Commuter Rail - Garner to West Durham

[chobbs]

Go Forward released a study last week on the West Durham-Garner commuter rail with lots of information about proposed stations, travel times, and TOD. Worth a read.

Link to Study

[chobbs]

And while I’m sharing PDFs, here is one from 2017 by the DOT and Go Triangle outlining the infrastructure for Raleigh-Wake Forest commuter rail:

Wake Forest to Raleigh Commuter Rail Analysis

[Kanatenah]

Oh just build this already. I could commute from Mid-town to RTP in about 45 minutes on a train. Where I can relax / work / read or do whatever. Versus anywhere from 25 to 60 minutes in bumper to bumper, stop and go traffic on I-40.

Where do I sign up?

[John]

@Kanatenah

Where do I sign up?

You “sign up” when you vote. Find candidates who support the commuter rail.

[chobbs]

Do we have an idea of who those candidates are at this point? This year we get to vote at the municipal level, and while we need a council and mayor who supports commuter rail, decisions are made at the county level, and need support at the state and federal levels to ensure funding.

We should identify the most commuter rail-friendly candidates running for municipal offices across Wake county this year, maybe over in the Raleigh Elections thread.

[Kanatenah]

Agreed - I would love a list of candidates that support this initiative at a City, County and State level. Not sure if one has been put together

[Kevin]

Not so easy. The Evaluation Results will help GoTriangle’s case when they try and move it into Project Development with FTA. It’ll also help move along the NEPA process (and they will need an enormous EIS for this).

[CarnifeX]

That’s a whole lot of acronyms…

FTA: Federal Transit Authority
NEPA: New England Pale Ale
EIS: Environmental Impact Survey

[Kevin]

Man sorry, I do get ahead of myself with the jargon.

[keita]

@CarnifeX

NEPA: New England Pale Ale

It’s really the National Environmental Policy Act. (…though it looks so dense, you’d want a case of that other kind of NEPA to help you get through it all).

@Kanatenah

Oh just build [commuter rail in the Triangle] already.

If only If 45’s “Infrastructure Week” were actually real, then maybe…

but as of today, it seems like any infrastructure project on American soil have to follow federal law and:

0. Perform and fail an environmental assessment (EA). Unless a Categorical Exclusion lets you skip even this step, you’ll probably end up with a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) and be allowed to carry on with doing what you were going to do. But if you find out there’s existing or potential environmental risks with your project, you won’t get a FONSI. Instead, you’ll need to…

1. Write up an EIS. This takes years, up to 300 pages of writing, and 10~30% of an entire project’s budget. It’s this big of a monster simply because of how thorough you need to be, plus how everyone from private citizens and landowners to state/federal governments get a say.

2. Let the public comment on it for a given amount of time. …though not a lot of citizens actually do that, plus project leads don’t seem to be mandated to respond to every single comment?

3. Release a Record of Decision (RoD) to say everyone who cares about the EIS saw it and are cool with it.

(not a lawyer: I just read the EPA’s websites, Wikipedia, and the stuff they linked to)

In general, from seeing what the Durham light rail attempt and the several BRT projects around the Triangle did, it seems like these are the fundamental questions that have to be answered with evidence to get shovels into the ground, in order:

• Do we have a problem that deserves a big solution? (MIS/Major Investment Study)

• What’s our solution, vaguely? (project development) This includes…

  • What ideas do we have, and do they make sense? (AA/alternatives analysis)

  • Is there a need (market) for the(se) solution(s)? (market analysis)

  • What does our idea cost us, aside for money? (EA/EIS - what we’re talking about)

  • What’s our idea, and do we really want to make it happen? (LPA/locally-preferred alternative)

  • Is this on our local to-do list? (adoption into fiscally constrained long-range transportation plan)

• What exactly do we build, and how? (engineering and design)

• Do we have all the money we need to pay for it? (funding commitments)

If we want things to go faster, then this workflow is what you’ll want to address.
(…but also notice that there’s a reason to do all of those things)

[scotchman]

This and all the other rules as well as law suits by citizens, interest groups and so on that will come up with their own reasons that you project violates some sort of right or law or endangers some bug, is why in 1/2 the time that we have bean talking about a 100 mph High Speed train north out of Raleigh, China as build over 16,000 miles of 200+ MPH true High Speed rail.

[RobertSanderlin]

@keita

but also notice that there’s a reason to do all of those things

Yeah, it’s called, the oil industry!!!

[Kanatenah]

Yeah I know a bunch of stuff needs to happen… Part of my frustration is that this has been talked about since we moved here in 2011. And next to nothing has been done.

