If you drive it’s 26 miles. An average SUV is getting in the range of 26 mpg. Thats $5 a day. When you start to factor in increased maintenance cause by extra mile, $13 doesn’t sound so unreasonable. I understand there could be last mile expenses on both ends, but if you live and work closes enough to the stations it’s not that bad.
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Remember too that the $13.00 a day is the Amtrak price. Commuter rail tickets would be less. A ticket coupon booklet could very well be competitive with the $5.00 a day SUV cost when taking into consideration parking would likely be paid for too.
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Oh I have no doubt that the commuter rail will be cheaper once it (eventually) comes around. I guess my question was how much more will it be than the current DRX fare when it replaces that route.
Also will be curious about what sort of frequencies we will be able to get for this service.
GoTriangle has been evaluating options on frequency. The highest option is 8 trips (each way) in the morning commute hours and 2 trips in the mid-day then 8 trips in the afternoon commute hours with 2 more in the evening/night. Essentially this works out to a train every 30 mins during the AM and PM commute peak and every 90 mins otherwise.
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Wonder what kind of service there would be on weekends
Freight traffic on the line is the wild card here, but based on some of Alon Levy’s research, running peak service is 2-3x more expensive than running base service and in most cases, you can run the full schedule at peak frequencies for marginally more operating cost than the peak/base alternative.
Ideally this line could have 2 trains per hour all-day initially and I really think the sweet spot to aim at here would be 3 trains per hour, meaning a train every 20 mins on a clock face schedule (i.e. a train at :10, :30, and :50 every hour of the operating day). This gets the train out of the “commuter” realm and into something that feels like real transit.
I’m mulling the idea of consolidating some of this info/research to publish in some format to hopefully encourage Triangle leaders to push (or at least envision) this type of service. We’ve basically approved the majority of this through the Wake Transit Plan (2016), but need to implement in a way that makes it all worth it.
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I wonder if it’d make sense to have a hybrid route. I’m not too familiar with how commuter trains work in most cities, but I know in Toronto some commuter trains only run during rush hour in the morning and evenings. The route becomes an express bus the rest of the day. Is this common?
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I think the GO network in Toronto is the only place I’ve ever noticed this. It would be pretty awesome to get some consistent Raleigh-Durham/Chapel Hill mid-day/weekend/night options if possible. Taking the 100 and having to transfer to the 700/800 is not appealing at all to get between the Triangle cities/towns.
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OK while talking about commuter systems in other cities, if want to see integrated rail, subway, bus and airport system can really be like here is one. Yes no comparison in size between RDU area but can dream what may be like in 100 years. I know it’s not same as Raleigh/Durham but shows what a big system is like.
First the commuter rail was more an accident as the rail was build for long distant inter-city travel not planed as commuter. Shanghai and Suzhou could be like Raleigh to Durham again not in scale. Shanghai 25m/Suzhou 5m in population and 50 miles apart. Suzhou is on the major rail lines going west out of Shanghai. Yes lines, there are two different high-speed lines, ~200mph, with train stations in each city on the different rail lines. These are 16 or 24 car trains (HS trains come in 8 car units and 84 passengers per car) departing from each city going to other about every 10 min from each station. Most of the trains leaving to and from Suzhou are stops on long distance trains passing through from/to Shanghai. The un-planned part is that Suzhou in last 5 years has built a subways system that links both it’s HS train stations to most of high population and business areas of city. So you can take subway to trains station (I’ve done it multiple times) catch a 30min train ride to Shanghai. Then from either HS station in Shanghai can use the 400+ mile long subway system to most parts of City. Result is, can, as friend that lives in Suzhou mention that a number of people do, can use the HS rail for commute into Shanghai for work being Suzhou is cheaper to live in compared to Shanghai.
One of the HS stations in Shanghai, in addition to having a subway station in the lower level is also part of terminal for the primary domestic airport for Shanghai. So going from Suzhou to Shanghai Hongqiao (SHA) airport is about same time as going from Raleigh to RDU, Pudong International PVG takes about an hour longer. Pudong (=east of Pu river) is right on coast east of Shanghai.
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Yeah, Hongqiao transit hub has really come a long way from when it was the only airport in Shanghai. Now if only they would extend the Maglev from Pudong to Hongqiao.
they tried a few years ago but people that lived along the route “Raised Hell” and it was canceled.
Yea, first time it went through Hongqiao, plane parked several 1000 feet from terminal and loaded us on bus to get to terminal. The Terminal also reminded me of the old original terminal at RUD. Seems they bulldozed the whole thing and built a new airport. First time flew into the new one my first reaction was “OH S… did I get on wrong airplane” 
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Does anyone know off the top of there head(s) when the next “phase of studies” is or will be done/completed for the Commuter Rail Transit C.R.T. ? I am really interested to see how the changes due to the DLR/money come into play?
GoTriangle’s website still says the same thing. ‘…completed in late 2019’ Well, we’ve got a week left, so it’s time to get cracking. (Now, watch the VDOT move in upping the stake in regional rail add another wrinkle in the transportation modeling, thus delaying the study further.)
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Bets on when we actually see commuter rail around here?
I just noticed the 2026 to 2035 time frame? Is that for when it CRT could start? Probably closer to the 2035 time frame?
High-speed rail from Raleigh to Richmond just got a little closer to reality:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article238656743.html
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The current step to plan out commuter rail is gonna take a lot longer than that.
GoTriangle’s regular status reports on capital projects are in the last pages of this document.
Reading between the lines, I’m getting the vibe that the Durham light rail cancelation combined with the potential speedup of the Hillsborough/Selma extension caused the whole thing to slow down.
…not that that matters much; our community’s probably the only place outside of formal stakeholder meetings where anyone would even care.
Click me for some side notes
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And people wanted to argue with me about my statement about what we are getting from the transit tax. A whole lotta talk is what we are getting.
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Addendum to post of 12/16. Guess we can only dream about triangle area having commuter services such as this.
Had a long chat with my Chinese friend last night. She mention that Suzhou has opened a new subway line (free rides until end of year) that has a stop right at entrance to her lake side condo complex in eastern Suzhou. She’s excited about it because she can now ride it to her work at Soochow University (old spelling of Suzhou ) where she is a linguistics professor (English, French & Russian) and her HS daughter can now ride subway to school. Cuts out 2 trips by car.
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I mean, I get how the lack of activity from the transit tax is frustrating. But at the same time, @R-Dub, what you said earlier is the same thing as being like “let’s just build commuter rail; I don’t care if NCRR/NS has any complaints, if there’s no evidence that people living/working near it will actually use it, or it will destroy natural/historical resources”. I don’t know about you, but doesn’t that sound … not okay?
I agree that these studies are just showing things we already know. But do you have a better idea on how to make sure you don’t step into a landmine?
I guess one solution is to be like China. …but… gotta love that authoritarian, “human-rights-can-go-f…-itself” efficiency lol
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