Very good point there. I was thinking of it as in “would it prevent commuter rail from happening one day down that corridor”
Anything that could potentially free up that piece of land would be awesome.
GoTriangle’s planning committee met last week and heard this presentation for the commuter rail project’s draft sub-study on its economic impacts. We now know just how much the Durham-Garner commuter rail line could help our economy, jobs, and development opportunities!
Click here for some of the interesting data I noticed.
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The average rider could save 21min/day (88 hours/year) on their commutes. But don’t get excited yet since that only accounts for 3% of our return-on-investment.
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Put another way, you’d save $1,078 of your time and effort each year by taking commuter rail. This assumes you’re making our area’s weighted average income of about $51,000.
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Lots of residential (+165k multifamily units), office (+78M sq.ft.), and industrial (+89M sq.ft.) developments are expected regardless of commuter rail’s success.
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…but compact, walkable, mixed-use developments would be greatly encouraged by commuter rail. Garner and Clayton, in particular, could see over 160% more of those through 2050.
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The Triangle could get an additional gross regional product of nearly $5 billion over 20 years once the Durham-Garner commuter rail is in service. That’s a 2.4x return on investment, with 83% of that coming from smart development.
As we’ve discussed before, GoTriangle knows some Durhamites and others who are skeptical of this project due to equity concerns. Just like the affordable housing analysis from earlier this year, this report also tries to address their concerns.
Click me for examples!
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Residents of East Durham could get to jobs in RTP around 45min faster. Only like 4% of the 11,200 working-age residents of East Durham work in RTP today, probably because 60% of them don’t have access to a car. Despite how they’re close on a map, there is no direct transit service today between the two areas.
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70% of job openings in the Triangle are in Wake County, and there are 0.64 job candidates per job opening.
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Put the two above points together, and it implies that the Triangle does not act like a unified labor market for people without access to a car. Commuter rail could change that picture.
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The Triangle’s labor force is only 0.03% more accessible by building commuter rail versus the no-build scenario. This sounds like a contradiction, but it makes sense because residents near potential stations already have access to jobs. Commuter rail, then, could improve their access to clusters of jobs, giving them more options for potentially higher pay.
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The Durham Housing Authority has an existing initiative on affordable housing in its downtown. Commuter rail could help residents in housing units there access better jobs.
There’s two big weakness in their methods, though, that should make you want to take these results with a grain of salt.
Here's what made me kinda concerned about this report.
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The consultants at HR&A who wrote this report surveyed stakeholders with our local chapter of the Urban Land Institute, but only real estate developers were explicitly mentioned as residential stakeholders in the slide deck. This means the observations and feelings of residents don’t seem to have been considered in estimating the quality-of-life impacts of this rail project. I’m worried that this strategy biases this report’s market analysis.
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Some of its metrics like cumulative increases in personal income don’t make sense. For example, its claim of $430 million in increased personal income from 2031 to 2050 sounds amazing. But if you assuming the Triangle has three million residents by then (2/3 of whom are working age), that means each resident would “make” $15/year.
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This presentation is coming up with the right hand side cut off?
Any thought or ideas? It looks cool and I would love to read, but…
It came up like that for me, too. The presenter probably used a different aspect ratio for their slides, and whoever put together the PDF of the meeting materials didn’t check and take that into account.
Do you want to take one for the team, and ask them to fix and re-upload it? I personally don’t care since you can make out what it says on most slides.
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GoTriangle is 100% prioritizing the right corridor. I have no doubts about that and am a little confused as to why they keep needing to say it. My concern is that these jobs that “pay less than $40,000 a year” probably don’t follow a traditional office schedule. A lot of lower-paying jobs have odd, inconsistent hours.
Like, they’re so close to a near-perfect transit project. Three distinct downtown areas on a single line, tons of opportunity for development, a heavily-travelled corridor… but they’re still focusing on the 9-5 commuter, which is quickly becoming obsolete.
It’s so frustrating. I mean, I’ll take something over nothing, and it’s fairly easy to scale once the infrastructure is in place. But they should be gunning for consistent all-day service out the gate. It could mean the difference between a core service that quickly becomes the backbone of the entire system and another subpar American commuter service that is only utilized by people who don’t mind using park-and-rides (looking at you, Nashville).
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bEcUz iT dOeSnT gO tO tHe AiRpOrT
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Do you think the scars of the (failed) Durham light rail might be an influence on the need to continually chest pump? Making sure there are NO questions or unforeseen things popping up? Aka we’re all playing from the same sheet music this time and someone like Duke can’t say they were ‘unaware’ of something?
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I think it’s absolutely informing how the commuter rail project is being run. Hell, if they’re not closely learning from every page out of its postmortem, I think they absolutely should be.
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I haven’t been participating in this conversation recently but I think that local transportation planners need to consider the current plans for Atlanta’s MARTA improvements and Boston metro’s considerations of converting diesel cars into electric ones. The worst thing our cities can do is create a transit system consisting of old failures of northern cities and Atlanta.
