tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10085682416658317152024-03-13T16:42:57.795-05:00Hi / Zeph / 400Covering rail projects along the Twin Cities – Milwaukee – Chicago Corridor, and delving into the history of the <i>Hiawathas</i>, <i>Zephyrs</i>, and <i>400s</i> which raced through this region in excess of 100 mph in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.comBlogger204125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-5914069927717507952022-12-08T16:11:00.001-06:002022-12-08T16:11:09.316-06:00Another try at passenger service to Madison<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgq6uXLSPcNvGS4e7ePAWtnf_arfml4n3muJ2phGqcYNadmTKy-NShFuzIztD5dF-UorH7BYyG6BVkFOfX11gJmy7OBFj-RIEqLO93oV74oBtkp5X5PF0nrhV37aRVNL8_NBYCv6c839RyG7gcHzVINo0hIj4RtlILN1W0_tW3Qfs--hQ2c5HjIJYAGA/s894/potential_station_locations.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Map of potential station locations in Madison, with six segments of track highlighted." border="0" data-original-height="894" data-original-width="684" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgq6uXLSPcNvGS4e7ePAWtnf_arfml4n3muJ2phGqcYNadmTKy-NShFuzIztD5dF-UorH7BYyG6BVkFOfX11gJmy7OBFj-RIEqLO93oV74oBtkp5X5PF0nrhV37aRVNL8_NBYCv6c839RyG7gcHzVINo0hIj4RtlILN1W0_tW3Qfs--hQ2c5HjIJYAGA/w245-h320/potential_station_locations.png" width="245" /></a></div>The Wisconsin State Journal reports on <a href="https://madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/madison-wants-passenger-rail-residents-hear-what-could-make-or-break-amtrak-options/article_60378ede-1d9f-52b9-85bc-4a4f35c1f879.html">another study for linking Madison with Amtrak</a>, with a selection process beginning that is examining six possible station locations. This of course comes a dozen years after the old high(er)-speed rail plan for connecting Madison to Milwaukee and Chicago was killed off at the end of Jim Doyle's term as governor, just prior to Scott Walker taking office following the 2010 elections.<p></p><p></p><p>Four of the six options are on the east side of the city, which are likely the most practical since they could potentially allow through-running on existing tracks to the Twin Cities that would still mostly follow the existing Amtrak <i>Empire Builder</i> route. Running through on the Madison isthmus would require either continuing west along the Wisconsin River corridor to Prairie du Chien (south of Amtrak's current routing) and north along the Mississippi, or building a connection west of Madison to turn north and rejoin the Canadian Pacific tracks Amtrak uses.</p><p>This appears to be <a href="https://www.cityofmadison.com/news/passenger-rail-station-study-kick-off-meeting">a study being led by the City of Madison</a> rather than WisDOT, and it doesn't seem to be tied to any actual plans for new train service. Instead, this looks like it's just to ensure the city has good plans in place if and when a rail service initiative actually happens, such as one using funding from the recent federal infrastructure bill. (Map from the city's site.)<br /></p>Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-15173806710078408082022-11-21T07:03:00.003-06:002022-11-21T07:03:50.818-06:00Video tour of the Autumn Colors Express<p>Mike on the DownieLive YouTube channel got a ride on a deadhead of the railcars
used in the 2022 <i><a href="https://www.autumncolorexpresswv.com/">Autumn Colors Express</a></i>, including the <a href="https://261.com/">Milwaukee 261 / Railroading Heritage of Midwest America</a> group's <i>Super Dome</i> and the <i>Cedar
Rapids</i> skytop lounge car. He got a trip from Chicago out to Huntington, West Virginia. The video includes clips from cars throughout the train, from historic <i>20th Century Limited</i> cars near the locomotive end to the 261 group's cars at the tail end.<br /></p><p>I think this is the first video I've actually watched from this channel, but I've seen others from it recommended to me, including one on the <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzHAGQhLfG8">Rocky Mountaineer</a></i> in Canada.<br /></p>
<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YSkysFOkupI" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-64736780934998673372022-10-28T12:56:00.000-05:002022-10-28T12:56:11.907-05:00Twitter break<p>Since this site is linked from my bio on Twitter, I'll mention that I'm taking some time off from it. The election had already been making me have to keep it at arm's length, and the acquisition worries the hell out of me. For the moment, I'm planning to be off for about two weeks.</p><p>It's been the best place to get breaking news, but has always been a firehose, too. It's easy to spend 3-4 hours there per day, but it also keeps my brain in a jumble all the time with the randomness of what I see. I'm not sure if I'll return to blogging, but getting away from Twitter for a while would help me get back to longer-form thinking, rather than trying to fit things into 280 characters.</p><p>I hate to have to explicitly say it, but I hope anyone reading this will be voting for Democrats or the most progressive candidates that they can during this election cycle. The aim of this site had originally been to look forward to a renewed future of rail travel from funding put forth in 2008-2009, but unfortunately the Republican backlash of 2010 stopped a great deal of that forward momentum from happening, and it took me years to realize how much things had gotten stymied.</p><p>Building an effective and efficient transportation system requires looking past color boundaries and political differences to work to serve everyone. I do not wish to punish people who vote differently than me or who have a different background, but it's clear there are far too many people largely congregating on the Republican side who do feel that way. That has to be stopped, or only tragedy will ensue.</p><p>As for a possibly post-Twitter world, I'm not sure where I may end up. I'd like to post here again, and I hope to return to being more active on Flickr. The local UrbanMSP forum and Streets.mn blog may get more traffic from me too. I also have some long-lingering electronics projects I'd like to get back to, such as ever-present ideas for cheap real-time transit departure displays. And I need to do something that lets me see people in the real world, as we live with the effects of the pandemic that caused so much isolation.</p><p>Reverse and remove spaces for mail: m o c . l i a m g @ 6 d a l u m<br /></p>Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-72749701161700016802018-03-01T09:30:00.000-06:002018-03-02T10:29:24.673-06:00Returning to the rails in South Dakota<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/QYT9cW" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="sd-existing-cities-2017-01-06 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/585/32148826956_57606c7c24_z.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">South Dakota is the only state among the lower 48 that has never had Amtrak service. The last regularly-operated passenger trains ran left the state in 1969.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Following an extended hiatus to surf the torrent of government news these days, I'm back with another set of maps to explain the current situation with passenger rail in the U.S. and a possible vision for the future. This time, I'm focusing on our neighbor to the southwest, South Dakota. For my previous posts on this topic, as well as some in-progress maps for other states, <a href="http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html">see this list</a>. Below, I'll talk about former service in the state and several suggestions on what I feel are the best opportunities to bring it back. <br />
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The current status for passenger rail in South Dakota is simple to convey: There isn't any. There is at least one heritage railroad operation (the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills_Central_Railroad">Black Hills Central Railroad</a> is most well-known), but there aren't any true intercity train routes, making South Dakota unique among the states. The nearest Amtrak routes are the <i>Empire Builder</i> running to the north through Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, and the <i>California Zephyr</i> running to the south through Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa.<br />
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South Dakota is the only state among the lower 48 that has never had Amtrak service. The last passenger route ended operation in 1969, two years before Amtrak took over the most of the remaining passenger routes in the country. Wyoming, South Dakota's neighbor to the west, is the only other state among the lower 48 to lack passenger trains today, though it did have them for several years in the Amtrak era when the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Zephyr">San Francisco Zephyr</a></i> ran through the state. Even Alaska has passenger service through the Alaska Railroad.<br />
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Like other parts of the country, South Dakota's rail system peaked in the early 20th century. About 4,420 miles of railroad have <a href="http://www.sdsrm.org/uploads/4/8/5/4/48543011/sdrrtimeline.pdf">been constructed in the state</a> through its history, but most of that has been abandoned. The state still had 1,753 miles of railroad <a href="https://www.aar.org/Style%20Library/railroads_and_states/dist/data/pdf/State%20rankings.pdf">as of 2012</a>, a little over half as much as North Dakota, and about 39% of the rail mileage of Minnesota. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ETHFKR0WIoI/Woxb_WYaVVI/AAAAAAAAIRw/PoLn1lqexfQSKj6fQB0hiatlRyTz3RmkQCLcBGAs/s1600/south-dakota-rail-map-2014.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1031" data-original-width="1600" height="412" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ETHFKR0WIoI/Woxb_WYaVVI/AAAAAAAAIRw/PoLn1lqexfQSKj6fQB0hiatlRyTz3RmkQCLcBGAs/s640/south-dakota-rail-map-2014.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Map of South Dakota's rail system as of 2014 (<a href="http://www.sdsrm.org/uploads/4/8/5/4/48543011/sd_rail_map.pdf">source</a>)</td></tr>
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Sioux Falls is South Dakota's largest city, but unlike other states which tend to have many routes radiating from the most-populated places, there are relatively few ways to get directly in and out of the city today. The most significant existing east-west rail routes pass to the north or south, and even in the past, significant long-distance routes into and through the state bypassed Sioux Falls.<br />
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For instance, the Chicago and North Western Railway ran passenger service from Chicago as far west as Rapid City, near the Black Hills, but their route went north of Sioux Falls, through Brookings, Huron, and Pierre. That route had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochester_400">passenger service into South Dakota until 1960</a>, when it was cut back to Mankato, Minnesota, and then it ceased passenger operation entirely in 1964.<br />
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One of the last lines to serve the state ran even farther north. It was a shortened route on the former Milwaukee Road transcontinental service to the Pacific Northwest, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympian_Hiawatha"><i>Olympian Hiawatha</i></a>. That train, which once ran from Chicago to Seattle/Tacoma, was cut back to Deer Lodge, Montana in 1961, then cut back again to Aberdeen, SD in 1964 (the largest city on the route between the Twin Cities and Billings, Montana).<br />
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With such a small endpoint, that service only lasted another 5 years. Passenger service exited South Dakota entirely in April 1969. There was also a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad line that operated through the extreme southwest corner of the state via Edgemont, and it ended passenger service through the state a few months later in August.<br />
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It appears that the last train to serve Sioux Falls was a branch of the Milwaukee Road's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_(MILW_train)"><i>Arrow</i></a> service that primarily ran from Chicago to Omaha, Nebraska. The line <a href="http://www.streamlinerschedules.com/concourse/track4/arrow195707.html">branched off</a> in the small town of Manilla, Iowa. It dropped service to Sioux Falls in 1965, then was discontinued entirely two years later.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/PKTpFA" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="sd-full-cities-2017-01-08 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/402/31345407804_937e98fc0a_z.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A suggested system of routes to connect all cities larger than 5,000 people in South Dakota and into surrounding states (<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1IcJiEXcF4rZWr5TlAWcMG9EbYKE">zoom in on South Dakota</a>, or <a href="http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/p/state-and-provincial-rail-maps.html">see other states here</a>).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It's a bit strange to me that South Dakota was stuck with this fate. I think it has a lot to do with a Chicago-centric focus by the freight railroads, neglecting the need for more local travel. According to a <a href="http://www.streamlinerschedules.com/concourse/track4/arrow195707.html">1957 timetable</a>, it took 17 hours and 25 minutes to take the <i>Arrow</i> from Chicago to Sioux Falls, on a line that skipped past both Des Moines and Omaha and went through much smaller communities instead.<br />
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South Dakota's population has grown by about 48% from 1970 to today, so the overall travel market is significantly bigger than it was when the last services disappeared from the state.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LjX86nRcYvg/V6fVuz46maI/AAAAAAAAHZ8/TTP4lSWpaAkQ0DwOc7pHTG9esMMx_SM1gCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/railmap-legend-2016-08-07.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="136" data-original-width="365" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LjX86nRcYvg/V6fVuz46maI/AAAAAAAAHZ8/TTP4lSWpaAkQ0DwOc7pHTG9esMMx_SM1gCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/railmap-legend-2016-08-07.png" /></a></div>
Above, I have a map of routes that I think would be good to look at reactivating with passenger service. All of the blue lines are existing freight routes, most of which had some form of passenger service in the past. The purple routes are mostly along former rail lines that have now been abandoned, but I invented a few routes that would be brand-new.<br />
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Unlike the cities in <a href="https://streets.mn/2016/12/12/potential-paths-for-passenger-rail-in-north-dakota/">North Dakota</a>, which are mostly laid out along two major east-west lines, the communities in South Dakota are much more scattered around, making it difficult to thread a single route through multiple cities. In mapping out possibilities, I've tried to stick to existing rail corridors as much as possible, followed by former routes, and adding routes of my own invention as a last resort. The scattered pattern of cities in South Dakota has made this one of the more challenging maps for me to put together. <br />
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Rather than relying on long-distance routes going all the way to Chicago, I feel it would be better for new services to focus on shorter routes, especially those that have relatively large cities within about 6-8 hours of travel time from Sioux Falls. A couple longer routes might also make sense.<br />
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High-priority corridors would include Sioux Falls to Omaha via Sioux City, Sioux Falls to the Twin Cities (a few routes available, my preference would be to go via Mankato), and Sioux Falls to Fargo (the best existing route is via Willmar, Minnesota, though it could be shortened somewhat by building some lines closer to the Interstate 29 corridor).<br />
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Rapid City in the western part of the state is South Dakota's second-largest city, and is a major gateway to the Black Hills region. This part of the state is closer to Denver than it is to the Twin Cities, so service heading south/southwest toward Colorado would be good to examine, as well as connections to Cheyenne, Wyoming, that state's capital and largest city. The rail line through Pierre and Rapid City comes to an end at Colony, Wyoming (not shown on the map), which makes it impossible to directly reach cities farther west. I suggest building a new line from around Whitewood, South Dakota to Moorcroft, Wyoming (a distance of about 80 miles), which would allow direct access from the Rapid City area into southern Montana.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/24FQiKc" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="sd-railmap-sioux-falls-2018-02-25 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4654/40488531261_962e7c567b_z.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Close-up of suggested routes around Sioux Falls, including parts of South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska. Unfortunately, direct routes to many of the nearest significant cities have seen major abandonments.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Within South Dakota, there's some potential for routes radiating outward from Sioux Falls to smaller cities, though they would have to be mostly rebuilt or built from scratch. Lines southwest from Sioux Falls to Yankton and west to Mitchell have been almost completely ripped up, and it appears that there has never been a line going all the way from Sioux Falls north to Brookings. Trains could get about 60% of the way by following existing and abandoned track, but the remaining part would need to be built new.<br />
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There's never been a direct line between Mitchell and Huron either. Instead, there's a route that runs somewhat west through the town of Wolsey. A more direct link would be better, though a bus or rail shuttle between Wolsey and Wolsey and Huron could be used as an interim solution. A former route between Brookings and Watertown that looks appealing has also been abandoned.<br />
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Out west, the story is somewhat better, since Rapid City directly connects to Sturgis and Belle Fourche. The nearby town of Spearfish is the largest city in South Dakota that lacks any sort of rail service. It could be connected by the potential new route between Whitewood, SD and Moorcroft, WY, that I suggested earlier.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TCDf5dmH_iE/WpTVsyvht4I/AAAAAAAAIUw/SlDSeOJP4MMC5M3cxrAqarktLgFu5fYJwCLcBGAs/s1600/sd-population-2015.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="808" data-original-width="718" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TCDf5dmH_iE/WpTVsyvht4I/AAAAAAAAIUw/SlDSeOJP4MMC5M3cxrAqarktLgFu5fYJwCLcBGAs/s400/sd-population-2015.png" width="355" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The places larger than 5,000 people in South Dakota add up to about 51% of the state's population.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Smack in the middle of South Dakota is the state capital, Pierre. It is the second-smallest state capital in the country by population, with around 14,000 residents. Only Montpelier, Vermont is smaller, though amazingly enough, Montpelier has Amtrak service. Of course, New England has many small towns, so Montpelier is far less isolated. Pierre is more than 115 miles from Huron, the nearest town of more than 5,000 people. It obviously doesn't have any Amtrak service today, though the city does rely on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service">Essential Air Service</a> subsidies to connect airline passengers to Denver.<br />
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The small populations of Pierre and Montpelier are one reason why I have used a threshold of 5,000 residents when making my rail maps. I think state capitals are places that are significant enough to warrant rail service, even if such service might not pencil out in standard benefit-cost analyses. That said, it makes sense to set up the best service possible. Since South Dakota's two largest cities are on opposite sides of the state, it would make sense to have a line running from Rapid City to Sioux Falls via Pierre.<br />
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However, as I mentioned above, there are relatively poor connections into Sioux Falls along east-west routes. The current line through Pierre is operated by the <a href="https://www.gwrr.com/railroads/north_america/rapid-city-pierre--eastern-railroad">Rapid City, Pierre and Eastern Railroad</a> (RCP&E), but the shortest path from Sioux Falls from Pierre by existing rails today is a strange zig-zag path to Wolsey, then running on BNSF Railway tracks south and east through Mitchell to the small town of Canton by the Iowa border before making a sharp 300°-plus turn back to enter the city via the suburb of Harrisburg.<br />
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At least one significant segment of rail would need to be built or rebuilt to make Sioux Falls directly accessible from the west or northwest. One interesting possibility is to use a line that roughly parallels Interstate 90, which is operated by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Southern_Railway">Dakota Southern Railway</a>. The rail line is owned by the state, but operation of trains on the route is contracted out. There has never been a direct connection to Pierre from that line, but making one would leverage state-owned infrastructure.<br />
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However, using that line would require building new tracks both near Pierre and again between Mitchell and Sioux Falls (a little over 100 miles total), so a route from Pierre via the RCP&E is probably more practical. A former rail bed running 30 miles from Lake Preston (about halfway between Huron and Brookings) down to Madison is probably a better solution for connecting Pierre to South Dakota's largest city.<br />
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The line through Pierre could also be used as a through route for trains running from the Twin Cities to Denver. Notably, Denver is the second-most common destination for travelers flying out of MSP Airport, after Chicago. At about 1,000 miles, it could take 16 to 20 hours for a conventional train service to travel the distance, so a train may not draw many travelers going end-to-end, though it could be a good alternative for people only going 1/3 to 1/2 the distance. For instance, flying from Pierre to the Twin Cities is time-consuming today, taking at least 5 hours, since all travelers must go through Denver first.<br />
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Another interesting long-distance possibility is to restore passenger service along the former Milwaukee Road <i>Olympian Hiawatha</i> route through northern South Dakota, southwestern North Dakota, and into Montana. Unfortunately, this is a low-population route, but it would provide coverage through a little-served area and would be an alternative for anyone traveling from the Twin Cities into southern Montana, though that would be a fairly low priority, in my book.<br />
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If all of the lines I suggest in my map were to be put to use, about 1,525 miles of existing track would see passenger service reactivated, and another 375 miles would be built or rebuilt, for a system total of about 1,900 miles. However, my map includes some redundant or indirect routes that could be eliminated to shrink down the total. <br />
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Adding passenger rail service is a challenge everywhere in the U.S., and South Dakota has some of the biggest challenges due to being a low-population state that has been without passenger trains for nearly 50 years. Still, I think there's a strong case for at least linking Sioux Falls into the Amtrak system. With some effort, a good in-state rail system could be built, likely better than what had been available for state residents even at the height of rail travel in the country. A focus on short- to medium-distance travel would likely bring the greatest benefit, though it will also require a lot of cooperation surrounding states to fully exploit the possibilities that exist today.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-15625038324473891122017-05-08T10:00:00.000-05:002017-05-08T10:45:41.532-05:00The stagnant investment in Amtrak, by station count<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WM3qRAkI6hY/WQ87MweaCUI/AAAAAAAAHpY/ZAVlpi-W0nEjh3kxyrVLPAA6mqpE_lJUwCLcB/s1600/number-of-stations-1984-2014-amtrak-and-transit-2.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WM3qRAkI6hY/WQ87MweaCUI/AAAAAAAAHpY/ZAVlpi-W0nEjh3kxyrVLPAA6mqpE_lJUwCLcB/s640/number-of-stations-1984-2014-amtrak-and-transit-2.png" width="640" /></a><br />
