Tag Archives: commuter rail

New Mexico’s Rail Runner has lost 38 percent of its riders since 2012 and is on course to making it 40 percent in 2019. Rio Metro, which operates the trains, is scrambling to find the $55 million it needs to install positive train control, as required by federal law, but remains $20 million short.

Abandoned station on the Rail Runner line. Click image for Wikipedia article. Photo by John Phelan.

A new report published by the state legislative finance committee offers a proposal in response to these problems: transit-oriented development. Although the report reveals that many of the communities along the rail line have zoned land for transit-oriented development, none has come about except in Santa Fe, and even there the development is minimal and required tens of millions of dollars in public subsidies. Continue reading →

Economist Mike Arnold argues that the Sonoma-Marin “SMART” commuter train is “falling short of its promises,” and those who say it is doing well are using “alternative facts” (or, as Colbert would say, “truthiness”). Among other things, he says that, of 26 commuter rail operations in the U.S., SMART’s ridership ranks only number 23.

That might not be fair considering that many commuter rail systems operate over far greater distances than SMART, whose line is 43 miles long. For a better idea of how the SMART train stacks up, I compiled data for other new commuter-rail operations below. I left out legacy operations in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and CalTrains in San Francisco as these are all going to do far better than most of the new ones. I also left out Amtrak’s Downeaster, which is an intercity (Boston-Portland) train that the FTA includes in its database as it has received from FTA funding. I included lines the FTA calls “hybrid rail” such as trains in Austin and Portland as the local transit agencies often call these commuter rail. All of the data are from the 2017 National Transit Database except for the SMART train, which didn’t begin operating until FY 2018; for this I took data from Arnold’s article.

Nashville’s Music City Star is a ridiculously wasteful transit project that never should have happened. Now, Democrats in Congress are insisting that it waste even more money.

In 2016, the Star attracted an average of 1,055 daily riders, far less than the 1,900 that was projected when it opened in 2009. Fares of $877,500 covered less than 15 percent of the $6-million cost of operating and maintaining the train.

Congress has directed all passenger-carrying rail lines (and many freight lines) to use positive train control, a technology that is expensive to install and expensive to maintain. The Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority, which operates the Star, applied for and received an exemption from this requirement. Now, House Democrats have challenged that exemption, noting that, “Although the Music City Star is one of the smallest commuter rail operations in the United States, the size of a railroad does not negate the potential for an accident.” Continue reading →

In February, the Boston Globe revealed that an engineer for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) had ten license suspensions and multiple stops for drunken driving on his record. If he wasn’t safe behind the wheel of an automobile, the newspaper asked, how could he be considered safe at the throttle of a commuter train carrying hundreds of people?

MBTA initially denied it was aware of the engineer’s record, something the Globe quickly disproved. The MBTA then said that this employee was a rare exception who somehow slipped through the cracks, possibly, no one said aloud, because his father was a judge.

Challenge accepted, said the Globe, which filed public records requests on the driving records of the agency’s other engineers. It turns out that a few more others also have poor driving records. Continue reading →