Yesterday, someone told the Antiplanner that rail advocates in their city cited five rail transit lines as successful examples of commuter rail. These five–Utah’s FrontRunner, Dallas-Ft. Worth’s Trinity Railway Express, the northern Virginia Railway Express, the Puget Sounder, and Denver’s Eagle 3P project–are all examples of transit agencies spending gobs of money on projects that accomplish very little.
Here is an alternate view of each project. Unless noted, transit data not taken from the briefing paper are from the National Transit Database published by the Federal Transit Administration. Data on the percentages of commuters riding transit are from the decennial censuses.
FrontRunner: From 1999 to 2011, the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) spent more than $1.7 billion (in 2011 dollars) in capital expenditures on its commuter rail lines. It now has two lines: Ogden to Salt Lake and Provo to Salt Lake, over which it runs 27 trains each way each weekday. Although some trains run through from Ogden to Provo, counting the Ogden-Salt Lake and Provo-Salt Lake trains as separate trips, there are 108 trips per day.