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Amtrak, the country's intercity passenger rail company, has had its funding stuck in the doldrums ever since it was founded in 1971. There have been sporadic bursts of money to the government-sponsored company, mostly to invest in new locomotives and train cars and the occasional upgrade to the tracks on particular routes. However, there hasn't been a sustained effort to repair and expand underlying infrastructure on a system-wide basis. This is reflected in the fact that the number of stations served by Amtrak has barely changed over time, in stark contrast to the growth in urban rail systems over the same period.<br />
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The graph above shows the <a href="https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_07.html">number of stations</a> for both Amtrak and the nation's urban rail systems from 1984 to 2014. Over the course of 30 years, urban transit systems grew from 1,822 stations to 3,355, an increase of 84%. Growth in urban systems been pretty linear, with about 51 stations added per year on average. <br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hpimkNSZWLY/WQ87PqsQK_I/AAAAAAAAHpc/LOLb4N9o42YFnn2qnflNakIOg6HzJuiBwCLcB/s1600/number-of-stations-1984-2014-amtrak-only-2.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hpimkNSZWLY/WQ87PqsQK_I/AAAAAAAAHpc/LOLb4N9o42YFnn2qnflNakIOg6HzJuiBwCLcB/s640/number-of-stations-1984-2014-amtrak-only-2.png" width="640" /></a><br />
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Meanwhile, Amtrak began the period with 510 stations and ended with just 518, an aggregate increase of just 1.6%. Amtrak's station count has fluctuated more than that over time, with the system reaching a low of 487 stations in 1987 and attaining a peak of 542 stations in 1996. It's a bit difficult to explain why Amtrak has been stuck in this rut for so many years while there has been a sustained investment in local rail service within metropolitan areas, but there has been a lack of coordination for new or restored routes in most of the country.<br />
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The United States' population grew from 238.5 million to 318.9 million over that period of time, so Amtrak's reach should have enlarged too. If Amtrak had grown at the same rate as our urban transit systems, there would have been about 940 stations in their system as of 2014. That doesn't necessarily mean the system would have 84% more mileage, though: One of Amtrak's biggest failings is that most routes only have one train per direction per day. Increasing service frequency could allow a mix of local all-stop trains and faster limited-stop trains along a single route, with the local trains potentially serving new/restored infill stations along the way. (Many Amtrak trains today are essentially "hybrids" of what used to exist, stopping more frequently than old express services, but less often than what locals used to do.)<br />
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Each new or enhanced route requires the involvement of multiple cities and metropolitan areas, so it needs to at least be coordinated at a state level, and many good potential routes (even if they're fairly short) are spread across two or more states. Amtrak is structured so that individual states are responsible for planning and finding funding for routes that are less than about 700 miles (following legislative changes passed in 2008, the states can still get federal funding for building lines, but operational costs must be borne by the states for these shorter "corridor" routes). That creates a disincentive for the company to pursue new routes on its own, since adding even a single new train on a 700+ mile route is very expensive (hundreds of millions of dollars if the <a href="https://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=Page&pagename=am%2FLayout&cid=1241245669222">PRIIA studies from 2009</a> are any guide).<br />
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What's the right way to coordinate new intercity train lines in the country? The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Association_of_State_Highway_and_Transportation_Officials">American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials</a> (AASHTO) played a critical role in organizing planning across states when the highway system was developed (back before "and Transportation" was added to the group's name), but it's not clear if they've ever had much of a hand in planning rail service. Their <a href="http://rail.transportation.org/Pages/rail_meetings.aspx">Standing Committee on Rail Transportation</a> meets once a year for what they describe as a "debrief and networking meeting", which sounds like a very passive group (plus, the committee only has members from 33 states versus the 46 that are currently served by Amtrak). AASHTO should take their interstate coordinating role seriously and reexamine the potential for intercity rail across the U.S.<br />
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Here in Minnesota, we've also had a very weak structure for coordinating intercity rail plans. The state's <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerrail/contact.html">Passenger Rail Office</a> has been underfunded and understaffed, requiring a heavy reliance on outside consultants rather than MnDOT employees tasked with working in the best interest of the state. The Republican-held state legislature is attempting to entirely defund the office as part of the state budget, even though it has only represented a tiny percentage of <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/funding/">MnDOT expenditures</a> over its existence (a couple million dollars per year), and it's particularly galling to have it happen when the state is projected to have a $1.65 billion surplus anyway.<br />
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The employees of the Passenger Rail Office also have an essential role in helping lead monthly meetings of the <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/passengerrailforum/">Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation Forum</a>, composed of stakeholders along the routes that are supposed to see passenger service added under the <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/railplan/">state rail plan</a>. Defunding the Passenger Rail Office would probably stall out plans for future lines within the state, and we're far behind where we should be on implementing that plan.<br />
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Intercity trains don't get the same attention that urban rail systems do, and I find that to be a shame, since I think it makes it a lot harder for many people to give up their cars, even in cities with good transit service. I personally hold on to my car due to my need to travel to areas in or near Fargo, Eau Claire, and Rochester for family and work, and all of those places would get rail service if we implemented the plan that's been on the books since 2010.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-1764824139360872292016-12-08T10:18:00.000-06:002016-12-13T08:27:21.528-06:00Potential paths for passenger rail in North DakotaMy last few posts have looked at the rail networks in <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/08/23/a-broader-look-at-passenger-rail-opportunities-in-minnesota/">Minnesota</a> and <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/11/04/many-prospects-for-passenger-rail-in-wisconsin/">Wisconsin</a> to look for opportunities for adding passenger service where little or none exists today. I also examined the system in <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/10/06/lessons-from-norway-for-minnesota-passenger-rail/">Norway</a>, a country with a similar population to Minnesota and Wisconsin, yet with a much more functional and robust intercity public transportation system than can be found almost anywhere in the United States.<br />
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This time I'm taking a look at North Dakota, one of our neighbors to the west and a state which also lies along the route of the <i>Empire Builder</i>, Amtrak's only service through our two states. Despite having only about 1/7th the population of Minnesota, North Dakota still has a huge 3,480-mile rail network <a href="https://www.dot.nd.gov/divisions/exec/docs/transportation-hdbk.pdf">as of 2014</a>. That's 78% the size of Minnesota's system (4,444 miles), 97% as big as Wisconsin's (3,600 miles), and 137% the size of Norway's rail network (2,540 miles). That's really remarkable for a place with only about 757,000 people.<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/PSzngk"><img alt="combined-2-existing-cities by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c6.staticflickr.com/6/5583/31421103125_ecc225edc6_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>Map of existing passenger train service in North Dakota and nearby areas.</i></small><br />
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The map above shows the route the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Builder"><i>Empire Builder</i></a> takes as it crosses through the region, with markers showing cities of 5,000 people and up. Only 12 cities in North Dakota are that large:<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: solid 1px black; clear: both;"><tbody>
<tr><th>City</th><th>Population<br />
(2015 est.)</th><th>Note</th></tr>
<tr><td>Fargo</td><td align="right">115,863</td><td>Served by Amtrak</td></tr>
<tr><td>Bismarck</td><td align="right">68,896</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Grand Forks</td><td align="right">56,057</td><td>Served by Amtrak</td></tr>
<tr><td>Minot</td><td align="right">47,997</td><td>Served by Amtrak</td></tr>
<tr><td>West Fargo</td><td align="right">31,771</td><td>Fargo metro area</td></tr>
<tr><td>Williston</td><td align="right">24,562</td><td>Served by Amtrak</td></tr>
<tr><td>Dickinson</td><td align="right">22,322</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Mandan</td><td align="right">20,820</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Jamestown</td><td align="right">15,446</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Wahpeton</td><td align="right">7,903</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>Devils Lake</td><td align="right">7,288</td><td>Served by Amtrak</td></tr>
<tr><td>Valley City</td><td align="right">6,676</td><td><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Amtrak serves five of those cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Devils Lake, Minot, and Williston) plus two other smaller towns (Rugby, pop. 2,846, and Stanley, pop. 2,721).<br />
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The sparse nature of North Dakota is one reason why I used the 5,000-person population as a threshold for making my maps for this series of articles—you need to go that low to get more than ten cities of sufficient size in this part of the country. Remarkably, the twelve cities in that table account for 56% of the people in North Dakota (you only need to go down to number 8, Mandan, to exceed 50%), showing that even heavily rural states still concentrate people into a small number of places.<br />
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Incidentally, the encampments of people who have been demonstrating against the Dakota Access Pipeline could add up to another "city" meeting the threshold for my maps. Tribal leaders said that the camps had <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38191311">seen more than 10,000 people</a>, though they're likely shrinking now following the announcement on December 4th that an easement had been denied for the pipeline's final segment. The camps are located along the Cannonball River near where it meets the Missouri River (about halfway between Bismarck and the border with South Dakota).<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-e8uFkIwK6xU/WESezZ0PfFI/AAAAAAAAHgo/yYIKsv6-_5Usmga23xzypUcgOdRFB92LACLcB/s1600/nd-2007-rail-plan-map.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="380" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-e8uFkIwK6xU/WESezZ0PfFI/AAAAAAAAHgo/yYIKsv6-_5Usmga23xzypUcgOdRFB92LACLcB/s640/nd-2007-rail-plan-map.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Map of North Dakota's rail system, from the <a href="https://www.dot.nd.gov/divisions/planning/docs/railplan.pdf">2007 state rail plan</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The huge existing freight network in North Dakota provides a lot of possibilities for rebuilding a passenger rail system in the state. Conveniently, the larger cities are mostly laid out along two corridors: The existing <i>Empire Builder</i> line, closely mirrored by U.S. Highway 2, and another corridor heading straight west from Fargo, once operated by the Northern Pacific Railway, now mirrored by Interstate 94.<br />
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Northern Pacific operated a few passenger trains on their mainline, one of which was the <i>North Coast Limited</i>, one of the many routes that was discontinued in 1971 when Amtrak took over nearly all intercity train service in the country. However, an "experimental" train service that Amtrak called the <i>North Coast Hiawatha</i> was brought back on the same route later that same year. Unfortunately, it was only a half-hearted attempt, since the train only ran three times weekly per direction for most of its existence (aside for a few peak summertime travel seasons when it operated daily). The line was finally dropped in 1979 after a round of federal budget cuts for Amtrak.<br />
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That's likely the best corridor to add back as a passenger line in the state, since it connects several larger communities. <a href="http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/2011/02/continued-interest-in-north-coast.html">Amtrak studied restoring the <i>North Coast Hiawatha</i></a> back in 2009, something that was mandated under the previous year's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Of course, no funding for implementation ever followed, so the report is now gathering dust. Nonetheless, it gives some guidance as to what the challenges would be for bringing back service along that corridor.<br />
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Restoring passenger trains on the line would reconnect Fargo to Valley City, Jamestown, Bismarck, Mandan, and Dickinson, and it would be worth considering having it head south from Fargo to reach Breckenridge/Wahpeton to completely reconnect the state's larger towns.<br />
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However, it would be best to go beyond simply adding that second route through the state. Today's <i>Empire Builder</i> only serves Fargo and Grand Forks in the <a href="https://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/221/686/Empire-Builder-Schedule-080116,0.pdf">extreme early morning hours</a>, and <a href="http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/images/blogimages/2009/10/16/1255727571-northcoasthiawathaservicestudy.pdf">Amtrak's <i>North Coast Hiawatha </i>study</a> also planned to stop in most North Dakota destinations between midnight and 7 a.m., which is not a pleasant time to be arriving or departing. Proper service during daylight hours would be much better for the state.<br />
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I think it would be best to add a few more routes to build up a mesh of lines. Below is a map of routes in North Dakota and nearby areas that I think would likely have the greatest chance of success, if proper investments were made and trains ran a few times a day, and not just at night or early in the morning:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/PPpsfN"><img alt="nd-combined-2-full-cities by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c3.staticflickr.com/6/5538/31385219306_be5da080e7_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of suggested improvements in North Dakota. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1oEyDb3ZCtofm52DnCKTjnBZYYPk">Zoomable version</a>.</i></small><br />
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If there were only the two east-west routes, people wishing to travel from Bismarck to Minot (for instance) would have to circle all the way through Fargo and Grand Forks, or possibly go west to somewhere in Montana in order to make a transfer. However, there are some decent options for shortcuts that could be considered.<br />
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On this map, I included a route from Jamestown to Minot which would help with that situation. Transferring in Jamestown would shorten a Bismarck–Minot trip by about 210 miles. There's also a rail line heading almost straight north from Bismarck and nearly reaching Minot, but it falls about 27 miles short. Filling in that gap would shorten a Bismarck–Minot trip by over 340 miles.<br />
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I also tried to make a few reasonable guesses as to what might work for cross-border lines into South Dakota and Canada. Much of South Dakota's population is in the eastern 1/3rd of the state, so it makes the most sense to try and run lines south from Fargo, Wahpeton, and Jamestown. However, significant pieces of the lines that formerly ran north and south have been abandoned, so they would be more costly to bring back.<br />
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A former transcontinental route built by the Milwaukee Road cuts through the southwestern corner of North Dakota. That's a fairly low-population route, and would probably be a low priority, but it would help connectivity through Aberdeen, South Dakota, that state's third-largest city.<br />
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Fargo and Grand Forks line up well for facilitating a corridor toward Winnipeg in Manitoba. Unfortunately, a short stretch of track that used to run straight into Canada near Pembina, ND has been abandoned. I included a suggestion in the map to build a short new connection via the existing border crossing between Noyes, Minnesota and Emerson, Manitoba. Reaching Winnipeg would allow a connection to Canada's<i> </i>passenger rail system, such as it is. Two services currently operate to and through Winnipeg: Via Rail's Toronto-to-Vancouver <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_%28train%29"><i>Canadian</i></a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnipeg%E2%80%93Churchill_train">Winnipeg-Churchill train</a>, which ends in a small town far north on the shore of Hudson Bay. Those services only operate two or three times per week, however.<br />
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Further west, Canadian Pacific has a mainline connection running from Minot northwest into Saskatchewan. The line heads toward Moose Jaw, though building a stretch of connecting track to another parallel line about 30 miles away could redirect trains to the provincial capital of Regina, a significantly larger destination.<br />
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Finally, one major disadvantage with the existing freight network in North Dakota is that it's primarily designed for feeding agricultural products east and south toward the Twin Cities and Chicago. There aren't many lines that that cut against that grain. I included a suggestion for a line running northeast from Jamestown, which could shorten journeys for people traveling from Bismarck to Grand Forks, for instance, without forcing a transfer in Fargo. However, a route like that would probably be among the lowest priorities for anyone wishing to rebuild a passenger system in the state.<br />
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The <i>Empire Builder</i> runs a little over 420 miles through North Dakota. Adding back the <i>North Coast Hiawatha</i> route would add another 374 miles to the roster of active passenger track in the state. All told, my suggested network would add another 939 miles of service along existing track, plus building or restoring tracks along another 194 miles. Along with the existing <i>Empire Builder</i>, that adds up to 1,554 miles. If it were all built, that mean that about 42% of the state's rail network would be supporting passenger service, compared to just 12% today.<br />
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Clearly, the biggest bang for the buck would come from restoring service straight west from Fargo along the old Northern Pacific corridor. <a href="http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/images/blogimages/2009/10/16/1255727571-northcoasthiawathaservicestudy.pdf">Amtrak's study from 2009</a> looked at the whole 2,200-mile route and estimated it would cost a bit over $1 billion to restore once-daily train service over that whole distance (including about $330 million for new train equipment to run over the tracks). That's a heartburn-inducing figure, but things become very costly when talking about such huge distances.<br />
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The Dakota Access Pipeline provides an interesting point of comparison, since it is estimated to cost about $3.7 billion over a 1,172-mile route. It is a very different thing from a railroad, but it makes me wonder what we could achieve if similar amounts of money were put into passenger service or improvements for existing freight trains. For instance, $3.7 billion would probably pay for converting 1,500 to 2,000 miles of railroad to electrified service, allowing a substantial number of diesel locomotives to be retired and replaced with more efficient, emission-free units instead.<br />
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Hopefully we can turn a corner soon and focus more on moving people rather than petroleum. It's something of a long shot in today's political climate, but something worth thinking about. North Dakota's rail network also seems oversized for a place with its population, so it is a good idea to think about which routes are most important for preservation going forward. There have been many missteps in recent decades where good routes have been prematurely abandoned, so it would be wise to learn from those mistakes and try to make better decisions for the future.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-6389426545550344862016-11-03T10:14:00.000-05:002016-11-03T10:14:12.323-05:00Prospects for passenger rail in WisconsinIn my most recent two posts, I looked at the <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/08/23/a-broader-look-at-passenger-rail-opportunities-in-minnesota/">opportunities I see for passenger rail in Minnesota</a> followed by an entry <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/10/06/lessons-from-norway-for-minnesota-passenger-rail/">examining Norway's passenger rail network</a> to make some comparisons. There are similarities such as the fact that Minnesota and Norway have about the same population and have been growing at about the same rate. Norway has a much bigger and healthier system of passenger train lines than Minnesota does, although we here in the Midwest have far more overall rail mileage installed due to the vast number of freight lines that were built back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.<br />
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This time, I thought I'd turn to our neighbor, Wisconsin, and see what opportunities might exist there. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Wisconsin had been one of the states pushing for expanded passenger rail service in the Midwest, notably leading the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative which was planning several lines radiating out of Chicago which would operate at speeds up to 110 miles per hour.<br />
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A couple of these have come to fruition to some extent, such as Amtrak's Chicago–Detroit and Chicago–St. Louis corridor. However, an enhanced-speed extension of train service from Milwaukee to Madison in Wisconsin was canceled after the election of Scott Walker in 2010, and prospects for extending that all the way to the Twin Cities have largely evaporated aside from plans for a second daily train along the route. Even that straightforward idea <a href="http://streets.mn/2015/07/06/second-train-to-chicago-still-running-late/">has taken way too long to be implemented</a>.<br />
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Here's a map of existing passenger rail in Wisconsin:<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RZQP_50KHSM/WBlUQFK16zI/AAAAAAAAHeg/RZP9PkLxRK8lp5VgAfESUVa5nfZevIluACLcB/s1600/wi-combined-existing-cities.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="596" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RZQP_50KHSM/WBlUQFK16zI/AAAAAAAAHeg/RZP9PkLxRK8lp5VgAfESUVa5nfZevIluACLcB/s640/wi-combined-existing-cities.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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The service that exists today in Wisconsin is very similar to what Amtrak has offered there <a href="http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/10282/the-evolution-of-amtrak-1971-2011/">ever since it was created in 1971</a>. The number of passenger trains per day on the <i>Hiawatha</i> service between Milwaukee and Chicago has increased, but west of Milwaukee, there's only one <i>Empire Builder</i> per direction per day. Chicago's Metra commuter train system also has a little bit of service in Wisconsin, but it only extends about seven miles into the state, ending in Kenosha.<br />
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Amtrak operates on only 236 miles out of the state's total of more than 3,600 miles of track—a mere 6.5% of the state's overall rail system.<br />