[orulz]

Great post, @keita ! If an EIS costs 30% of a project’s budget, and the FTA will only fund 50% of total costs, I would say it is certainly not worth the extra complexity, time, and uncertainty. I would say that the FTA new starts program has simultaneously saved and killed transit in the US. (More towards the saving end of things from the 70s thru 90s and more towards the killing end from approximately 2000 on.)

I do remember that at some point when they were planning the budget for the sales tax prior to the referendum, the NCRR commuter rail line was planned and budgeted to happen with no federal or state money, although it seems like they are now going to apply for a federal grant.

[CanesFan]

I would think this project should be able to clear most, if not all of the hurdles listed above, primarily since the right of way largely exists today, as opposed to the light rail project, which would have had a significant amount of new right of way on its proposed alignment. Of course, the devil is always in the details.

[orulz]

The EIS process is basically in the bag for this one, I agree. The point that we may stumble on is “cost effectiveness”. Our region’s transit projects have never scored well from a cost effectiveness standpoint. Downtown Raleigh doesn’t have that many jobs compared to basically anywhere else applying for these FTA grants, even places like Charlotte or Phoenix. And that means we don’t perform well in ridership models, and that means lower ratings for cost effectiveness. Having two CBDs on the line does help, but will it be enough?

It has also always seemed to me that the cost effectiveness rating is an area that might be subject to a bit of political meddling as well…

[keita]

@orulz

Downtown Raleigh doesn’t have that many jobs compared to basically anywhere else applying for these FTA grants, even places like Charlotte or Phoenix. And that means we don’t perform well in ridership models

Do you know how they come up with these models? I’ve always been curious about this, since it seems really difficult to find a way to validate a model like this (at least, without invading a lot of people’s privacy).

[keita]

Now that I finally read the paper (thanks for the link!)… (drum roll, please)

@conclusions -but abridged

• While this study looked at the FTA measures and criteria, the project will need additional
  evaluation that can be used for FTA scoring. That will be accomplished in the next phase of
  studies. However, this study did produce results that support further analysis
• Travel times for CRT in the corridor are faster and more reliable than longer distance driving and bus routes
• The operating scenario providing service every 30 minutes in the peak periods and limited service in the off-peak periods of mid-day and evening service was the most productive among the scenarios studied
• All 16 potential candidate station zones are appropriate for further analysis
• Ridership results are consistent with similar statistics for recent commuter rail systems
• Additional analysis is needed to refine ridership estimates and to identify infrastructure required to support the CRT operating plans studied in this evaluation.

Highlights from this paper (because we all know most people aren’t going to read the whole thing):

Note for Table 10: more negative = commuter rail gets there even faster than car

@on what is(n't) defined by this study

[S]pecific station locations are not identified and are subject to future studies to determine the actual location of the station platforms. […] In future phases, alternative sites for the stations within the candidate zone (or additional candidate zones) will be identified and evaluated in terms of physical design constraints, access to local land uses, and operational analysis with the other rail services within the corridor.

@on what defines Ease of Access

[Ease of access] measures the number of intersections within a one half-mile of each CRT station candidate zone to identify the pedestrian accessibility of the area surrounding each station. The one half-mile buffer is measured using the street network, not straight-line distance to incorporate natural and built barriers into the analysis.

Note for Table 15: LBAR = legally-binding affordability-restricted area. It’s interesting to see the differences between the areas that have each ratings…

@on what it takes for a 3 out of 3 rating for Low-Income Access

Any portion of the buffer including areas with >80% poverty populations
Or
≥ half the buffer area with >50% poverty populations

@Why the study looked at ridership as a ratio

This measure was chosen to evaluate the relative performance of the scenarios and not produce a specific estimate of daily ridership. The refinement of the ridership estimates will be done in future phases of the study [but we assumed three cars per set in our results].

[…]

The term “vehicle revenue hour of service” [means] the number of commuter rail passenger car (defined as a vehicle) hours of revenue service. This is not the number of train hours as a train is comprised of multiple passenger cars or vehicles.

[…]

[Commuter train services we compared our math against] ranged from a low of 21 for the A-Train in Denton, Texas, to a high of 64 for the MetroRail in Austin, Texas.

[Nickster]

@Kanatenah

Part of my frustration is that this has been talked about since we moved here in 2011. And next to nothing has been done.

They were talking about light rail back in the late 90s when I first came to Raleigh. It ultimately got axed. Then the more recent plan(s) have evolved. I have decided to not get my hopes up on any kind of transit plan until I actually construction start.

[KenAA]

I’ve never been able to buy the reasons for excluding RDU from any durham/raleigh rail line.

I think any plan that doesn’t connect to RDU is going to be derided by a large portion of the public and help it to go down in flames like all the others. must.connect.to.RDU