriented way.
Itinerant Urbanist 