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As in my previous maps, I've included markers for all cities of 5,000 residents or larger. Wisconsin has a population that's a bit more spread out than in Minnesota. Most people in Minnesota live in the Twin Cities region (about three million people), but Milwaukee's metro area is not quite as big (only about two million). The state's largest cities are a more widely distributed, which in a way makes the state better suited for supporting an intercity public transportation network.<br />
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Here's a concept map I made that could be used to connect all of Wisconsin's cities of 5,000 and up into a rail network. About ten cities were on abandoned lines or had never been connected to the state's freight network, and those are on lines drawn in purple, indicating that they're on corridors that need to be restored or built new. Blue lines indicate track that is still in active use for freight which I think could have value for passenger service:<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sY3UDKw08Q8/WBlUUz9cRQI/AAAAAAAAHek/hTQvG-VI-HwePD6qWy4Ep9wQ41LkkEj2QCLcB/s1600/wi-combined-full-cities.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="596" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sY3UDKw08Q8/WBlUUz9cRQI/AAAAAAAAHek/hTQvG-VI-HwePD6qWy4Ep9wQ41LkkEj2QCLcB/s640/wi-combined-full-cities.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Here's a <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xb1qu-0F9nIGExkpcv3FpeipbXg&usp=sharing">zoomable version of the Wisconsin portion</a> of that map. <br />
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That's just one idea out of many possible route combinations for the state, which could grow larger or smaller depending on how things get prioritized. Some of the best corridors on the map include the ill-fated extension to Madison (which would have branched off from the <i>Empire Builder</i> corridor in Watertown) and a route from Milwaukee to Green Bay via the west coast of Lake Winnebago, hitting Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, and Appleton along the way.<br />
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An extension of the Metra corridor along the shore of Lake Michigan from Kenosha through Racine to Milwaukee is another no-brainer, and probably something that would have been implemented by now if not for the political machinations of the last decade. A few other radial Metra lines could logically extend into southern Wisconsin heading in the direction of Janesville and Milwaukee's southwestern suburbs and exurbs.<br />
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The Milwaukee area retains a fairly robust system of rail lines which could be used for commuter-style service. Madison also has a good potential for lines radiating out, though a few of those have been abandoned over the years. Janesville, the home of U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, doesn't have that many suburbs in its immediate vicinity, but it turns out to be a natural crossing point for a number of lines between other places, and could be a significant passenger rail hub someday.<br />
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MnDOT has plans for a regional train service from the Twin Cities to Eau Claire, though it's hard to say when that might move forward. That line could be extended southeast to combine with the existing Amtrak corridor to Milwaukee (owned by Canadian Pacific), though another line toward Appleton and/or Green Bay would also be a good option.<br />
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Finally, I'll mention that Wisconsin has ferry services operating on two routes across Lake Michigan. They run from Milwaukee and Manitowoc on the Wisconsin side to Muskegon and Ludington on the Michigan side, respectively. Milwaukee already has passenger rail service, but the other three cities would benefit from being connected to the rail system as well.<br />
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Surprisingly, a substantial amount of <a href="http://wisconsindot.gov/Documents/travel/rail/railmap.pdf">Wisconsin's rail network</a> is either owned by the state or by other public agencies (primarily shown with outlined orange lines in the above map). Most of this publicly-owned network is operated by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_and_Southern_Railroad">Wisconsin & Southern Railroad</a>, including the segment between Watertown and Madison which was set to be upgraded for higher-speed service when the plug was pulled in late 2010. Bizarrely (to me, anyway), the CEO of Wisconsin & Southern found to have been illegally funneling campaign contributions to Scott Walker's campaign in the 2010 election, thereby helping to torpedo the <a href="http://www.wpr.org/following-wisconsins-high-speed-rail-funding-down-tracks">$810 million project</a> that would have directly benefited his railroad. I'm not sure I'll ever wrap my mind around that one.<br />
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Wisconsin is fairly well-positioned to take advantage of its rail network for passenger service, if only politics could get out of the way. Hopefully things will change sometime soon, but it's hard to predict when that might happen.<br />
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As in Minnesota, Wisconsin's rail network has been shrinking for nearly 100 years since the peak of rail travel back in the 1920s. Many of the lines that were abandoned were deservedly dropped, but some of those lost corridors should have been retained for passenger operation even if they didn't carry much freight. The system is at a much more financially sustainable size now, and is probably close to bottoming in terms of overall mileage, but there's still the potential for critically important segments to be abandoned. That's one reason why it's important for the state to step in and help coordinate the maintenance and use of what is still in place and protect them from being lost to future generations.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-31951078178270608402016-10-05T10:11:00.000-05:002016-10-05T10:44:30.604-05:00Lessons from Norway for passenger rail in Minnesota<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K0pyYg88LUQ/V_Fk8neeSXI/AAAAAAAAHdI/IXPX9av9iKYYtyzmLaGL9JW571Nd1gKQwCLcB/s1600/nsb-73-sveins-E12271-41.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="512" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K0pyYg88LUQ/V_Fk8neeSXI/AAAAAAAAHdI/IXPX9av9iKYYtyzmLaGL9JW571Nd1gKQwCLcB/s640/nsb-73-sveins-E12271-41.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Norwegian State Railways train near the town of Støren on the line to Trondheim. (Image from <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E12271-41.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, by Sveins, CC-BY-SA 3.0) </td></tr>
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When talking about expanding passenger train service in Minnesota and other parts of the U.S., it's common to be told that our area of the country has cities that are too small and spread out for it to ever work. Supposedly, only the Northeast and a few other heavily-populated areas have the population and travel demand to support passenger rail. We certainly don't have the same densities as France, Germany, or Japan, but I had a feeling that there are parts of the world are much more similar to Minnesota or other parts of the Midwest, yet have successful rail systems.<br />
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I started searching for such places earlier this year, initially looking at our nearest neighbor, Canada. Unfortunately, it turns out that Canadian passenger rail policy has produced a worse overall result than what we've seen here (Via Rail has a network that pales in comparison even to our skeletal Amtrak system, something I hope to delve into in a future article). Eventually, I turned to Europe to see what I could find over there, and discovered that Norway's fits our situation pretty well.<br />
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Norway is an interesting place to compare, especially since a sizable chunk of Minnesota's population is descended from people who migrated here from Norway or other Scandinavian countries. (Of course, it's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Minnesota">about twice as common</a> for a Minnesotan to be of German heritage rather than Norwegian.) <br />
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It turns out that Minnesota and Norway have had similarly-sized populations for the last several decades, and have been growing at similar rates. In fact, Minnesota passed Norway's population around 1981, when Minnesota reached a population over 4.1 million. However, Norway is a lot larger than our fair state: 149,000 square miles (385,000 km<sup><small>2</small></sup>) of land, 1.7 times our 87,000 sq. mi. (225,000 km<sup><small>2</small></sup>). Since Minnesota has a somewhat bigger population, we have an overall density 1.9 times that of Norway.<br />
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The country's shape is stretched out compared to our state borders. Most of it is narrower than Minnesota, but Norway is about 1,150 miles end-to-end. Since Minnesota is about 400 miles north-to-south, you'd need to stack nearly three Minnesotas on top of each other to reach Norway's northeastern edge.<br />
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If our area can't justify the existence of passenger trains, then surely it doesn't make sense for Norway to have any, right? But in fact, they have a system that is widely used. Here's a map of Norway's passenger rail network along with major cities (5,000 and larger) and other significant municipalities (<i>kommune</i>s):<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/LWm7Mf"><img alt="norway-rail-existing-cities-2016-10-04 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5724/29494713624_d0cec068a5_z.jpg" /></a><br />
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Here's the same map with the city markers removed so the lines can be seen more clearly:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/MTSd62"><img alt="norway-rail-existing-nocities-2016-10-04 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c4.staticflickr.com/9/8541/30122992115_59a1963af7_z.jpg" /></a><br />
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(A zoomable version is available <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Rqg4kgIaJyQTaac4NjxRYdGsnUc&usp=sharing">here</a>.)<br />
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The main rail network extends from Bergen and Stavanger in the western part of the country eastward through Oslo and into Sweden, along with two lines that run north from Oslo toward Trondheim. From Trondheim there's one line that extends to Bodø, which lies north of the Arctic Circle. A short stretch of track also connects the city of Narvik even farther north, though the only way to get there by rail from other parts of Norway is to go through Sweden.<br />
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Minnesota only has Amtrak's <i>Empire Builder</i> (one daily round-trip) and the Northstar commuter train (six daily round-trips) providing passenger service on the state's intercity rail network, which only adds up to 800,000 or so annual riders (Northstar had 722,600 riders in 2015 according to the <a href="http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Documents/Ridership/2015-q4-ridership-APTA.pdf">APTA</a>, and <a href="https://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/346/168/MINNESOTA15.pdf">Amtrak</a> recorded 138,631 boardings+alightings for the year, but that double-counts some people and doesn't count others who rode straight on through). As I mentioned in my <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/08/23/a-broader-look-at-passenger-rail-opportunities-in-minnesota/">previous post</a>, I noted that we only see regular passenger trains operating on about 375 miles (600 km) out of the state's total 4,444 miles (7,152 km) of track.<br />
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Minnesota's rail system grew dramatically from zero miles of track in 1860 to nearly 9,300 miles (14,970 km) in 1920, when the system reached its peak size. Since then, nearly 5,000 miles have been abandoned. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Norway">Norway's rail system</a> is fairly small in comparison: At 2,540 miles (4,087 km), it represents just over half of the trackage than we lost over the last century. Despite that, they strongly outperform us when it comes to moving people around by rail.<br />
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<a href="https://www.nsb.no/en/">Norwegian State Railways</a> (NSB, for <i>Norges Statsbaner</i>) provides most intercity and commuter train service in Norway. In 2015, they carried <a href="http://www.nsbkonsernet.no/en/finance/annual-reports/_attachment/18078?_download=true&_ts=1531eb0ab40">67.1 million passengers</a> on trains within the country, plus another 5.3 million across the border on routes that connect to major cities in Sweden. Their in-country ridership is about 80 times the level we see here. NSB also turned a profit in the process.<br />
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NSB also operates a companion bus network, primarily under the Nettbuss name, which serves intercity and commuter passengers, though they also operate the local bus services in some cities. This bus system contributed another 75.3 million to the total number of passengers NSB carried in 2015.<br />
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Norway's rail network grew at a much more deliberate pace than the system in Minnesota, perhaps due to the country's challenging topography. Steep mountains force most population and infrastructure into the valleys between them and around the edges of lakes and fjords. However, Norwegians have become adept at using tunnels and bridges to make their own paths through the mountains and across large bodies of water. For instance, there are nearly 700 rail tunnels in the country, many of which are several miles long. Minnesota has very few rail tunnels, perhaps only a dozen, and they're mostly very short (the longest in the state are the Blue Line's tunnels at MSP airport, and that's outside of the scope of this article since that's an urban light rail line rather than an intercity service).<br />
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It took until 1909 for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen_Line">line from Oslo to Bergen</a> to be completely built, a major accomplishment for the country at the time. The pace of growth picked up after the country was invaded by Nazi Germany during World War II, as the new regime saw military advantage in having an expanded system and were willing to exploit the labor of prisoners of war to do it. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8rlandet_Line">southern line</a> to Kristiansand and Stavanger was completed in 1944, and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordland_Line">northern line</a> from Trondheim toward Bodø was significantly expanded during the war. It finally reached that city in 1962 (passenger service included), a time where American railroads could hardly kill off their passenger and freight lines fast enough.<br />
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The country has continued to invest since then, including electrifying nearly 2/3rds of the rail network and adding new tunnels to straighten out and speed up older routes that used to skirt around major obstructions. You can see how old and new tunnels mix together on the Bergen Line for yourself, since the state TV broadcaster (NRK) created a "slow TV" recording of the entire 7-hour journey from Bergen to Oslo:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xisVS_DKpJg" width="640"></iframe><br />
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The train in that video operates as an express service near Bergen and Oslo, only stopping at major stations in those areas, but it makes many stops on the stretch between Myrdal and Hokksund. Despite that being a sparsely-populated region compared to the coasts with few larger towns, there are often significant numbers of passengers getting on and off at the stations. Some stretches of the Bergen Line have top speeds of 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), though most of it twists and turns enough that those speeds aren't regularly achieved.<br />
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The vast majority of Norway's rail system carries passenger traffic in addition to freight. Generally speaking, only short branch lines off of their mainline network (often just 10 to 20 miles in length) have been abandoned or converted to freight-only use, a stark contrast to what we see in the U.S. They also operate passenger trains more frequently. For instance, there are five round trips per day* on the 308-mile (496 km) route between Oslo and Bergen. A similar journey here might be between the Twin Cities and Green Bay (about 280 miles or 450 km).<br />
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*(Technically, only four trains go all the way to Bergen—one round-trip has its western endpoint in Voss, but there are 21 trains running from Voss to Bergen each weekday.)<br />
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There are seven round-trips on most days between Oslo and Stavanger (339 miles or 545 km), four round-trips between Oslo and Trondheim (340 miles or 548 km), and two round-trips between Trondheim and Bodø (453 miles or 729 km. A third daily train goes about 2/3rds of the way, to Mo i Rana).<br />
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In addition to those longer-distance services with their handful of daily trips, many of Norway's larger cities have shorter-distance local services running much more frequently. Oslo, which has a population of 658,000 and is in a metro area of 1.7 million people, has the biggest commuter rail network, but Bergen (pop. 250,000), Stavanger (211,000), Trondheim (175,000), Skien/Porsgrunn (92,000), and Bodø (40,000) all have more frequent local trains connecting them to towns along the lines that operate to/through them, sometimes up to distances of about 100 miles away.<br />
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That gives me a lot of optimism that there's unexploited potential in much of the rail system in Minnesota and other parts of the U.S. Of course, there are a lot of differences between our region and Norway which could throw a monkey wrench in the works. Cars are more expensive to buy and operate in Europe than they are here, and we have a much bigger network of freeways and other major highways than Norway does. But our region is pretty flat, meaning most ordinary rail lines are much straighter here than over there, and could sustain pretty high speeds if they were just rehabilitated and maintained to the right standard.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/JZwzsX" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="mn-combined-full-cities, by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c8.staticflickr.com/9/8631/28217990463_9943c0e6d8_z.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From my <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/08/23/a-broader-look-at-passenger-rail-opportunities-in-minnesota/">previous post</a>, a map of a potential system for reconnecting cities of 5,000 people and up in Minnesota and neighboring states/provinces. </td></tr>
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Could we ever get to the level of carrying 67 million passengers a year over the existing freight network here? It would be a big challenge, to be sure, but we can definitely create something better than what exists today. Nearly all of the cities in our state over 5,000 people (which account for 70% of the state's population) are on or near the freight network, and those same lines go through many smaller towns that could also be served. Even if we just set up a core system of rail routes and used buses for many of the connections to smaller towns, we'd probably be a lot better off than we are now.<br />
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We have a network already in place that's much more extensive than the Norwegian system. Many northern cities don't have train service, and some cities are on islands that are hard or impossible to reach with ground transportation. In fact, Norway has one of the biggest <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Air_passenger_transport,_2014_(%C2%B9)_(passengers_per_inhabitant)_YB16.png">air travel markets</a> in Europe relative to its population, since many people don't want to deal with the relatively slow, constantly curving routes of roadways and rail lines. People traveling by car also often need to use ferries to reach between islands and fjords, which further slows down journey times. Our flatter region isn't nearly as difficult to build through.<br />
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The world recently passed a milestone where carbon dioxide is now saturating the atmosphere at a level of <a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/world-passes-400-ppm-threshold-permanently-20738">400 parts per million</a>, and it's continuing to rise year over year, right along with <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-10/global-warming-gif-shows-how-hot-earth-has-gotten-over-past-165-years">global average temperature</a>. To hold back that rise, we'll have to do everything we can to shift people to using less carbon-intensive modes of travel. Biking, walking, and urban transit are good for local journeys, but it's necessary to build up a good public transportation network for spanning the larger distances between cities too. We have an untapped resource sitting on the ground, and I hope we start using it to it's fullest potential.<br />
<br />Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-20285086822158809262016-08-22T10:00:00.000-05:002016-08-22T10:00:20.822-05:00A broader look at passenger rail opportunities in MinnesotaI've spent a lot of time on mapping projects over the past several years, focusing in particular on rail lines through Minnesota and nearby regions. Since the state and national rail networks peaked in the 1920s, and have been shrinking ever since, a lot of that mapping has been a bit depressing. There have been a number of times when I've gone into OpenStreetMap to mark once-busy line as as disused, abandoned, or completely obliterated with virtually no trace left behind.<br />
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The size of Minnesota's rail network has been roughly cut in half since since its 1920s apex, but there are still 4,444 route-miles of existing railroad in the state, <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/ofrw/railroad/systems.html">according to MnDOT</a>. That's almost <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/roadway/data/reports/mlm/14_cors.pdf">five times the size</a> of the Interstate highway network in Minnesota (916 miles) and a bit over a third the size of the total trunk highway system (11,814 miles including Interstates, U.S. highways, and state highways, though that's still a tiny fraction of the 143,000 total miles of roadway within the state).<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/LbJvww"><img alt="mndot-freight-rail-poster-2015-january by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c7.staticflickr.com/9/8603/29001156782_9ae0ba9ef2_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<i><small>MnDOT's <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/ofrw/maps/MNFreightRailroadMapJan2015Large.pdf">freight rail map from January 2015</a>. Active lines are in color or black, while abandoned corridors are shown in dashed gray lines.</small></i><br />
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However, even though Minnesota's 4,444-mile network reaches most of the places you've heard of and many of the ones you haven't, only about 375 miles (about 8%) of it is used for intercity passenger trains. Over 90% of the system is only used for freight traffic.<br />
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Here's a map I created to show what we have for existing conditions for passenger rail in Minnesota and nearby areas. This primarily shows Amtrak's <i>Empire Builder</i>, but Via Rail's <i>Canadian</i> is also shown passing through Manitoba and Ontario to the north. I mapped a green segment coming out of Minneapolis showing the Northstar Line, and I also included a line out of Duluth for the North Shore Scenic Railroad (You can't really go anywhere on that line, since they're just excursions out and back from the Duluth depot, but it's probably the most significant other rail segment in the region that regularly sees passengers travel over it).<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/JZiYp5"><img alt="mn-combined-existing-nocities by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c3.staticflickr.com/9/8765/28215531154_e95558a7cf_z.jpg" /></a><br />
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Here's the same map, but including markers for cities with populations of 5,000 or more (Stars denote capital cities, squares are used for the largest cities per state, and circles mark either the 10 largest cities per state/province, or cities over 75,000 when the state/province is large enough, such as with Thunder Bay in Ontario. Smaller places are noted with orange or yellow diamonds):<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/JZwzxM"><img alt="mn-combined-existing-cities by Michael Hicks on Flickr" src="https://c8.staticflickr.com/9/8697/28217990743_1ce2b4ddce_z.jpg" /></a><br />
