How much would we spend on additional roads and lanes on I-40 instead? Nobody ever talks about cost per driver with building roads.
The argument will need to include that if we get x number of riders daily it will take x cars off the road and will save y cost of building more roads / lanes.
Plus lost time due congestion and increased pollution and noise that comes with all those cars.
Gotcha. Yeah, I’m thinking more on an operational standpoint running in mixed traffic with other carriers on the same line.
Most systems have that to one degree or another.
Less so, than it used to be. Chicago Metra probably has the most traditional mixed traffic system in the country. Orlando SunRail and Miami Tri-Rail would rank right up there. LIRR has only a modest degree of freight traffic. But, other newer commuter rail systems run on abandoned legacy lines. Music City Star comes to mind.
Valid point. But, most people use public roads at some point every day, and it’s buried in the gasoline tax. So, they don’t think about it that way.
With airports, there’s a surcharge right on your ticket that indicates what is going towards operations and maintenance.
With commuter rail, you’ll have some of those who will say, ‘I’m not going to use that, so why should I support it.’ Especially when there’s a $1.4B price tag running with it.
The answer to that is: That for every person that rides the train it’s one less car stuck on I-40 during rush hour. Making your commute better even if you never ride the train.
And, that certainly tracks with what has been published. The commuter rail project has the potential to have it’s largest impact on reducing congestion on I-40. (That being said, we’ll likely see the completion of the projects to upgrade US70 before we see GoTriangle Rail.)
The IRS allowes cost of driving (gas, depreciation, insurance, maintenance, taxes (non gas) and so on) to be 58¢ per mile for 2019 (for business deduction). Put another way a 30 mile round trip commute works out costing $17.40
NJT, MARC, and VRE as well.
So, bottom line, it’s not as unique of a situation (mixed freight, intercity rail, commuter rail operation) as I was thinking.
(What pisses me off, is that heavyweight rail was one of the options that was considered with TTA Regional Rail when they were doing their fixed guideway traffic studies in 1992. But, they went with a lighter weight DMU to run in a parallel corridor with the freight carriers. Twenty years wasted. ARRRGHH!!!)
… and then they wound up having to order FRA compliant DMUs anyway.
That project was such a home run. $800 million for trains every 20 minutes all day long, from North Raleigh to Durham, on dedicated tracks, free of freight interference. Since the tracks would have been a FRA-regulated railroad, and operated without a waiver, they could have connected to standard freight tracks with some trains running through and further out into the suburbs in the future.
It was a really well thought out project. The ridership projections always struck me as almost comically understated. The methods for evaluating cost effectiveness in those days were dumb.
If we could have dusted off that project verbatim, 9 years down the road after the transit tax was passed, it would have sailed through the evaluation process.
We just couldn’t seal the deal at the time because (1) local funding mechanisms were limited, (2) costs increased somewhat (less than 20%) during final design, and (3) we had to ask the feds to cover a greater share, 63% if I recall, which (4) brought greater scrutiny as the FTA under GW Bush sought to make an example of us for having the audacity to ask them to pay more than 50% (even though New Starts was authorized to cover up to 80% of costs) which (5) brought the whole thing down like a house of cards as they took, if I recall, the nearly unprecedented step of dropping the cost effectiveness rating at that point, effectively denying us funding at the transition from final engineering to FFGA. Sigh.
@orulz. Thanks for that. I had forgotten what the finished price for that would have been. My thoughts were also flavored by my being in grad school at Duke and riding my bike quite a bit at the time between 1992 and 1994 (I would have given anything for the American Tobacco Trail.)
The terminus at the hospital seemed to be a bit of a forced fit. But, I knew that there was the Phase 2 extension to Chapel Hill being planned.
All that in perspective, there’s going to be a choke point west of downtown Durham because of the squeeze constrained by the Durham Freeway at Ninth Street.
(Last, but not least, Corcoran and Mangum need to be grade separated. But, I’ve ranted about that on many occasions.)
Really the STAC (strategic transit advisory council) that was set up in 2007 in the wake of the TTA DMU line failure should have basically decided to revive the DMU line, except backed by better local funding: a transit sales tax. It had full environmental clearance, all agreements negotiated, and a fully complete, really shovel-ready, 100% design. But there was such a desire to distance us from that project (which I am convinced did not fail based on its merits, but rather for the financial and political reasons outlined above) that, essentially, everything except that was on the table.
I believe that if we had resubmitted that project to an Obama-era FTA, especially if it were backed by a local transit tax, it would have been a slam dunk. They rewrote the rules to include stuff like TOD and, IIRC, to consider cost effectiveness per federal dollar rather than total cost. I think that what happened to the TTA project was actually a not-small factor in encouraging them to rewrite the rules in the first place. Now this is a bit more unlikely, but I wonder if, with enough support from NC’s congressional delegation, we might have even been able to skip some of the years-long project development phase.
Instead we have been condemned to transit purgatory for 22 years, a sentence of which we have served 13 years.
Sigh.