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Is Atlanta’s transit system really a failure? It’s the 9th largest in the country. Covers the main cores. The reason people say it doesn’t go anywhere is because Cobb and Gwinnett Counties (suburban NIMBYS) keep voting down expansion there. The system itself is pretty great.
As for here - given the current work climate, I don’t know if strictly “commuter rail” is even worth it at this point. We should really be striving as stated above for catching the leisure and other hour trips. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t even see how “commuter rail” by definition just in peaks even moves the needle here.
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I’m all for an all-day service, but I’m still not sure if I’d go so far as to say a commuter-focused service is pointless? There’s a difference between saying that 9-to-5’s will be less dominant versus implying they’re gone for good. Even businesses are split on this issue (not to mention our community), so I don’t think we should jump the gun and put all our eggs in one basket.
There’s a practical issue, too: @colbyjd3 wrote out earlier what a commuter-leaning train schedule could look like, which has 30min headways some of the time. But if we use his schedule but we say trains run at equal intervals all day, you’d be stuck with trains that come every 50min all day with our current budget. I don’t know about you, but I’d find the former train service more convenient, even if it’s just for certain times of the day.
Our region is planning to double the frequency of commuter/regional trains as soon as it gets the chance (so divide the above numbers by two). But we have to go back to the ballot box and double our transit-dedicated sales tax to do that and save up enough money to pull that off. Until the day comes when we do that, isn’t it better to be okay with something in the meantime?
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All-day seems to be the best service, I just can’t see 9-5pm or Peak service. Especially word has it this commuter rail won’t run on Saturdays and Sundays. So we be spending on a nothing burger. IF we focus on peak.
I wasn’t necessarily calling any of those systems a failure, I said that to say that local planners need to consider the problems MARTA and other systems are facing or trying to resolve.
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So much goodness in this post! I agree that we have to get off of the commuter rail mindset and focus on the rail service being a regional service that supports traditional commuter patterns, the travel of non-white collar job workers (odd hours), and leisure users who come into the cities for entertainment, etc. Frankly, I can easily make the case that service industry workers could easily be majority users of the system since their jobs are more likely to be in the centers of the cities, and their salaries are less likely to support them living there, and parking for such employees would be harder to come by as the cities grow larger.
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Turns out GoTriangle quietly released a report on the travel market along the commuter rail line.
…and y’all won’t like they key assumption it lists:
This is frustrating, but I wouldn’t chalk it up to them being incompetent: they know from their own survey last year that non-9-to-5 needs are a weak point in their study.
Also, this study does go above and beyond in clearly showing how people living through different types of inequality (income, race, housing type, car ownership) could be better served by potential stations. It means they are trying to shine a light on low-wage workers and their demographics, though differences in how they work are not on their radar.
This made me wonder if the issue is that they don’t have the data to look into this sort of thing. After all, they talk about their future works in the end of the report:
That new Triangle Regional Travel Demand Model is done, and our planners are asking for feedback on it now through Feb. 15! This model is at the heart of a ton of the evidence behind our region’s transit projects, including this rail proposal. Maybe we should write to them about this specific issue, and ask whether it’ll be considered by this new model?
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From the thread on 401 W. Lane St. that somehow devolved into a conversation about rail construction:
It’s hard to say for different digging methods beyond the contexts of individual projects, but one of the researchers behind the Transit Costs Project noted in his professional blog that cut-and-cover construction is like 50% ($120M) cheaper than boring tunnels, per mile.
Another example: CalTrain, the commuter rail line connecting San Francisco to the rest of Silicon Valley, compared the costs of electrifying their tracks and grade-separating them. Compared to at-grade construction, the average aerial viaduct in its right-of-ways were 3x as expensive, whereas cut-and-cover and boring would’ve been 5x and 7x, respectively. But again: take that with a grain of salt because we’re talking about one of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet.
This study from the influential Eno Center for Transportation also found that the cost of tunneling for rail projects is artificially higher in the US than the rest of the world. This matches up with what tunneling industry experts have noticed have found that the construction itself is only a part of why tunneling is expensive: all of those reports blame sloppy regulations (e.g. NEPA being warped to promote NIMBY interests) and decision-makers being allergic to temporary disruptions (to people’s daily lives as well as to traffic).
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Awesome, as always! Thank you so very much! 
More than just money. The most common complaint about the current Union Station AMTRAK platform is that the access corridor is too long-winded and complicated.
A just barely below the surface rail network means that the travel distance from metro station entrance to train car door is short. Skytrains will need to be built higher vs how deep you have to build an underground metro given an even terrain.
Of course this is ignoring that there’s a bunch of utilities just at the surface that will need to be rerouted.
Yeah, inconvenient alignments can be a huge problem, too, especially if the act of temporarily ripping apart a road will cause problems (including utility, but also drivers and local businesses too). I thought you were talking about the old light rail idea as a whole rather than just the Union Station segment, but I guess my point still stands?