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The national Amtrak passenger rail system is an extremely skeletal network that sometimes has gaps of hundreds of miles between corridors, and most of the system only sees one train per day per direction.<br />
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We're relatively lucky that Amtrak even stops in the Twin Cities. To our south in Iowa, Amtrak misses the state's capital and largest city, Des Moines, by about 50 miles. The most-populated place in Iowa directly served by Amtrak is Burlington, the state's 19th-largest city. (Iowa's 7th-largest city, Council Bluffs, gets an honorable mention since it is a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska, where Amtrak does have a station.) To our west, Amtrak doesn't even bother serving South Dakota, even though the Sioux Falls region has a population of about 250,000 and Rapid City, near the Black Hills, has a metro population of 144,000.<br />
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Even though Amtrak only has six stops in Minnesota (Detroit Lakes, Staples, St. Cloud, Saint Paul, Red Wing, and Winona) and three others just across the border (Grand Forks and Fargo in North Dakota and La Crosse in Wisconsin), they can easily claim to serve more than half the state's population, simply because the 3.1 million out of the state's total 5.5 million population is concentrated in the Twin Cities region. I think we deserve a lot better than that, though.<br />
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Places like Rochester (3rd largest city in the state after Minneapolis and St. Paul) and Duluth (5th place, barely behind Bloomington) have no service, not to mention numerous other smaller towns.<br />
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One of my observations during my years mapping is that most places with populations of 5,000 and up still have freight rail service. This isn't always true, but the rule holds pretty well for outstate Minnesota. From what I can tell, the only towns of that size outside of the Twin Cities lacking freight rail are Hutchinson (pop. 14,000, about 60 miles west of Minneapolis), and Stewartville (pop. 6,000, about 13 miles south of Rochester).<br />
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There are more examples within the Twin Cities, particularly postwar suburbs, but even most of them are still within a few miles of railroad lines due to the denser network of tracks in the metro area. Woodbury, the state's 9th largest state (pop. 68,000), is the biggest to not have direct rail service, but its neighboring cities of Oakdale and Lake Elmo do have tracks running through them.<br />
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I decided to try making a map to show how much of the state and surrounding area could be linked using existing track, and how much might need to be rebuilt or constructed on new alignments in order to make a suitable network. You might call this a "fantasy map", but I prefer to think of it as a "mapping experiment", since it's mostly based around infrastructure that already exists.<br />
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Here's what I came up with (still somewhat of a work in progress). Existing freight lines are marked in blue, while purple is used for routes that would need to be built new or reconstructed:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/JZiYj5"><img alt="mn-combined-full-nocities by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8671/28215530864_40092a80e8_z.jpg" /></a><br />
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Here's the same map again, but with cities included:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/JZwzsX"><img alt="mn-combined-full-cities, by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://c8.staticflickr.com/9/8631/28217990463_9943c0e6d8_z.jpg" /></a><br />
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The system that emerged in my map adds up to about 4,275 miles within Minnesota's borders, including 3,475 miles of existing railroad (78% of the state's freight system) and adding or restoring about 805 miles of other corridors to create a tighter mesh. If all of that was built for passenger service and other existing freight lines were retained, this would re-grow Minnesota's overall rail network by about 18% to 5,250 route-miles.<br />
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Most of the purple routes follow abandoned rail lines, but a few, including connections for the off-network towns of Hutchinson and Stewartville, plus segments of the line to Thunder Bay, Ontario, use alignments that I invented. <br />
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My population threshold of 5,000 was fairly arbitrary—it's probably a lower population than most transportation planners would think of connecting by rail, but cities of that size can still generate quite a bit of traffic. <br />
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My hometown of Byron is currently estimated to have a population of about 5,300 people, and according to the Census's <a href="http://onthemap.ces.census.gov/">OnTheMap tool</a>, 1,785 people who live in Byron are employed in nearby Rochester. If each one of those people decided to drive to work at exactly the same time, the line of cars would be nearly 7 miles long standing still and would stretch to 100 miles if they were moving at 65 mph with a 3-second trailing distance—not so good considering that Byron and Rochester are only 10 miles apart. Plus, that's purely a measure of commuter traffic—there are always additional trips for dining, shopping, and other activities to consider too.<br />
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I wish there was more transportation thinking happening on this scale, since I think it would massively improve our chances of meeting climate change goals in the transportation sector. If this network existed, it would be much easier to have a car-free or car-lite life, even in a rural small town. Cities of 5,000 and up account for 70% of the state's population, and an extensive network like this would also dramatically improve public transportation access for the remaining 30%.<br />
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MnDOT has a passenger rail plan with some of these routes included in it (the image below is from the 2010 version of the plan), but their system always struck me as a bit flawed since it was entirely centered on the Twin Cities and it didn't give much priority to the lines to Sioux Falls or straight south to Albert Lea (toward Des Moines). The latter line has since been upgraded to a higher priority, but that's not saying much considering the slow pace of planning for these routes.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Gt-Cr8n7jTw/Vz9bpZvqkhI/AAAAAAAAHXo/65WwTHfC8i81f5iKWidD6o4t5VcDeHohgCPcB/s1600/minnesota-2010-passenger-rail-plan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Gt-Cr8n7jTw/Vz9bpZvqkhI/AAAAAAAAHXo/65WwTHfC8i81f5iKWidD6o4t5VcDeHohgCPcB/s640/minnesota-2010-passenger-rail-plan.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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In my opinion, MnDOT's passenger rail plan is the minimum we should be aiming for, but they've had insufficient financial and personnel resources to even execute that vision. Their plan would reach most cities over 20,000 in population (at least outside of the metro area), but for now it remains little more than an idea.<br />
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Planning for the Northern Lights Express service to Duluth continues to trundle along, though the planned speed and frequency of service has been cut back. Formerly fast-moving plans for high-speed service to Rochester have been shelved due to lack of funds and the emergence of a private company that claims they'll build the line instead, but it's not clear whether that organization will move forward either.<br />
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It's been like pulling teeth to get any movement on a <a href="http://streets.mn/2015/07/06/second-train-to-chicago-still-running-late/">mere second daily train</a> between the Twin Cities and Chicago, and plans for faster and more frequent trains on that line have been held up because of an obstinate government in Wisconsin.<br />
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Something significant has to be done to shake us out of the rut of car-dependent transportation planning across the state. In a previous post, I suggested implementing a <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/05/24/taking-the-transit-sales-tax-statewide/">statewide 1% sales tax</a> that could be applied to both urban transit and intercity projects like this, estimating that it could generate about $740 million per year, enough to fully fund the equivalent of at least one 150-mile Northern Lights Express project annually.<br />
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It would take a few decades to build out a system as big as what I've suggested, and such a scale might not be fully attainable given future lifecycle costs, but some back-of-the-envelope calculating suggests revenue from a 1% sales tax (assuming about half of that went to urban transit and the other half was for intercity links) would make it possible to build out and sustain a system of at least 2,000, putting it somewhere in between MnDOT's suggested system and my concept.<br />
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What do you think? Where would you draw the line for intercity service?Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-39430452707803225582016-05-20T13:57:00.000-05:002016-05-20T13:57:44.669-05:00Taking the "transit" sales tax statewideAs I write this, the 2016 Minnesota legislative session is coming to a close, and last-minute discussions are taking place to try and sort out transportation funding. One of the major options is the possibility of a <a href="http://www.startribune.com/half-cent-sales-tax-is-last-ditch-plan-to-secure-light-rail-funding/380208441/">0.5% metro-area sales tax</a> for transit, an increase from the 0.25% currently collected for the Counties Transit Improvement Board. This is partly to finance the Southwest LRT project, which is currently facing a $135 million funding gap. CTIB currently collects <a href="http://www.mnrides.org/sites/default/files/downloads/20160217141052566.pdf">$110 million per year</a>, and the increase would bring the funding level to $280 million annually (if it included all 7 counties rather than the 5 that are currently members).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GbZJyB5ONag/Vz8ynicDV_I/AAAAAAAAHXU/7QTzhTiLXCsT-0n88PxRrVRwQufUAuwrQCLcB/s1600/mndot-fy2015-summary.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GbZJyB5ONag/Vz8ynicDV_I/AAAAAAAAHXU/7QTzhTiLXCsT-0n88PxRrVRwQufUAuwrQCLcB/s400/mndot-fy2015-summary.png" width="310" /></a></div>That's a significant improvement, but still pales in comparison to the annual amount of money put into roadways. In 2015, MnDOT <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/funding/documents/TranspFunding%20Pie%20Chart%202015.pdf">funneled $3.28 billion in funds</a>. That included about $1.3 billion on construction for roads and bridges on the state trunk highway system, plus another $1 billion handed over to counties and cities for the County State-Aid Highway (CSAH) and Municipal State-Aid Street (MSAS) programs.<br />
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When discussing transit funding, it's common to get bogged down talking about operational costs, even though that is measuring something completely different than the capital spending that dominates the cost of roadways. MnDOT doesn't actually move anyone—they just provide the infrastructure that allows people to move themselves, mostly in cars that are privately owned. Capital spending by transit agencies tends to be fairly low, and it's often dominated by the cost of vehicles and maintenance facilities, with little left over for any actual infrastructure in the ground. New rail projects have <a href="http://streets.mn/2014/07/18/transit-budgets-expose-hidden-costs-of-roads/">all-inclusive budgets</a> that seem high because they count guideways, vehicles, stations, maintenance facilities (which double as parking for transit vehicles), power supplies, and miscellaneous other items.<br />
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Given all of that, it's really unsurprising that the mode share for public transportation is very low across the country, and only modestly better in most larger metro areas. But wow, wouldn't that be different if we balanced the amount of spending between different modes? What if we had the money to fund the tunneled and/or elevated lines that would allow denser parts of the Twin Cities to have good transit service? What if we built on the concept of the metro-area sales tax and took that statewide?<br />
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This topic has come up <a href="http://forum.streets.mn/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3682&p=115869#p114869">over on the streets.mn forum</a>, with a few different ideas tossed around, and some more thoughts have bubbled up as we now watch Denver open several new lines this year, starting with <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/05/10/with-denver-on-the-fastracks-hoping-the-twin-cities-arent-derailed/">the new A Line commuter service to their airport</a>.<br />
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The Twin Cities region has long struggled to fund desirable projects, and it has been especially difficult to get lines with good routings to serve the densest and most populous parts of our region. Minneapolis, which generates the largest number of transit trips of any city in the metro area, is only expected to be served by a <a href="http://streets.mn/2013/08/03/a-rail-identity-crisis-in-minneapolis/">limited number of new light-rail stations</a> on the Blue and Green Line extensions.<br />
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Of course, if we had a steady stream of $1 billion per year like the trunk highway system does, what has been impossible in the past due to complex federal funding rules would now be far, far more practical. It would be easier to do the logical thing and upgrade <a href="http://streets.mn/2015/01/28/chart-of-the-day-top-10-metro-transit-bus-routes-by-ridership-2014/">Metro Transit's busiest routes</a>.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gt-Cr8n7jTw/Vz9bpZvqkhI/AAAAAAAAHXk/JQZhYnhdt-cqNJbi0_9t1yMtlQbwxU3VQCLcB/s1600/minnesota-2010-passenger-rail-plan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gt-Cr8n7jTw/Vz9bpZvqkhI/AAAAAAAAHXk/JQZhYnhdt-cqNJbi0_9t1yMtlQbwxU3VQCLcB/s400/minnesota-2010-passenger-rail-plan.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
If we took the funding stream statewide, it would also help transit service in smaller cities, and could fund the restoration of passenger service on current and former freight rail corridors across the state, not to mention a conversion from diesel power to quieter, cleaner, and more efficient electric power. This would make it so "transit" isn't just something for large cities, but also a system for connecting all corners of the state. Most towns in Minnesota were built up along rail corridors, so it would make sense to link them together again. MnDOT has struggled to make progress on the estimated $95 million <a href="http://streets.mn/2015/07/06/second-train-to-chicago-still-running-late/">second daily train to Chicago</a>, a project that should have been implemented years ago. That project and <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/railplan/">MnDOT's state rail plan</a> are things that could be built up in no time if we treated public transportation the same way we treat highways.<br />
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Denver's metro-area transit system is funded with a 1% sales tax, double what is currently being discussed by legislators. Minnesota has a pretty large economy, with a <a href="https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=MNNGSP">gross domestic product of $317 billion in 2014</a>. Each percent of sales tax from that year brought in about <a href="http://www.revenue.state.mn.us/research_stats/Pages/Sales_and_Use_Tax_2014_Statistics.aspx">$740 million</a> in revenue. Surprisingly, my hypothetical target of $1 billion isn't that far off. If we wanted to do this, we could.<br />
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Are either of those figures the right amount to spend on public transportation in our state? For our present situation, where highway funding has been leagues ahead of what we've gotten for transit decade after decade, it basically seems too low. We can't flip the switch tonight and have a fully built-out statewide system tomorrow, but with issues like climate change lurking, and a possible flip from growth in the sprawling suburbs back into the <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/27/getting-around-the-block-city-vs-suburb/">city grid</a>, I feel like we need all the investment we can get.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-85579295690435767272016-05-09T10:30:00.000-05:002016-05-09T10:30:05.940-05:00Getting around the block: Metro vs. outstate<a href="https://flic.kr/p/FbL8V9"><img alt="blocks-rochester-2016-03-23 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1530/25719690470_574848f735_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Rochester, Minnesota (<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1xx56pTV5Q5WFKPTGdWQrcOydgSQ">Click here for full map</a>).</i></small><br />
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In my last few articles, I've looked at the city block layouts of Minneapolis and Saint Paul (both <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/18/getting-around-the-block-downtown-vs-downtown/">downtown</a> and <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/20/getting-around-the-block-city-vs-city/">citywide</a>) and <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/27/getting-around-the-block-city-vs-suburb/">compared them to a few suburbs</a>. I thought it would be useful to also make some comparisons with cities outside of the metro area, to see what they're like.<br />
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Above, I have a map of Rochester, which about 80 miles southeast of the Twin Cities. It's the third-largest city in the state, after Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but is quite a bit smaller than those two. The most recent population estimates put Rochester at about 111,000 residents, which is roughly 27% the size of Minneapolis (pop. 407,000) and 37% the size of Saint Paul (pop. 298,000).<br />
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As with previous maps in my series, I've drawn blocks using surface streets (skipping freeways) and given them colors according to size and the presence of one-way streets around the edges. Pink blocks are 15 acres or larger, while green, yellow, and darker red colors are used when blocks are smaller in size. I use green for blocks that can be circled clockwise, while yellow blocks need to be circled counter-clockwise due to one-way streets. Red blocks crop up when one-way streets meet and it's impossible to loop around the block without also including another adjacent block.<br />
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The resulting maps tend to show where I find it to be comfortable or uncomfortable to walk around, at least in terms of time and distance. A square block of 15 acres is about 0.6 miles and takes at least 12 minutes to circle on foot, and those figures increase as blocks become longer and thinner, or become twisted around into strange shapes.<br />
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I let the blocks continue beyond the city borders until reaching the nearest street roadway that could complete a loop, so the Rochester map bleeds over into unincorporated territory quite a bit.<br />
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It's useful to compare this map to Minneapolis, which is the most walkable city in the state, along with being the one with the highest transit ridership:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/GofS1h"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1705/26506133416_ef1e4eda9a_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Minneapolis. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kUdRW6QIgE4A">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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It's a pretty stark difference between the two. I traced 4,701 small blocks in Minneapolis compared to 225 large blocks, for a ratio of 21:1. In Rochester, I traced 922 small blocks versus 256 large blocks, for a ratio of just 3.6:1.<br />
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Perhaps a better measure is number of blocks per unit area: Minneapolis has about 90 blocks per square mile, while Rochester has less than 22 per square mile. By either measure, Rochester is much more of a sprawling city than Minneapolis, although it's roughly on par with the suburb of Bloomington, which I looked at <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/27/getting-around-the-block-city-vs-suburb/">in my most recent post</a>.<br />
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Rochester had a somewhat larger population than Bloomington before suburban-style development took hold, with around 30,000 residents in 1950. That was enough to create a decent gridded area in the city center, even if it was broken up somewhat by a fork of the Zumbro River that flows through town as well as some of the streams that feed it. The city has a reasonable downtown, but suburban-style sprawl has defined most of the growth since 1950.<br />
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In fact, one of the more <a href="http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/stuck-in-1950s-suburbia/">notable monuments to the suburban style</a> of living and working sits on the north side of the city along U.S. Highway 52—the IBM complex designed by architect <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eero_Saarinen">Eero Saarinen</a>. Both of my parents worked there as I grew up:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/FRaTg7"><img alt="IBM Rochester in the late 1950s by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1615/26154350704_4bfa099735_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>IBM's Rochester facility as it appeared around 1958, by <a href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/krb2008000476/">Balthazar Korab</a>.</i></small><br />
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The building's signature blue panels made for an evocative connection between the earth and sky, especially when combined with the landscaping of the site, but the low-slung nature of the two-story complex means that it spreads across a vast area.<br />
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It was laid out on a flat plain in a modular design, which made expansion easy, though of course the land area was consumed by parking lots just as rapidly as it was by buildings. The site grew over the years to more than three times the original size (most recently reported at about <a href="https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/rochester/rochester_profile.html">3.6 million square feet—</a>a little over half the size of The Pentagon, but more than 2.5x the size of the IDS Center).<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/GEPvkn"><img alt="IBM Rochester from the air in the late 1950s, on Flickr" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1659/26693566511_335bac4c06_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>The IBM complex as seen from the air around 1958. It has since expanded to about three times the size. Photo by <a href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/krb2008000486/">Balthazar Korab</a>.</i></small><br />
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However, the site is now long past its peak employment, and the amount of hardware manufactured at the site has plummeted. This past week, IBM announced that they would be <a href="http://www.postbulletin.com/news/local/ibm-to-sell-buildings-consolidate-campus/article_8a84da67-c943-5c50-bcb2-f0b257d71aaa.html">selling off two-thirds of the site</a>, returning to a footprint similar in scale to what the company originally had in 1958. <br />
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A counterpoint to the suburban development by IBM and countless smaller businesses has been the Mayo Clinic's more concentrated development in the city's downtown, though that has unfortunately become surrounded by <a href="http://streets.mn/2014/10/28/rochester-mn-map-surface-parking-lots/">one of the most distinctly donut-shaped parking craters</a> I've ever come across.<br />