Is there that the the old TTA plan (up into N Raleigh and WF) could be revived as a Phase II after the Garner to Durham phase gets up and running? I’ll be retired by the time it is operational, but I hate to think that all hope is lost for this N/S line. There are so many underdeveloped properties along this line that could become more dense TOD. This line is just asking to be revived in the not-so distant future.
I’ve fully resigned myself to the fact that I’ll be one of these guys ‘Down at the Depot’ when commuter rail gets going…
I’d have to be the guy with the hat, otherwise I’ve already lost more hair than the other gents. 
Pretty sure this is not the first time this has been posted, but the plan for a commuter rail line between Raleigh and Wake Forest is not exactly dead yet (article originally posted by @dbearhugnc).
And there’s more recent evidence that it’s still financially reasonable-ish, once there’s a bit of investment involved like double-tracking specific segments.
What would really be nice is if:
politicians in both the General Assembly and DC cared more about “effectiveness per federal dollar” (not just the cost) of transit vs just more highways
project development, environmental studies etc. were done more efficiently so that every attempt at a study (not just of transit infrastructure projects, but really, ANY development project) doesn’t have to redo the same work over and over again
just straight up figure out why we suck at transit planning/building/maintenance compared to other countries. This shouldn’t be hard, except a study ordered by Congress found this problem wayyyyy too overwhelming and complex to answer.
But in this country, of course we can’t have nice things if, God forbid, we go up against ~rugged individualism~ and ~property rights~ 
btw I found this interesting opinion piece; if you believe this writer, it means the reason we’re pissed off by this might actually hide one of the answers to a multi-trillion dollar question?
Grade Crossing Inventory
So, from doing a quick flyover in Google Maps, I identified these crossings along the length of the NCRR which would likely fall within the range of GoTriangle Rail which have not been grade separated. If there is a NCDOT plan being mentioned in their STIP (State Transportation Improvement Plan) 2019-2029, it’s been annotated as such. If there is some preliminary engineering which has happened, there will be a hyperlink. If it’s not hyperlinked, then it has a STIP number which has not proceeded any further than being added to the STIP timeline without any further planning study.
There’s a process in place right now which also deals with the private crossings which are interspersed along the length of the railroad. Most of those which have been dealt with are much further to the west.
Notice that I’ve not included some current bridge/overpass structures which are already in place, but may need replacement while this process plays out. These will be addressed in a future post.
There is a traffic separation study which has already been published in 2013 for Durham County. And, there is a Raleigh-Cary Crossing study which was published in 2016. Cary has been making some superficial improvements to their crossings west of town, but the focus there has been on the CSX S-Line. Cary has also been wanting to consider extending Walker Street under the tracks to the Municipal Campus.
Garner
Raleigh
Cary
Morrisville
Durham
I’ve not gotten any sense from the GoTriangle Rail preliminary report that they have any plans yet to completely seal/grade separate the corridor. But, if they’re going to the effort of double-tracking, then it would make sense to get it done to that standard up front. There’s also the whole engineering question as to which curve sections will need to be softened ( as was done at Hopson Road and Morrisville Parkway, and will be done at Wrenn Road) which is a bit beyond my level of understanding.
Saying that, it’s going to be a paradigm on a level of building a new 34 mile highway right through the middle of the Triangle while keeping freight and intercity rail movement fluid during the entire process. Can it be done incrementally? Sure. But, I believe that this is what the finished corridor is going to look like.
And, not to keep bringing it up, this would be an investment for SEHSR, if/when it eventually happens. So, that could be a selling point when going to the feds for infrastructure grants.
[I believe this is about as finished as I’m going to get this]
Already boasting the world’s largest rail network, China has built 8,489 kilometers (about 5,275 miles) of new railway lines in 2019, including 5,474 kilometers of high-speed rail.
The Beijing-Zhangjiakou high-speed railway – which features driverless (( driverless WOW - my comment scootch)) bullet trains operating at 350 kilometers per hour.
I ripped this off from a ‘Progress in Motion’ presentation that was made last year to the North Carolina Rail Road in August, 2019.
Virginia Railway Express (Manassas - DC, Fredericksburg - DC)
VRE.pdf (247.8 KB)
SunRail (Sanford - Orlando - Poinciana)
SunRail.pdf (704.4 KB)
TexRail (Fort Worth - DFW Airport)
TexRail.pdf (1.1 MB)
TRE - Trinity Rail Express (Dallas - Fort Worth)
TRE.pdf (802.0 KB)
So, @orulz, TexRail might be a model to aim for in relative comparison. It is the same length as what GoTriangle Rail is shooting for, uses Stadler FLIRT 3 DMU’s (meeting FRA Tier 1 crashworthiness criteria and meets the ‘Build America’ standard), is operated with mixed commuter rail and freight.
It, however, runs directly to DFW, while GoTriangle Rail will still require a shuttle to RDU from the Morrisville station.
But, good on the NCRR to have these agencies come and present their systems to the gathered leadership. I’ll take that as a promising sign of potential cooperation with GoTriangle.