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What will Rochester's future hold? There's a lot of momentum for the suburban style of development, especially for housing and retail. Big-box retailers continue to plop buildings down in the middle of empty areas, such as at the "<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9544879,-92.4631296,17z/data=!3m1!1e3">Shoppes on Maine</a>" district on the southern end of town, or the site of the new <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0983815,-92.5154649,17z/data=!3m1!1e3">Menards</a> at the extreme northern edge. <br />
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Still, the city's Destination Medical Center project, which aims to build on the success of the Mayo Clinic, is mostly focused on areas in and near downtown. This may restrain sprawling development to some extent, but it seems likely that housing and commercial developers will still seek to spread out onto the cheapest land they can find.<br />
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Next, I thought I'd swing my view in the opposite direction and look at Fargo, North Dakota, about 240 miles northwest of the Twin Cities and sitting just on the other side of the Minnesota border: <br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/FCCTa6"><img alt="blocks-fargo-2016-03-27 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1527/26012503931_e7f7c9fc1d_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Fargo, North Dakota (<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1kCnZ2Oo2hNUBPbpE9CxZWLSGO9o">Click here for full map</a>).</i></small><br />
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Fargo has an estimated population of about 116,000, just a few thousand larger than Rochester. However, it's squeezed a bit on the west by the suburb of West Fargo and on the east by the Minnesota border and the city of Moorhead. I mapped 1166 blocks and 272 large ones, for a ratio of 4.3:1. That's significantly higher than Rochester's 3.6:1, but still far below Minneapolis's 21:1 or Saint Paul's 14:1.<br />
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The street grid spreading out from downtown is more contiguous in Fargo, though there's only one significant river to contend with: The Red River of the North, which defines the border between Minnesota and North Dakota. The grid falls apart as you get close to Hector International Airport in the northwest part of the city, 25th Street heading west, and Interstate 94 heading south.<br />
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Rochester and Fargo have been on a similar population trajectory for the past few decades, though Fargo has been developing somewhat more densely. Apartment buildings seem to be much more common in Fargo than in Rochester, though the complexes still tend to be married to large parking lots and are laid out in ways that consume a lot of land, rather than in a more urban pattern facing the street. <br />
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Two of BNSF Railway's major routes converge in Fargo and then split apart again on the other side. Despite them passing within blocks of each other near downtown, that part of the city maintains a fairly continuous street grid. However, there is a lot of industrial land centered around the tracks into the western part of the city.<br />
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Fargo also sits at the junction of Interstate 94 and I-29, which are also home to many spread-out industrial and commercial sites, including the city's main shopping mall, <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8590682,-96.8442312,15z/data=%213m1%211e3">West Acres</a> (which sits just northwest of the I-94/I-29 interchange). Areas near the interchange also host many hotels, befitting the city's nature as a gateway to the rest of North Dakota.<br />
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Further evidence of the city's sprawl is typified by one of my most-/least-favorite ironic place names, lying just southwest of the freeway interchange: The neighborhood of <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8373923,-96.8688861,15z/data=!3m1!1e3">Urban Plains</a>, which is of course neither urban nor plains.<br />
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Could Fargo do a proper job of marrying those two ideas in the future? The city's downtown development has been far less intense than in Rochester, but the area's large number of parking lots could give a canvas for a diverse mix of businesses<a href="https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/rochester/rochester_profile.html">—</a>something different than the medically-focused center that Rochester is trying to make. But for now, just like it's cousin to the southeast, Fargo mostly keeps seeing development pop up well outside the city core.<br />
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Both Rochester and Fargo have the population to make them very dynamic places, but the lack of restraint for keeping development compact and connected ends up diffusing a lot of that potential energy. Without big natural barriers, adjacent suburbs, or well-defined urban barriers hemming them in, the cities have had important destinations flung around without any consideration for how people will get there through any means other than by car<a href="https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/rochester/rochester_profile.html">—</a>something that can't continue to be tolerated in the 21st century. Here's hoping they start changing their plans.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-65038003501675802082016-04-25T11:00:00.000-05:002016-04-25T11:00:22.726-05:00Getting around the block: City vs. suburbIn my last <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/18/getting-around-the-block-downtown-vs-downtown/">two</a> <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/20/getting-around-the-block-city-vs-city/">posts</a>, I looked at the city block structures in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, first zooming in to the respective downtowns, then pulling out to look all the way to the cities' borders and slightly beyond. Now I'd like to turn to a few suburbs and see how they compare.<br />
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First, let's refresh our memories by taking a look at Minneapolis:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/GofS1h"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1705/26506133416_ef1e4eda9a_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Minneapolis. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kUdRW6QIgE4A">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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In my maps, blocks that are less than 15 acres in size are colored green, yellow, or dark red (the latter two colors help indicate the presence of one-way streets). Blocks of 15 acres and larger are shown in pink. That size is roughly when I find that they become uncomfortable to walk around—these blocks have a circumference of at least 0.6 miles and take at least 12 minutes to circle on foot, and those numbers increase as blocks elongate and morph into strange shapes.<br />
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Minneapolis is a city of about 407,000 people, and has been getting built up for more than 150 years. A street grid system has been effective at filling out and giving access to most of the city's developable land. Areas shown in green on the map are generally pretty walkable and bikeable, with typical city blocks around four or five acres in size. Not all areas of the city have good access to things like restaurants, grocery stores, or other shops, but there's generally good connectivity, setting up a nice framework to be built upon.<br />
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My Minneapolis map has 4,701 small blocks compared to 225 large ones, for a ratio of about 21:1.<br />
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Now let's turn our gaze to Eden Prairie, which hangs off the southwestern edge of the I-494/I-694 beltway. It was incorporated in 1962, and has grown rapidly to become a city of about 63,000 people. An abundance of office parks and retail locations mean that close to 40,000 people work in the city, more than 85% of whom commute from other cities in the metro area. Like Minneapolis, most of the city's developable land has now been divided up into fairly small, privately-owned parcels, so it's almost fully built out:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/FsDJA1"><img alt="A map of city blocks in Eden Prairie, Minnesota" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1469/25899505252_0faaf900a2_z.jpg" title="blocks-eden-prairie-2016-03-23 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Eden Prairie. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.k6RIToZd2-bw">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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Um. Yikes!<br />
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This map has 328 small blocks and 164 big ones—a ratio of just 2:1, or less than one-tenth the small:big block ratio for Minneapolis.<br />
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In a word, this is sprawl. There's a lot more stuff in Eden Prairie than what that map shows, but it's arranged in ways that waste land and make it extremely difficult to get around by any means other than driving. Let's zoom in on a section near Baker Road and Valley View Road to get a better look at what's going on:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/G1FE47"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1583/26262008100_81a7f1ab64_z.jpg" title="blocks-eden-prairie-comparison-2016-04-19 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" /></a><br />
<small><i>Comparing an aerial view of Eden Prairie to a map only showing city blocks.</i></small><br />
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This comparison image shows how the suburb's dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs fill up space but don't really contribute to street connectivity. Tracing only the block edge filters out most of the streets that are mere fingers into larger areas of land. The gaps between blocks mostly show through streets, though sometimes blocks exist in small pods that are entirely encircled by a larger block except for a single road to access them.<br />
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This map highlights how suburbs' heavy reliance on cul-de-sacs, pod-style development, and hierarchical road systems is bad for walkability and bikeability, and it isn't good for car traffic either.<br />
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Do you remember how busy things were at polling places on caucus night this year? My caucus site in Saint Paul was at a nearby school less than a mile away, and I was able to walk there in 15 minutes. While a lot of other people drove, the school I went to was surrounded by a pretty good street grid to walk, bike, and drive on. I'm sure there was some frustration with parking, but there were plenty of open spaces on nearby streets as long as people were willing to walk a couple blocks.<br />
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In Eden Prairie, by contrast, a much higher proportion of people had to drive to their caucus sites, and the limited number of alternate routes created cases where the traffic stretched on for long distances—perhaps miles:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rugfBdnK1bE" width="640"></iframe><br />
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The sparse road system in suburbs like Eden Prairie funnels traffic onto the few through streets that remain. A system of small streets connected to feeder streets leading to main arterial roads can create traffic jams that could be sopped up by the grid in more traditional neighborhoods.<br />
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The limited number of through routes also creates huge problems for transit planners. Buses operate most effectively when they can run on relatively straight routes to and through mixed-use zones. They can only pick up and drop off passengers along the edges of these blocks, unless a special right-of-way or station is built. Buses that run along the freeway can't stop wherever they want—they have to exit the freeway either on a normal off-ramp or using special bus-only access.<br />
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Finding a relatively straight route that manages to hit walkable pockets while also reaching relatively dense areas of population and useful destinations is difficult or impossible with this street layout.<br />
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In some cases, there are bicycle and pedestrian paths that break blocks up into smaller areas, but they aren't consistently in place from neighborhood to neighborhood. Single-use zoning is the norm, with residential, commercial, and retail spaces kept segregated from one another, so most paths don't really take you anywhere other than the local neighborhood. Such paths may be nice for recreation, but they aren't able to provide a suitable alternative to getting around the city by car. <br />
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Alright, enough picking on Eden Prairie. Let's find another point of comparison. How about Woodbury, a somewhat more populated suburb of about 67,000 that lies just one mile outside the city limits of Saint Paul:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/FJuTMn"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1532/26078844115_1efc61799c_z.jpg" title="blocks-woodbury-2016-03-27 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Woodbury. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kBb08J0QTD70">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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Oof.<br />
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Okay, by my measurement, there are 377 small blocks in Woodbury and 200 big blocks, for a ratio of about 1.9:1. That's slightly worse than Eden Prairie, though Woodbury's development remains somewhat restricted by the Metropolitan Council's <a href="https://gisdata.mn.gov/dataset/us-mn-state-metc-plan-musa-composite">MUSA urban boundary line</a>. A fair amount of the southern and extreme eastern parts of Woodbury is still farmland, so there's some potential for the ratio of big blocks and small blocks to improve before it gets fully built-out, but only slightly if future development continues in the same way as what has preceded it. The area that has developed within the MUSA boundary seems a little denser than Eden Prairie, but not by much.<br />
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Both of these cities have completely rejected the street grid, and there's hardly a straight line to be found anywhere within them, with the exception of section line roads roughly one every mile in Woodbury. (They had little impact on the layout of neighborhood streets between them, though.)<br />
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Alright, let's try and find a suburb that's a little more ordered in its development. How about Bloomington, which lies just east of Eden Prairie. It has about 86,000 residents and is duking it out with Duluth for the rank of fourth-largest city in the state:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/GdRZoQ"><img alt="Map of city blocks in Bloomington" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1702/26399822232_61f617406a_z.jpg" title="blocks-bloomington-2016-04-17 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Bloomington. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.k1tSA_aBx8UQ">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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Aha! Here we have found something of a "missing link" in the transition between cities and suburbs in our metro area. Bloomington is technically an older city in the metro area, as it was incorporated in 1858. However, the number of people living there grew slowly until just after World War II. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomington,_Minnesota#Demographics">population jumped</a> from 3,600 to 9,900 between 1940 and 1950, then exploded to more than 50,000 in 1960 before leveling off at about 82,000 around 1970.<br />
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Bloomington lies south of Minneapolis and the inner-ring suburb of Richfield. The Minneapolis street grids extends through Richfield and is present in parts of Bloomington, particularly between Interstate 35W and Cedar Avenue (Minnesota State Highway 77). However, the grid is much more fragmented in Bloomington, and many blocks are considerably larger—essentially two to four Minneapolis-sized blocks merged together.<br />
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There's a certain logic to that, since the lot sizes for individual homes also grew as development moved pushed south and west through Bloomington. The most common residential lot size in Minneapolis is about one-eighth of an acre, while houses in Bloomington are typically on lots about two or three times that size. If a block size that formerly contained 30 homes could now only hold 15 or 10, it might make sense to bump up block sizes by a corresponding amount, in order to avoid creating too much infrastructure for too few people.<br />
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That alone might not have been so bad, but the city block structure also began to twist, turn, and break apart first as curving streets and then cul-de-sacs became fashionable among developers in the post-war era.<br />
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Lot sizes for commercial and industrial businesses also grew, and retailers were often concentrated into strip malls or shopping centers, all of which were major contributors to the weakening of the street grid. Even though many businesses have the same or similar amounts of square footage as comparable ones on smaller parcels in the core cities, they're separated into single-use buildings and surrounded by parking lots.<br />
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All of this helps explain why so few people walk, bike, and take transit in the suburbs as compared to Minneapolis. The idea of a standard city block is completely alien in these areas, and people can live their whole lives without really understanding what it's like to live in a true neighborhood where it's possible to live, work, eat, shop, and do most other things without needing to get on a highway.<br />
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As Nick Magrino noted in his <a href="http://streets.mn/2015/02/19/measuring-the-minneapolis-st-paul-metro-area-and-getting-real-with-the-map/">Measuring the Metro Area and Getting Real with the Map</a> piece, only the core cities and a limited set of the suburbs can be considered "urban" in a traditional sense. Without the framework of a tight grid or other small-block layout, it becomes nearly impossible to meet or even set meaningful goals for increasing mode share for walking, biking, or taking transit, and it makes it extremely challenging to serve populations like children, the elderly, or those with disabilities who can't move themselves around by car.<br />
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While developers have occasionally tried to go back to smaller block sizes in what I like to call "New Urbanish" projects, they are still often isolated in small pods. Going back to the grid is one of the only ways to break developers of their bad habits. But are we already too late?Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-10113051361724627332016-04-20T10:01:00.001-05:002016-04-20T10:04:32.540-05:00Getting around the block: City vs. city<a href="https://flic.kr/p/GjGmjv"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1656/26465840481_a8e001d7c9_z.jpg" title="blocks-saint-paul-2016-04-19 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of the city blocks of Saint Paul. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kJ337dMx7Gbk">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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In my previous post, I <a href="http://streets.mn/2016/04/18/getting-around-the-block-downtown-vs-downtown/">compared the city block layouts</a> of the downtowns of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. This time, I thought I'd zoom out and compare the whole cities. Above is the map for Saint Paul, a city of about 300,000 residents. Blocks that are green, yellow, and dark red are smaller in size, less than 15 acres, while pink blocks are larger. That's a fairly arbitrary size to mark a transition between small and large blocks, but generally fits with where I'm comfortable getting around. A 15-acre block is at least 0.6 miles in circumference, taking about 12 minutes to circle on foot, with the time and distance increasing as blocks get longer, thinner, and begin to take on strange shapes.<br />
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In general, the map shows blocks of the tightest loop you can make with surface streets to circle around any particular point in the city. Some of these blocks extend well beyond the city borders, so these maps make the cities look a bit larger geographically than what you normally see. To simplify my mapmaking, I generally required streets to have car <i>and</i> bike <i>and</i> pedestrian access, which excluded freeways (illegal to walk or bike on) and made campuses and parks look less permeable here than they would be to someone using non-motorized transportation.<br />
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The color coding helps indicate the presence of one-way streets and how they impact navigation by car (usually with the same rules applying for bikes). Green blocks can be circled clockwise, while yellow and dark red blocks have one-way streets on their edges that either require at least one left turn (circling the block counter-clockwise), or have turn conflicts that prevent looping the block.<br />
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As I noted in my last post, downtown Saint Paul is relatively isolated from the rest of the city, but a dense street grid reaches through most other neighborhoods, creating large, fairly contiguous regions that are fairly easy to walk and bike around, and that can sop up large volumes of car traffic. <br />
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Individual neighborhood "islands" contain scattered large block within them, and are separated from each other by longer corridors. The city's network of highways and railways also fans out from the downtown area through the rest of the city. These tend to run past industrial and low-density commercial blocks, but also sometimes bump into other areas of limited development.<br />
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Many large blocks appear because of natural impediments like rivers, lakes, and steeply sloping hills. The Mississippi River valley marks the most significant area of big blocks through the city, with wide river flats areas that are largely un- or under-developed. The West Side Flats area just across the river from downtown is notable for getting its residential population cleared out in the 1960s after flooding devastated the area the decade before. However, the low-density commercial development that replaced it still contributes to downtown's isolation from the rest of the city.<br />
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Some large blocks on the map are fairly private spaces like cemeteries and golf courses, while others are more permeable to foot and bicycle traffic, such as parks and school campuses.<br />
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The relatively sparse road network on the western edge of Saint Paul creates a large lobe extending well into Minneapolis along BNSF rail corridors.<br />
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I mapped out 3508 small blocks and 248 large blocks in Saint Paul, which is a ratio of about 14:1. Let's take a look at Minneapolis and see how it compares:<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/GofS1h"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1705/26506133416_ef1e4eda9a_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A map of city blocks in Minneapolis. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kUdRW6QIgE4A">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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Minneapolis is somewhat larger and denser than Saint Paul, with a population of about 407,000. Regions of small blocks are even more contiguous than in Saint Paul, perhaps aided by the fact that the city is a bit flatter than its neighbor to the east.<br />
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Interestingly, the Mississippi River channel is narrower through Minneapolis (the city sits upstream of the confluence with the Minnesota River). It's also a bit harder to see freeways cutting through the city than I would have expected.<br />
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One-way streets extend much farther into Minneapolis's neighborhoods than into Saint Paul. Some of these one-ways essentially make highways through town, while others are in place because of narrow streets or heavy volumes of parked cars in denser neighborhoods.<br />
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Railroads still cut through parts of the city, particularly in paths radiating to the west of downtown and in through Northeast and Southeast Minneapolis, but they don't have quite the same impact as in Saint Paul. The areas northeast of the Mississippi also host a large amount of industrial land along Interstate 35W and the rail corridors. Surface streets are so limited in that area that the convergence of I-35W, Minnesota State Highway 280 and MN-36 creates a "block" that extends all the way to Fairview Avenue—kitty-corner to Rosedale Center mall.<br />
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Similarly, the sparse road network along the I-394 corridor creates blocks that extend well into St. Louis Park and Golden Valley, even reaching past MN-100. That same highway makes a significant barrier on the northeastern edge of the city, so circling on surface streets would take you through parts of the old Brookdale Mall in Brooklyn Center.<br />
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Circling the block along the MN-62 corridor on the south end of Minneapolis will take you into Richfield, and a large lobe also extends south of the city to encircle Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, which takes up most of the unincorporated area of Fort Snelling.<br />
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When making this map, I was surprised at how many blocks were crammed close to Lake Harriet, Lake Calhoun, and Lake of the Isles. Even areas around Lake Nokomis and Diamond Lake have had a lot of stuff built quite close to them.<br />
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Planners in Minneapolis have used the street grid and other small-block layouts to great effect since the city was founded, filling almost every nook and cranny they could find. I count 4,701 small blocks on this map, plus another 225 big blocks—a ratio of nearly 21:1 (significantly higher than Saint Paul's 14:1).<br />
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How do you think the suburbs fare in comparison? Stay tuned for a future post.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-86369287651561302712016-04-18T11:00:00.000-05:002016-04-18T11:00:01.184-05:00Getting around the block: Downtown vs. downtown<a href="https://flic.kr/p/FWXbKS"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1557/26219772080_e5c8178802_z.jpg" title="blocks-saint-paul-downtown-2016-04-17, by Michael Hicks on Flickr" /></a><br />
<small><i>Map of city blocks in downtown Saint Paul. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kJ337dMx7Gbk">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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How hard is it to get around the city block where you live, work, or shop? Does that affect the modes of transportation you choose on a daily basis? Does it impact the choices of city planners, or the areas where businesses choose to locate?<br />
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Until I started working in downtown Saint Paul, I often avoided the area due to its reputation for getting people lost. There are several one-way streets that create confusion, and the north-south streets are mostly named rather than numbered, so it becomes difficult to keep track of where you are unless you know the pattern. Take a wrong turn, and a driver can inadvertently get sent across one of the long bridges that separate downtown from other neighborhoods.<br />
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The streets aren't just an issue for drivers, though. Cyclists are also supposed to ride on the street and take the same circuitous paths as cars (unless you cheat by riding on the sidewalk). Even walking is impacted—I often use the green traffic light as a backup for knowing when to cross, since many pedestrian signals don't activate automatically, but car car signals aren't visible on some corners of one-way intersections.<br />
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Recently, I started mapping downtown to try and represent these navigation difficulties, starting with how hard it is to turn where and when you want to. I used green for blocks that can be circled in a clockwise direction with right-hand turns when driving. Yellow blocks mean that one-way streets on at least one side require turning left to make it all the way around. I used dark red for blocks where at least one turn would send you into oncoming traffic—those blocks require you to include at least one other block when circling around.<br />
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However, a different pattern began to dominate as I moved away from downtown and into the nearby neighborhoods. "Big" city blocks also create an impediment to navigating the city. The most obvious boundary around downtown is the Mississippi River, but there are highways, railways, and other underdeveloped spaces that almost completely isolate downtown from other neighborhoods. I used a threshold of 15 acres to distinguish "big" blocks (shown in pink) vs. "small" blocks—a number I arrived at for little more reason than 10 acres seemed too low and 20 acres seemed too high.<br />
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A square block of 15 acres has a circumference of about 0.6 miles, taking about 12 minutes to walk around, and the time and distance increases as blocks become more rectangular or otherwise elongated. Of course, some smaller blocks can take much longer than 12 minutes to circle on foot due to strange shapes, and the presence of small blocks doesn't automatically mean that you're in a walker's paradise. But in general, I think the resulting maps give a good indication of what it's like to get around.<br />
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Compare the above map of downtown Saint Paul with another one I made of downtown Minneapolis. This shows a fantastic checkerboard pattern of blocks that can be circled clockwise, counterclockwise, and the ones that have turn conflicts requiring extra circling of adjacent blocks.<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/EPfsJv"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1702/25476253993_2b148c4d32_z.jpg" title="blocks-minneapolis-downtown-2016-03-27 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr" /></a><br />
<small><i>Map of city blocks in downtown Minneapolis. <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kUdRW6QIgE4A">Click here for full map</a>.</i></small><br />
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Both downtowns have significant "moats" around them, though downtown Minneapolis retains more connections to nearby neighborhoods, especially to the south. In both cities, highways (especially interchanges) make large unwalkable zones, though the straighter mainline sections of the highways aren't quite as bad. Saint Paul significantly tore down a large amount of housing in the West Side Flats area in the early 1960s, and the city's Port Authority redeveloped it as a low-density industrial park. Large areas were also torn down to free up room for the capitol grounds. The park-like capitol lawn is an impressive space, but opening up the area in that way created something more similar to a suburban office park than a downtown zone.<br />
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Saint Paul is also much more heavily affected by railroads than Minneapolis is today. Both cities used to have a lot of railroad activity downtown, but only one freight rail corridor still cuts through the center of Minneapolis today, in the Warehouse District on the edge of downtown. On the other hand, Saint Paul sits at the a convergence point of six or seven different railroad lines operated by three different freight companies, including two major transcontinental rail corridors. In the heyday of passenger rail, this was good since it allowed lines to branch out in any direction, but with passenger service almost completely wiped out today, the freight lines present a significant burden on the downtown area.<br />
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This map likely helps explain how the West 7th Street neighborhood is one of the most active areas in/near downtown, since it's one of the only continuous connections of smaller, more walkable blocks leading into downtown. The only other similar link is along Robert Street and Jackson Street on the north end of the city—an area dominated by government buildings and a hospital.<br />
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Downtown Minneapolis blends into nearby neighborhoods more readily, though there are still significant gaps. I skipped over freeways when making these maps, since it's illegal to walk or bike along them except in limited circumstances, but also avoided routes that are only for bikes or pedestrians. That's mostly just to keep the maps relatively simple—many bike and pedestrian connections are hard to see on maps, and they more frequently involve bridges, which lead to some trouble when mapping. Sometimes a single spot can be encircled by several different "blocks" depending on which bridges or other links you choose to use—I've included some of those, such as on Nicollet Island in Minneapolis, but tried to limit my use of overlapping blocks to keep the maps cleaner.<br />
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What stands out to you about these maps? Do they match the way you feel about the ease or difficulty of getting around these parts of town?Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-24977147649891437472016-01-24T09:08:00.000-06:002016-01-24T09:08:39.703-06:00Preparing for the zero-carbon highway...and parking lot<a href="https://flic.kr/p/DiX9zc"><img alt="Graph of available electric car models by year from 1991 to 2015" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1487/24488340845_264e556ec0_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A decade ago, the electric car was declared dead. Now there are more models available than ever. (Source: <a href="http://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10303">AFDC</a>)</i></small><br />
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In order to fight climate change, we're heading into a zero-carbon future. This is a problem that needs to be tackled in part by making cities and neighborhoods that are more walkable and bikeable with good access to mass transportation, but it's clear that many people and many places won't make the shift to those ways of getting around. Even in well-balanced urban areas, lots of families will only be able to go car-lite rather than car-free.<br />
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Automobiles will remain necessary, though they'll have to start being powered by electric motors fed by carbon-free energy. The state and local governments in Minnesota haven't been particularly active in encouraging the change toward electric vehicles so far, but continuing improvements mean that we will need to pay more attention.<br />
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The search for the practical zero-emission car has gone on a roller-coaster ride over the past couple of decades. This began with a burst of interest in EVs in the late 1990s due to mandates that were about to go into effect. California led the way since they have one of the world's most influential car markets, and several other states adopted similarly strict air pollution rules. There was heavy resistance to these requirements, however, and the electric car was declared dead less than a decade after that era began.<br />
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The 2006 documentary <i>Who Killed the Electric Car?</i> showed there was plenty of blame to go around. The film cited the usual suspects like the oil and automotive industries, but also pointed to government officials and a generally uninterested (albeit often uninformed) consumer base. Batteries were specifically absolved in the film's postmortem analysis, but it has to be acknowledged that they've had major feasibility problems in the past. Battery packs have been too heavy, too big, too expensive, had too little capacity, and taken too long to recharge. Still, there were some substantial improvements at the time, including a few cars that used new high-capacity lithium-ion batteries. These technological embers persisted in the ashes of that first pulse of EV development, and sparked a new generation of substantially better electric cars just a few years later.<br />
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Those initial EVs from the late '90s through the early noughties were only made available in limited regions, explicitly to comply with government mandates, and were they often only leased rather than sold. As far as I know, none of the models were made publicly available in Minnesota. Zero-emission vehicle mandates were pushed back by about a decade, but are beginning to exert force once again. Things are going a bit differently this time around, and sales of electric cars are picking up steam. By 2025, California will require <a href="http://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/will-californias-zero-emissions-mandate-alter-the-car-landscape.html">more than 15% of new cars to be zero-emission vehicles</a>. <br />
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While many manufacturers still only offer "compliance cars" in a few states, some models such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S">Tesla Model S</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3">BMW i3</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf">Nissan Leaf</a> can be purchased locally. Recent years have also seen the emergence of plug-in hybrid vehicles which are able to run at least several miles on battery power alone before switching over to a gasoline engine, and many of those are being sold in all 50 states. The most well-known plug-in hybrid is probably the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt">Chevrolet Volt</a>, which has been billed as General Motors' response to Tesla, but many others have also appeared. The BMW i3 notably inhabits both camps, since a range-extending engine is available as an option.<br />
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These cars still command relatively high costs, but mass production is bringing prices down for batteries and the raft of other components unique to electric vehicles. Tesla, known for having the only cars with over 200 miles of range per charge, has set the price of their Model S upward of $70,000 (sans government tax credits). However, they struck a balance by including a host of compelling features in the car. This disguises the cost of the drivetrain, but allows it to be highly competitive with gas-powered cars in the same price tier.<br />
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Other electric cars have been sold at lower prices, but they've resorted to much smaller battery packs. Both the BMW i3 (upwards of $42,000) and the base edition of the Leaf (starting at $29,000) are prime examples, with just over 80 miles of range in their base configurations. This puts cities like St. Cloud, Rochester, and Duluth at or beyond the driving range of most electrics on the market today. Manufacturers are now racing to match the driving distance of Tesla's offerings while still aiming for distinctly mid-market prices—somewhere near the <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/05/04/new-car-transaction-price-3-kbb-kelley-blue-book/26690191/">average cost of a new car</a> ($33,560 last year).<br />
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Nissan has a bigger battery option available for the Leaf which brings range to 107 miles per charge and has hinted at even larger packs, and BMW recently indicated their i3 will get a range boost to about 120 miles for the 2017 model year, but those seem to just be incremental improvements. Tesla plans to offer a 200-mile-range vehicle for about $35,000 in 2017, but they may be beaten to the punch by General Motors. Earlier this month, GM showed off their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Bolt">Chevy Bolt</a> (yes, with the most confusing name ever), which is also supposed to reach the 200-mile mark. Their goal is to enter production by the end of 2016. It's hard to say which one of these cars will reach consumers first, but they're both right around the corner.<br />
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<div style="float: right; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 1em; width: 320px;"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/DjwNeA"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1668/24494906236_123d6b5a33_n.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>Level 2 chargers with SAE J1772 connectors dominate the national electric car charging infrastructure, but most aren't very speedy.</i></small></div>This increased travel range presents a problem with charging infrastructure, however. There are <a href="http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_infrastructure.html">three or four</a> different charging systems in use on modern electric cars. Most manufacturers, except Tesla, have settled on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772">SAE J1772</a> standard for low-speed charging using alternating current at 120 (Level 1) or 240 volts (Level 2). Most Level 2 chargers I've found are rated for 6.6 kilowatts of output, although some can reach 19.2 kW. Under good conditions, a 6.6 kW charger can restore 20 to 25 miles of range to a battery pack per hour, although the rate drops off as the battery gets closer to full. Not bad if you can charge up at home and mostly stick to short-distance just driving within a single city or metro area.<br />
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It becomes very challenging to use these AC chargers on longer journeys, though it's certainly not impossible to use them. On the 408-mile trip from Minneapolis to Chicago, using an electric car with Level 2 AC chargers could require more than double the normal drive time of a gas car, even with a head start on a battery filled with 200 miles of range. To make long-distance travel a reality, automakers are moving away from AC toward high-voltage direct current (more than 400 volts). However, this technology has been in greater flux, and there are three competing DC systems.<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/CDSvqH"><img src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1674/24057408589_736b29aef2_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A dual-standard 50-kilowatt high-voltage DC charging station at the University of Minnesota sporting both CHAdeMO (blue) and CCS (black) connectors.</i></small><br />
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BMW and GM, along with other American and European companies, use the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Charging_System">Combined Charging System</a> (CCS). This is also known as "SAE Combo" in North America because it expands upon the previously-mentioned SAE J1772 standard by adding two extra DC pins on the bottom. A CCS port can accept either a low-power charge plug or a high-power one, though a high-power plug can't fit into a low-power socket. Despite that problem, it seems like it should be one of the more popular systems, but it's the youngest standard and the others have had a head start.<br />
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Nissan and other Japanese automakers use a system called CHAdeMO. This uses a large, round plug which isn't physically compatible with the SAE standard at all, so a high-speed charging socket needs to be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAdeMO#/media/File:Nissan_Leaf_Charging_Sockets_2012-04-01.jpg">placed adjacent to</a> the normal low-speed SAE port on any vehicle that uses this system. CCS and CHAdeMO installations may vary in power between 20 kW up to about 60 kW, making them capable of restoring 60 to 180 miles of range to a 100 mpg<sub><small>e</small></sub> car in an hour, although development is continuing on versions that will push that significantly higher.<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/haJkgU"><img src="https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2860/10611816294_f5caca9708_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>A Tesla Supercharger filling the battery of a Model S at a California outlet mall.</i></small><br />
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And that brings us to Tesla, who bring the smallest and sleekest design, able to do both low-speed and high-speed charging through a single unified connector. However, the downside is that this requires adapters whenever non-Tesla charging stations are encountered. Tesla offers adapters for both low-speed SAE and high-speed CHAdeMO plugs, but nothing (yet) for the CCS standard. Their high-speed charging system is called the Supercharger, and can <a href="http://insideevs.com/tesla-cranks-superchargers-up-past-120-kw/">pump 120 kilowatts of power or more</a>, allowing peak charging rates of 360 miles per hour. Again, this ends up being slower in practice due to the slowdown as batteries fill up, but Tesla says that cars equipped with their 85 kilowatt-hour battery pack, good for 257 to 270 miles of range depending on model, can be fully recharged in 70 minutes.<br />
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There are already more than 3,500 fast DC chargers deployed through the country across the three different standards. Mapping them out, they reveal some surprising patterns. <br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/Dm7xh6"><img alt="Composite of maps showing coverage for CHAdeMO, SAE Combo/CCS, and Tesla fast DC chargers, plus a fourth showing all stations using the previous 3 standards plus Level 2 charging stations" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1486/24512806225_f5eb5eeecc_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<small><i>Deployment patterns for the various charging station types. Maps from <a href="http://www.afdc.energy.gov/locator/stations/">AFDC</a>.</i></small><br />
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The two standardized systems are mostly clustered in metropolitan areas, but include some corridors that were probably sponsored by state governments or other regional entities. CHAdeMO has the most stations, but CCS is catching up. One issue is that CHAdeMO and CCS installations usually only have one or two chargers per station, which can be troublesome if you need to charge and come across one that's already in use, blocked, or broken. The small sites greatly increase the chance that you'll have to go somewhere else or sit and wait for a long time to get an available charger.<br />
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Tesla appears to be the only entity that's thinking nationally about fast-charging infrastructure, and has stretched them along multiple corridors across the country, facilitating coast-to-coast travel. Notably, the first cross-country leg of the Supercharger network was built <a href="http://streets.mn/2014/03/20/tesla-re-draws-the-map-for-ev-travel/">through southern Minnesota</a>, and company employees used it to smash the record time for cross-country EV travel in February 2014. Tesla averages more than 4 chargers per station, and some installations have two or three times that number. Despite having the smallest number of stations, Tesla has the largest number of DC fast charger outlets and the broadest coverage area.<br />
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The company intended their Supercharger network to primarily be used for intercity travel, so they sometimes aren't available in metropolitan areas. Still, when combined with the extended coverage area available through the (<a href="http://www.teslarati.com/review-tesla-model-s-chademo-adapter/">somewhat expensive</a>) CHAdeMO adapter, Tesla maintains a strategic advantage over other automakers.<br />
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Most new CHAdeMO and CCS stations are being built with dual-standard chargers, like the one from the University of Minnesota that I pictured above. Dual-standard chargers are apparently only about 5% more expensive than ones only operating on one of the two, so it makes sense to just include both types of connectors. It's conceivable that future stations may be triple- or quad-standard, including J1772 and/or Tesla adapters, allowing all types of vehicles to use them, but I hope one of the three fast-charging types will eventually become dominant and we won't have to worry about the mess of different plugs a decade from now.<br />
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For anyone who worries about being able to find a charge point, plug-in hybrid cars also offer an interim solution. Since they include a normal gasoline engine, they can be filled up like regular cars on long trips, but still benefit from using electricity when doing daily driving tasks. This segment of the car market is <a href="http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=alts&year1=2015&year2=2017&vtype=Plug-in+Hybrid&srchtyp=newAfv">broadening pretty rapidly</a>, though that's partly because states with zero-emission vehicle mandates are now allowing them to be partly fulfilled with these models (known as "transitional zero-emission vehicles" under California's regulations).<br />
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As an example of where this is headed, Chrysler recently announced they'll offer a plug-in hybrid version of their <a href="http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1101960_2017-chrysler-pacifica-hybrid-more-details-on-30-mile-plug-in">new Pacifica minivan</a>, which the company claims can run 30 miles on electricity before shifting to power from the engine (it also has a built-in vacuum cleaner). Chevrolet also recently updated their Volt with better electric driving range (increased from 35 miles to 53) and improved gas engine fuel economy. However, in the long run, it looks like it will be cheaper and more practical for cars to be all-electric rather than dealing with the complexity of both an internal-combustion engine and a battery-powered drivetrain.<br />
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Electric charging will create a big shift in the way we get around, and will have an impact on the built environment. Homeowners are able to install chargers at home, so many drivers will only need to use public chargers on rare occasions. It's hazier what will happen for apartment-dwellers. Certainly some apartment complexes will get chargers, but it's a bit hard to imagine that everyone will be able to plug in overnight. There will always be some drivers who will need to fill up on the go.<br />
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Fast-chargers seem to be getting faster by the day, but it's not quite clear how fast they'll be able to become. The standard gas station/convenience store combination we're all familiar with will probably become morph into something different, but what? I expect increased demand for meaningful retail, entertainment, and restaurant options—at least something more substantial than the typical gas station hot dogs and junk food.<br />
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The electrification of the car is one of three major shifts that I expect to see in the automotive world over the next few decades, with the other two being self-driving cars and the transition toward car sharing services. Despite all the buzz it gets, I don't expect self-driving vehicles in themselves to significantly change the way we build cities. In contrast, car sharing has the potential to dramatically reduce the number of cars we need on the road—but only if people buy into the concept.<br />
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I expect the shift to electric driving to be somewhere in between. Notably, charging stations can fit into tight spaces and can meld with existing parking. They can be in lots or on the street, and sometimes show up in parking structures, such as the <a href="http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/49247-Supercharger-Duluth-MN/page3">Superchargers in Duluth</a>. The valuable city corners occupied by gas stations could still fill up just as many cars even after they're replaced with mixed-use buildings and have the adjacent streets lined with charging outlets.<br />
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For places that have seen traditional town centers depleted of commercial and retail activity in favor of areas around off-ramps and frontage roads, thoughtful placement of charging stations is also potentially useful tool for restoring more walkable alternatives.<br />
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Of course, while electric cars are quieter and far more efficient than their gasoline-powered rivals, but we still shouldn't give up our more walkable environments in order to accommodate them. We'll always have to remember that electric charging this is a form of parking, so charging spaces bring all of those associated benefits and costs. Choose your locations wisely. Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-14668067572309156572016-01-11T11:00:00.000-06:002016-01-11T13:01:52.173-06:00Gold Line needs a literal change of direction<a href="https://flic.kr/p/C4NJpq" title="stpaul-woodbury-gateway-2016-01-10 by Mulad, on Flickr"><img alt="stpaul-woodbury-gateway-2014-02-13" height="428" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1590/23671910934_ef4f471ec4_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
<small><i>The preferred alignment of the Gold Line/Gateway Corridor running eastward along I-94 from downtown Saint Paul overlaid on a map showing population and employment density as well as other transit routes.</i></small><br />
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Last Tuesday, the Lake Elmo city council voted 3–2 to <a href="http://www.twincities.com/transportation/ci_29356441/lake-elmo-wont-let-gold-line-bus-route">reject further involvement in the Gold Line project</a>, also known as the <a href="http://thegatewaycorridor.com/">Gateway Corridor</a>. The service has been planned to run through 2.5 to 3 miles of Lake Elmo, but that would take it through some undeveloped areas with very low population density and limited amounts of commercial development. I've been disheartened to see planners push this strange routing, so I see this rejection by Lake Elmo as an opportunity to restore some sanity to a project that has literally gone off in the wrong direction.<br />
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The Gateway Corridor only came onto my radar around 2010, but it has moved through the local planning processes relatively quickly. Of course, with some of our regional transit planning efforts taking decades, it's not that hard to stand out. <br />
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When it was first talked about, the Gateway Corridor included a study area extending all the way to Eau Claire, Wisconsin (more than 80 miles from downtown Saint Paul). It has been trimmed back and is now shortened to about 12 miles—Still a mile longer than the Central Corridor! The currently preferred alignment runs from Saint Paul through Maplewood, Oakdale, and Lake Elmo, likely with a turn at the very eastern end south into Woodbury (not included in my map).<br />
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Rail and bus options have both been considered for this line, but the rail options have been discarded at this point. It's currently expected to be built as a bus rapid transit service with a dedicated busway (similar to the route used by the University of Minnesota's Campus Connector buses).<br />
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(MnDOT still has a separate plan to run regional rail service to Eau Claire <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/railplan/resources.html">on the drawing board</a>, though it's not clear when planning for that route will pick up steam again.)<br />
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An eastward transit service along the Interstate 94 corridor has been on the minds of planners for decades, particularly due to <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9530508,-92.9955347,16z/data=!3m1!1e3">3M's global headquarters</a> in a mile-wide section of Maplewood just outside of Saint Paul. It's home to around 12,000 employees, but only two bus routes, the 219 (suburban local) and 294 (express), reach the corporate campus today.<br />
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It makes sense to improve service to such a major destination, but I've been continually baffled as Gateway Corridor planners have stuck so close to I-94, seemingly a vestige of the original plan to reach cities in Wisconsin. I was even more surprised when they pushed for building large segments in Lake Elmo on the north side of the highway, a suburb that has fought against denser development.<br />
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Lake Elmo has a sizable population of over 8,000, but because it is a community that annexed most of its surrounding township, those households are spread across more than 22 square miles of land. Small towns out in rural parts of Minnesota often have densities of 1,000 to 2,000 people per square mile, but Lake Elmo only tips the scales at 360 per square mile.<br />
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There has been a lot of development in the city but it's very spread out because homes are typically placed on large parcels that are two acres or larger in size. Amusingly, the densest blob of population in Lake Elmo is the <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9604552,-92.877311,16z/data=!3m1!1e3">Cimarron trailer park</a> near Lake Elmo Avenue and 10th Street North.<br />
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Woodbury, just to the south across I-94, stands in stark contrast to Lake Elmo. While Woodbury isn't nearly as dense as the central cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, it has an estimated population of nearly 67,000. It has no traditional downtown that I'm aware of, and was only incorporated in 1967, but has seen explosive growth over the last few decades. It is an almost perfect example of 36-square-mile township becoming an incorporated city, though not quite 2/3rds of its area has been actively developed so far.<br />
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Neither of these cities is a poster child for dense development, but Woodbury has at least experimented with more urban patterns, such as at <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9425322,-92.90026,17z/data=!3m1!1e3">City Walk</a> near Woodbury Drive and Hudson Road.<br />
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Personally, I don't understand the desire to route such an expensive service (currently estimated at $485 million) into almost completely undeveloped area where the local government is hostile to any reasonable density. It could easily go south of the highway through an existing retail corridor—still very under-developed, but hopefully a region that would be more easily fixable with the right incentives in place.<br />
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But even with the Gold Line running south of I-94, is that enough to fix the current transit situation out in the eastern suburbs? Metro Transit barely gets into Woodbury today, only serving a small area in the northeast corner of the city, and only operating express bus routes with limited schedules. While the Gold Line would add more stops and an all-day schedule, the stations would all need to be built around the park-and-ride model. While that would probably work alright for workers in downtown Minneapolis or Saint Paul, I have a hard time imagining anyone would use a park-and-ride stuck next to I-94 in order to get to 3M, a destination that's only a few minutes away on the highway.<br />
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The Gateway Corridor really needs to morph into something different—a network that gets a lot more people within walking or biking distance of their nearest stop. If Woodbury was a standalone city, it would be big enough to justify its own transit system. Woodbury has a population comparable to St. Cloud, and is around the size that Rochester was when I was growing up, and both have modest bus systems. While the city doesn't have a traditional layout with a downtown to act as an obvious hub, it is roughly laid out along mile-by-mile grid with fast arterial streets that would automatically encourage a limited-stop style of service.<br />
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Here's an example of a simple network that could be built out of a half-dozen routes or so to allow local connectivity while also bringing traffic north and west to connect to the existing Metro Transit network. It gets most of the city within half a mile of a bus stop. In a few places, I routed lines along bikeway corridors or created other new routes (such as a bridge crossing just west of the I-94/I-694/I-494 interchange), but it's likely that such a system could be put together for much less than the current estimated Gold Line price.<br />
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<iframe height="480" src="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kgDKB_19uY-w&z=12&ll=44.9231907,-92.923445" width="640"></iframe><br />
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Obviously, Woodbury's low density would be a challenge for successfully implementing a network like this. I just slapped this network together quickly by following major roads, but I think it has a few features that would be critical for success. First, I had four routes converge on the 3M campus northwest of the city, fanning out through the city in different patterns. Second, multiple routes converge at two other hubs: Woodbury Village by I-494 and Valley Creek Road, and Tamarack Village on Radio Drive just south of I-94.<br />
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Purely as an example, the purple line extends down Radio Drive all the way to Cottage Grove, since I think there's a slim possibility of decent suburb-to-suburb service (in this case, perhaps a link between the Gold Line corridor and the Red Rock service proposed along US-61). There's also some potential here to link to routes along I-494 to cross the Mississippi River into South St. Paul and other southern suburbs.<br />
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Before I end, I'll point out another huge challenge that Woodbury must overcome to rebalance its transportation network. The city has a dearth of decent pedestrian infrastructure, with sidewalks and sidepaths largely restricted to major roadways—and sometimes only running along one side of those roads. Here is <a href="http://product.itoworld.com/map/126?lon=-92.93090&lat=44.92092&zoom=13&fullscreen=true">a sidewalk map from the folks at ITO</a>—green roadways are the only ones that have sidewalks, while red roadways don't have any pedestrian infrastructure (pink indicates actual sidewalks, which is a little confusing, and light green indicates dedicated paths that aren't located next to a roadway—the awkward color scheme is a downside of using this otherwise wonderful free tool).<br />
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<a href="https://flic.kr/p/Ctgzez"><img alt="woodbury-sidewalks-2016-01-10 by Mulad, on Flickr" src="https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1642/23937427519_1c6ac375f5_z.jpg" /></a><br />
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New bus services through Woodbury would need to have their routes checked for adequate pedestrian infrastructure, and new sidewalks or paths would need to be added where necessary. Woodbury does have a pretty extensive network of off-street paths, however, and it would be important to leverage those routes as much as possible to get people to and from their nearest stops.<br />
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The Gold Line really only skims the surface of what's needed for proper transit service in the East Metro, and current plans undervalue the need for infill development in existing built-up areas. We're heading toward a zero-carbon future, and preparing for that requires us to make the most use of what we already have.<br />
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It will be far better to get existing suburbs to build up their missing downtowns and connect into regional public transportation networks than it would be to abandon them in favor of magic new greenfield plans. Our transit plans need to reach the hearts of these communities rather than bypassing them for green pastures.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-13913336430213731002015-09-21T10:00:00.000-05:002015-09-21T18:31:01.322-05:00Getting rolling on rail to Eau ClaireThis week, a citizen group is holding a couple of <a href="http://www.hudsonstarobserver.com/news/region/3836222-minnesota-plans-st-paul-eau-claire-passenger-rail-line">public meetings</a> to advocate for a passenger rail link between the Twin Cities and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a corridor that MnDOT suggested in its <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/railplan/">2010 State Rail Plan</a> should be built before the year 2030. <br />
The meeting announcement has led me to dig into the route and do some analysis of my own, though this doesn't necessarily reflect what will be presented by the St. Croix Valley Rail Group on Wednesday.<br />
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MnDOT's plan suggested a regional rail service operating approximately four round-trips through the day, though presumably they would be spread out, making it unlike peak-only commuter rail service. (Commuter rail had been studied and discarded on this route as part of the Gateway Corridor study, which is instead looking at bus rapid transit for the much shorter Gold Line route).<br />
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Wisconsin's Department of Transportation had also been working on a 20-year rail plan around the same time as Minnesota, though it was put on pause following the Tea Party-infused political surge later that year which put Governor Scott Walker in office alongside a much more conservative legislature in the winter of 2010–2011.<br />
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Wisconsin then ended up with a near-total abandonment of passenger rail planning. The official state rail plan document was <a href="http://wisconsindot.gov/Pages/projects/multimodal/railplan/default.aspx">finally approved last year</a>, and includes possible links to Eau Claire, Madison (where federal funding was famously turned down by the state), and Green Bay.<br />
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That's good, but a bit underwhelming, considering how Wisconsin's population is less heavily concentrated than Minnesota's (see <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=zJ7tTmaN1yqU.k19GuvHIVFns">this map of cities with populations greater than 5,000</a> and contrast it to <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=zJ7tTmaN1yqU.kmQ2ZTg_Jchk">the one for Minnesota</a>), so I expected a couple of other interesting links. These seem to be cribbed from older Midwest Regional Rail Initiative plans, a multi-state effort for high(er)-speed rail that was once led by Wisconsin.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2-fiYtv49oM/Vf8DMwoT-yI/AAAAAAAAHUs/yHk2RZKcI88/s1600/Wisconsin_Rail_Plain_2030_corridors.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2-fiYtv49oM/Vf8DMwoT-yI/AAAAAAAAHUs/yHk2RZKcI88/s640/Wisconsin_Rail_Plain_2030_corridors.png" width="513" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wisconsin's rail plan for the year 2030 includes possible connections to Eau Claire, Madison, and Green Bay.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>One significant link that seems like it's missing is some sort of connection from Eau Claire to Green Bay. Frustratingly, the most direct link via Wausau has been mostly abandoned at this point, though it would still be possible to have a fairly good path through Stevens Point and Appleton (which might make it a better idea anyway).<br />
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But for this post, I want to focus on Eau Claire, which lies about 100 miles east of Minneapolis. The city itself only has a population of about 65,000, though there are a number of nearby towns including Chippewa Falls which creates a small metro area of about 165,000 people. Menomonie is also close by, and the Eau Claire-Chippewa Falls-Menomonie Combined Metropolitan Statistical Area now reaches a population of almost 210,000.<br />
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Eau Claire and Menomonie (at nearby Menomonie Junction) had rail service on the Chicago & North Western Railway's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Cities_400">Twin Cities <i>"400"</i></a> until July 23, 1963, about 8 years before the introduction of Amtrak. A <a href="http://streamlinermemories.info/?p=5945">timetable from 1962</a> listed travel time at 114 to 120 minutes from Minneapolis to Eau Claire and 85 to 90 minutes from St. Paul to Eau Claire (the eastbound train was slightly faster, at least on paper).<br />
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This was one of the three fastest trains to run between the Twin Cities and Chicago, although it had the major flaw that it only ran once per day per direction. That made it very hard to compete with automobile and air travel. Even today, Eau Claire has two daily round-trip flights to Chicago, subsidized through the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service">Essential Air Service</a> program (though they will still cost you more than $350 round-trip).<br />
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Restoring passenger rail service on the corridor has the potential to provide a more frequent transportation option for the area's population while also reducing costs, especially compared to flying: The existing Eau Claire air service costs close to 70 cents per mile when EAS funding is included, while the average cost for Amtrak to carry a passenger one mile is about 40 cents (also including their subsidy).<br />
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It's certainly a bit tough to imagine reestablishing service that was abandoned by the railroads more than 50 years ago now, though it's important to note that Wisconsin's population has grown by 40% since 1963, and Minnesota's has grown by 55%. Even if the potential market for rail service remains relatively small, it continues to grow year over year.<br />
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So, what are the challenges facing restoration of service on this line? Here's a map I put together of single-tracking and sidings along the corridor, to give an idea of the route's capacity:<br />
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<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.k4DaUizjeFdE" width="640" height="480"></iframe><br />
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Between Saint Paul and Eau Claire, there are only four places with long sidings or segments of double-tracking, plus another short siding at Menomonie Junction, which limits how often trains can pass each other. It's 38 miles between the double-tracked segment in Hudson eastward to Menomonie, according to Google Maps' "Satellite" view, and about 46 miles from Hudson to the longer siding near Elk Mound. [<b>Update</b>: It turns out that I missed a siding between Woodville and Hersey, which reduces the longest stretch of single-tracking to 21 miles.]<br />
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MnDOT's rail plan only suggested running four round-trips per day (eight total trains), and the Federal Railroad Administration's <a href="http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/publicsite/downloaddbf.aspx">Highway-Rail Crossing Inventory</a> suggests that there are only about four freight trains per day, so with appropriate scheduling, it's conceivable that 12 daily trains (less than one per hour) could operate over that gap without needing any new infrastructure. Still, it would be better to add a few new sidings to shorten the gap. Even with upgraded track speeds, passenger trains could take half an hour to 45 minutes to cover the gap, and freights could take more than an hour, potentially leading to serious delays on trips that should only take two hours end-to-end.<br />
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A few additional sidings would be a good idea, likely including one near Baldwin to be about halfway along the line. There are also clusters of freight customers near Menomonie and Truax which should have their spurs connected to shared sidings. That would allow the main track to be kept clear for through traffic while freight crews deal with the relatively slow process of attaching and detaching rail cars at the customer sites.<br />
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Much more of the line used to have double-track and sidings, but it was pulled out over the decades as freight traffic consolidated onto fewer routes and the need to keep extra track for passenger service disappeared. This means that there are few physical obstacles to restoring it, but it will cost a considerable amount of money. Each siding would likely cost several million dollars.<br />
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The tracks have also been allowed to degrade over the years, so the allowed train speeds are not as high as they once were. Freight trains can reach a maximum of 50 mph on the route, but only for a few short segments, according to a 2007 Union Pacific timetable I scraped off the Internet a few years ago. 85% of the route was limited to 30 mph or less at that time, though things may have changed since then.<br />
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The timetable notes that passenger trains are allowed to go 10 mph faster than freights on the line, but that doesn't help much when comparing it to the nearby Interstate 94 which has recently been updated with 70 mph speed limits (increasing from a rural freeway limit of 65 mph that Wisconsin had for many years).<br />
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Restoring tracks to 79 mph service, the typical standard for passenger service in the U.S., or beyond into "high-speed" territory will require an investment of a few hundred thousand dollars per mile. This type of work involves removing worn-out ties/sleepers, refreshing track ballast, and smoothing and straightening the rails themselves. Depending on the age and quality of the rails, they may only need to be run through a grinding machine to restore a good running surface, but bad segments would obviously need to be replaced.<br />
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The line is in relatively good shape as far as signaling goes, but would still need to be significantly improved for passenger trains to run on the route. The line has automatic block signaling (ABS) in place for all but about six miles of track, but future passenger lines are required to have positive train control (PTC). It's unclear how much that would need to cost, since it is still a new technology and price estimates have fluctuated wildly over the past few years.<br />
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That's a major hurdle, though the freight company may be required to implement it anyway if it carries hazardous materials on the route. If that's the case, then adding passenger service back on the route would be beneficial to the railroad, since the costs could be shared between the freight and passenger operations (with passenger trains most likely being funded by state and local governments, though the possibility of a privately-funded operation probably shouldn't be discarded entirely). <br />
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If the line is extended beyond Eau Claire as shown in the Wisconsin Rail Plan map above, the challenges would be similar for the next 120 miles of track. However, the last nine miles between Wyeville and Camp Douglas (where the line could merge with today's route of the <i>Empire Builder</i>) deserves special note: That section of track appears to be disused and in danger of abandonment. Google's aerial images show the right-of-way in a condition of poor repair, and miles of underused rail cars were parked there for long-term storage when pictures were taken.<br />
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That's yet another reason why planning of passenger service to or through Eau Claire needs to get going right away, before those tracks disappear.<br />
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The St. Croix Valley Rail Group is planning two presentations for Wednesday, September 23rd. I haven't had any direct contact with the group, but thought the timing presented a good opportunity to do some of my own digging. The meetings are scheduled at 5:30 and 7:00 pm, respectively:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">River Falls Public Library<br />
140 Union St<br />
River Falls, WI<br />
5:30 pm<br />
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Hudson House Grand Hotel<br />
1616 Crest View Drive<br />
Hudson, WI<br />
7:00 pm</blockquote>Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-166977405208342912015-09-09T09:54:00.000-05:002015-09-09T09:54:00.331-05:00Sunset Unlimited: Restoring passenger rail on the Gulf CoastUp here in Saint Paul, the Mississippi River passes within blocks of where I live and work. As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached, I started looking toward the other end of this waterway that links the Midwest to the South because I wanted to better understand the lasting impact of the storm on one of my interests, the nation's passenger rail system. Ever since the hurricane happened, service on Amtrak's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Limited"><i>Sunset Limited</i></a> route has been suspended east of New Orleans, and the reasons why haven't been well-defined.<br />
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What could have damaged tracks so badly that it would still be out of service ten years later? Even though Katrina was the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. since 1928, was its impact so great that we couldn't restore the modest service that was running before the storm? In reality, the hurricane is probably just a convenient excuse for the halt of passenger operations and not an outcome that should be tolerated.<br />
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Surprisingly, when Amtrak formed in 1971, the system <a href="http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/10282/the-evolution-of-amtrak-1971-2011/">didn't include any service between New Orleans and northern Florida</a>. It took over two decades of campaigning by the region before a direct link was reestablished in 1993. Even when the train did run on the line, it was only three times a week each direction—the same frequency that it's always had on the route's western section from Los Angeles to New Orleans.<br />
<br />
I decided to take a look at the layout of tracks along the route to try and understand why it has continued to take so long, using a map format like what I used on the <i>Empire Builder</i> route several months ago. I focused on the 770-mile stretch that is still suspended between New Orleans and Orlando.<br />
<br />
<iframe height="480" src="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=z0mLxCdMPV7Y.kBGV1a3sFSN4" width="640"></iframe><br />
<br />
When I started, I expected to find something obviously out of place along the route, but as I traced the line through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, everything seemed to be in good order.<br />
<br />
However, it was obvious from the aerial imagery that there were a few different sections to the corridor which carry different amounts of traffic and are maintained to different standards. I compared my map to railroad crossing data from the Federal Railroad Administration (which I used to make the map in my <a href="http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-single-tracked-world-of-american.html">previous post</a>) and made note of these five main segments:<br />
<ul>
<li>Starting from the west, the <i>Sunset Limited</i> used mainline tracks that run from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama, and then toward Montgomery, though the train turns off the mainline in the small town of Flomaton, Alabama, right next to the border with Florida. For this distance of about 210 miles, the track see about 15 to 18 freight trains per day. The FRA railroad crossing database still lists top speeds up to 79 mph, which is the maximum for most passenger rail lines across the U.S. The longest distance I found between sidings was 13.8 miles.</li>
<li>From Flomaton, the line heads south to Pensacola, Florida and then east to Tallahassee, covering a distance of about 240 miles. This section of the line is much quieter, only seeing two or three trains per day. Speeds appear to range from 30 mph up to 59 mph, a number that signifies that the line lacks any illuminated signals to help control train movements. The longest distance between sidings here is 31.1 miles</li>
<li>For the next 105 miles from Tallahassee to Lake City, there are about 7 trains per day, and top speeds now appear to be about 40 mph in most places (which appears to be a reduction in speed from before the storm in 2005). The longest stretch between sidings is 18.4 miles.</li>
<li>The 62 miles from Lake City to Jacksonville host 8 to 12 trains per day and have speeds up to 79 mph, with the longest single-track segment being 12.5 miles.</li>
<li>The 151 miles from Jacksonville to Orlando still has three Amtrak passenger trains in operation, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Meteor"><i>Silver Meteor</i></a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Star_%28Amtrak_train%29"><i>Silver Star</i></a>, and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Train"><i>Auto Train</i></a> (an oddball route that only stops in the Orlando suburb of Sanford). The FRA data indicates there are 8-14 trains per day in total, though it doesn't seem to include traffic from the new <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunRail">SunRail</a> commuter service near Orlando. the spacing between sidings is fairly short, only reaching up to 11 miles apart. Most of the commuter rail section near Orlando is double-tracked.</li>
</ul>
CSX Transportation is the railroad that owns the tracks all the way from New Orleans to Orlando (the western segment of the train that is still in operation is run on Union Pacific tracks from Los Angeles to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where it switches to BNSF tracks for the rest of the route to N.O.). Their heaviest damage in the storm was between New Orleans and Mobile.<br />
<br />
Just east of New Orleans, the tracks cross the Intracoastal Waterway, which connects Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico. The line then passes into Mississippi and through communities such as Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, and Biloxi, which were among the places hit hardest by the wind and <a href="http://www.wunderground.com/education/Katrinas_surge_contents.asp">storm surge</a> during the hurricane. In Pass Christian, the surge measured 27.8 feet and was combined with a relatively high tide.<br />
<br />
That level of surge is enough to completely obliterate homes and other modest-sized buildings. The rail line suffered too as <a href="http://www.trainweb.org/trainpixsnet/news%2Binfo/hurricaneKatrina_csx.html">tracks were washed out and bridges destroyed</a> and <a href="https://www.arema.org/files/library/2006_Conference_Proceedings/001.pdf">electrical signaling huts that were flooded with saltwater</a> as the water crashed ashore. In some places, ships and barges floated up onto the ground and eventually settled onto tracks as the waters receded.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://flic.kr/p/y9AVVW"><img alt="Map of train traffic volumes at grade crossings in the southeastern U.S." src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5807/21100763772_cd9bfc02f4_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
About 100 miles of track was severely damaged or destroyed, but with 15 to 18 trains per day, it was important for the railroad to be repaired and brought back into service. The railroad and several contracting companies worked for four months to restore service between New Orleans and Mobile.<br />
<br />
It's less clear how bad the situation was in Florida, along the second notable section of track in my list. Pensacola did experience a modest storm surge of about five feet, but that didn't cause as much damage, so the line was back in operation pretty quickly. Only the track nearest Pensacola would have been affected by storm surge—most of the distance from Flomaton to Tallahassee is inland and would have only been damaged by wind and creeks and rivers swollen by rain.<br />
<br />
And yet, this relatively protected stretch of track is probably the real culprit preventing the resumption of service. With only two or three trains per day, there isn't enough revenue from freight traffic to warrant maintaining tracks at the level that passenger trains really need.<br />
<br />
I was surprised to see that train frequencies were so low along that stretch of track, since the Gulf Coast seems like an important economic region to me. But rail freight tends to move in a more hub-and-spoke pattern like airlines rather than a point-to-point service like highway vehicles do.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://flic.kr/p/yauFSK"><img alt="Map of train speeds at grade crossings in the southeastern U.S." src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5748/21110862315_1394865cef_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
A line with just two or three freights per day often only justifies enough maintenance to operate at speeds of 10 to 30 miles per hour, which is far too low for passenger services. Extra outside funding is often needed to cover the cost gap when passenger operations exist on otherwise quiet lines. That's likely one of the reasons why <i>Sunset Limited</i> service hasn't resumed: Either previous funding sources dried up, or the railroad increased the amount of money they were asking for after the hurricane and subsequent repair work.<br />
<br />
Running more trains, whether freight or passenger, would allow the cost to be spread more widely, but that idea hasn't gotten much traction so far. Amtrak <a href="http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/904/671/GulfCoastServicePlanReport.pdf">studied the route back in 2009</a>, but only looked at either restoring the previous tri-weekly train or two options for running a daily service (one was an extension of the <i>City of New Orleans</i> from Chicago, while the other was a standalone New Orleans to Orlando train).<br />
<br />
Amtrak's underwhelming conclusion? Restore the train as it had been before, despite it's infrequent service and all the delays and complication involved in running a train all the way from coast to coast.<br />
<br />
Studies like that are asking the wrong question and getting the wrong answer. What the country really needs is for Amtrak to add frequent, speedy service so that their trains can be used as day-to-day transportation for many more people. That would broaden the benefits that the company provides, and hopefully reduce their operating losses as well.<br />
<br />
Here are populations for some of the metropolitan areas from New Orleans on east to Orlando:<br />
<ul>
<li>New Orleans region - 1.2 million</li>
<li>Gulfport region - 383,000 </li>
<li>Mobile region - 414,000</li>
<li>Pensacola region - 461,000 </li>
<li>Tallahassee region - 376,000</li>
<li>Jacksonville region - 1.4-1.5 million</li>
<li>Orlando region - 2.3-3.0 million</li>
</ul>
It's about 620 miles from New Orleans to Jacksonville, the longest gap between 1-million-plus metros on the corridor. That's considerably longer than the 400-mile rule of thumb used in rail planning, though there are a lot of people questioning whether that's a valid rule.<br />
<br />
Still, there are a few shorter segments that look good on paper. Here in Minnesota, we've been looking at adding eight daily round-trips on the 150-mile Northern Lights Express corridor from Minneapolis to Duluth. The Twin Cities has a population up to 3.5 or 3.8 million, and the Duluth area has a population around 280,000.<br />
<br />
Orlando and Jacksonville two 1-million-plus metros about 150 miles apart, which makes that corridor an ideal candidate for increased rail service. New Orleans-Gulfport-Mobile and Jacksonville-Tallahassee are also pretty similar distances (144 and 167 miles, respectively).<br />
<br />
Having multiple daily trips on the eastern and western segments would probably improve the viability of the middle section of the line, the most likely source of trouble today. The service improvements might even justify a new, more direct rail alignment between Mobile and Pensacola.<br />
<br />
Similarly, if we look to cities west of New Orleans, there are some interesting combinations possible if the line started in Texas:<br />
<ul>
<li>Baton Rouge region - 820,000</li>
<li>Lafayette region - 479,000 to 616,000</li>
<li>Houston region - 6.3 million</li>
<li>San Antonio region - 2.3 million</li>
</ul>
Houston to New Orleans is about 363 miles, which makes puts it in that ideal distance zone for frequent, high-speed service. Houston is also a notable destination because the <a href="http://www.texascentral.com/">Texas Central</a> high-speed rail service is being planned to connect that city to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Frustratingly, a segment of track between Lafayette and Baton Rouge has been abandoned, so it would take some significant investment to link that city, but it would be worthwhile in the long run.<br />
<br />
Amtrak's trouble with restoring the <i>Sunset Limited</i> or pursuing even better options shares the same symptoms that the company has all across the country. They've lacked the funding and motivation to pursue service improvements in areas that would bring the biggest bang for the buck while also adding to the system's overall connectivity. Amtrak needs better funding to pursue these opportunities, otherwise we'll look back in a couple decades and still find a skeletal national network that hardly looks different than what we have today.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-44380826216363919152015-07-28T15:25:00.000-05:002015-07-28T22:27:30.733-05:00The single-tracked world of American railroading<a alt="Map of grade crossings in the United States showing number of main tracks at each crossing" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mulad/19403368774/" title="grade-crossing-main-tracks-2015-07-26 by Michael Hicks on Flickr"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/503/19403368774_075c57ce57_z.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
Here's a map I put together using the Federal Railroad Administration's <a href="http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/publicsite/downloaddbf.aspx">Highway-Rail Crossing Inventory</a> database, focusing on the number of main tracks at public grade crossings across the country. The main thing to see is that the vast majority of our rail infrastructure is single-tracked, only allowing trains to travel in one direction at a time on segments of track that don't have passing sidings. (For this version of the map, I didn't attempt to show sidings.)<br />
<br />
There are only a dozen or so major double-tracked corridors that show up on this map. Some routes, like the double/quadruple-tracked Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts, are mostly or wholly invisible, since they are grade-separated and don't have any level crossings. Many metropolitan areas and rail hubs have splotches where there are three or more tracks, but they're usually for very limited distances.<br />
<br />
Some rail routes are double-tracked due to running heavy, slow trains. This includes routes in northern Minnesota that were built to haul iron ore/taconite to seaports on Lake Superior. In Wyoming's Powder River Basin, the triple-tracked Joint Line shows just a few public crossings. It's used to haul coal out from the region's mines to connecting routes, some of which are themselves double-tracked.<br />
<br />
BNSF's Southern Transcon connecting Southern California to Chicago shows up particularly well—it's a route that carries a lot of intermodal traffic from West Coast ports. Union Pacific's corridor between Northern California and Chicago doesn't show up quite as much—for some reason, there aren't many crossings shown out west, though it also has more single-tracking.<br />
<br />
Routes that have a significant amount of double-tracking correspond pretty well with maps of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#/media/File:Amtrak_System_Map.svg">Amtrak service</a>. Out west, the Amtrak Cascades corridor is easily visible between Oregon and Washington, and the Capitol Corridor stands out in California. Other long-distance routes in the Eastern U.S. and Midwest also show up pretty well: The route of the City of New Orleans, the Crescent, and the Silver Star (which shares parts of its route with a couple other long-distance Amtrak services).<br />
<br />
Double-tracking isn't a requirement for passenger routes, but double-tracked lines make scheduling much more flexible and can dramatically increase capacity over lines that only have a single main track. Single-tracked lines are constrained in the number of trains they can carry by the number of sidings, spacing between them, and siding length, not to mention the general condition of the line and other design features that limit train speeds.<br />
<br />
Most rail maps of the United States don't differentiate between busy and lightly-used rail lines, in contrast to maps of the highway system which are able to classify roads based on design. Each can be misleading, though—just as a busy rail line doesn't look much different than a quiet one, it also isn't obvious from the design that that Interstate 94 is far busier in Wisconsin than it is in North Dakota or Montana.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-22566180412610481252015-07-06T10:00:00.000-05:002015-07-06T10:00:00.854-05:00Second train to Chicago: Still running lateLast Thursday, after a delay of almost 2½ years, the Amtrak study for adding a second daily train between the Chicago and the Twin Cities was <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerrail/mn-chicago-study.html">finally released</a>. The agreement to begin the supposed nine-month study was signed back on May 3, 2012, and it finally arrived on July 2, 2015, thirty-eight months later. Cue your Amtrak jokes now.<br />
<br />
The delay is bad. Even worse is the fact that this is just a feasibility study without any actionable output—just more data to put into another phase of study later on. The level of detail is pretty bare-bones, and fails to put this improvement in the context of any other projects in Minnesota's <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/railplan/">state rail plan</a> (Wisconsin doesn't even have a rail plan, because Scott Walker). And of course, there's no funding in place to do anything more at this point, so we'll continue along the course of twiddling thumbs and wasting time.<br />
<br />
I grew even more confused on Thursday and Friday as I saw news reports pop up that were literally pulling a little data from column "A", a little from column "B", and yet more from column "C". The reports were based on the <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/newsrels/15/07/2Amtrak.html">press release</a>, which was based on the <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerrail/pdfs/2nd-train-feasibility-summary.pdf">executive summary</a>, which was based on the <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerrail/pdfs/2nd-train-feasibility-report%20.pdf">study itself</a>, but apparently only a version that had been tossed in a blender first.<br />
<br />
None of these documents alone are enough to understand what's going on. The press release got <a href="http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2015/07/study-proposes-doubling-down-on-chronically-late-rail-service/">Bob Collins confused</a>. The study itself got me confused. You probably need to look at all three, and this is for a study that is relatively basic—something that should be routine and unremarkable.<br />
<br />
The study conclusions—or rather, the conclusions put into the executive summary because the study itself drew no real conclusions—are themselves unremarkable and obvious, perhaps looking a bit preordained: Yes, adding a second train is a good idea. Yes, it would increase ridership along the corridor—more than double it, actually. Yes, ending it in St. Paul is the cheapest, simplest option.<br />
<br />
Is that the <i>best</i> option? Yes. Well, maybe. Um, er—just wait for the next phase of study when we actually bother to do benefit-cost analysis.<br />
<br />
<center>
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wiredknitter/4041192085" title="Kitty faceplant by wiredknitter, on Flickr"><img alt="Kitty faceplant" height="333" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2563/4041192085_1701db60d5.jpg" width="500" /></a><br />
<small><i>Current mood: Faceplant</i></small></center>
<br />
There is some helpful information coming out of the study from computer modeling of train ridership, operating costs, and getting an idea of the upgrades needed along the route to support the extra. It's embarrassing that it took so long for the information to be generated, though.<br />
<br />
The study looks at four main scenarios, all based on the <i>Empire Builder</i>'s current travel corridor, but with the western endpoint somewhere in the Twin Cities or St. Cloud area rather than all the way out in Seattle and Portland. The options are:<br />
<ul>
<li>Scenario 1: Run from Chicago to St. Cloud, with stops at St. Paul Union Depot and Target Field station in Minneapolis.</li>
<li>Scenario 2: Run from Chicago to St. Cloud, with stops at St. Paul Union Depot and Fridley's Northstar station (bypassing Minneapolis).</li>
<li>Scenario 3: Run from Chicago to Minneapolis, still including a stop at St. Paul Union Depot.</li>
<li>Scenario 4: Run from Chicago and terminate at St. Paul Union Depot.</li>
</ul>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y8Y_QOfXiho/VZinnI38tcI/AAAAAAAAHSQ/SUTBLwYhLIc/s1600/mn-chicago-map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y8Y_QOfXiho/VZinnI38tcI/AAAAAAAAHSQ/SUTBLwYhLIc/s400/mn-chicago-map.jpg" width="335" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pay no attention to the orange line. Or the black line. Or Sturtevant.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Obviously, "Scenario 4" is the cheapest to implement, since it's the shortest route. It's the one recommended in the executive summary, although that's a short-sighted conclusion, if you ask me.<br />
<br />
Each scenario was evaluated with three different alternatives based on different departure times from St. Paul, given the letters A, B, and C. These have a decreasing order of implementation cost—schedule "A" encounters the most rail traffic congestion and needs the largest number of improvements, while schedule "C" is least congested and therefore the cheapest.<br />
<br />
Ridership is apparently the reverse, although only schedules "A" and "B" were evaluated in detail. Schedule "C" is assumed to have the same ridership and operating costs as "B", which may or may not be a valid idea. You'll only find schedules "A" and "B" in the study report itself. "C" is mentioned in passing, but you need to look at the executive summary to see it listed.<br />
<br />
The executive summary (and the press release that was derived from it) quoted the capital cost ($95 million) from Scenario 4C, annual ridership (155,000) from Scenario 4B, and an annual operating subsidy ($6.6 million) that matches Scenario 4A.<br />
<br />
Okay, I kind of get the first two, but what's the deal with that subsidy number? For an era where we are obsessed with cost subsidies, why didn't the study partners tout Scenario 3B/3C, which would extend to Minneapolis, pull in 22,000 additional passengers, and therefore only need $4.5 million in extra support annually? <br />
<br />
The price tag is higher for building service to Minneapolis or beyond, of course. Here are the estimated capital costs and ridership estimates for each scenario's "C" alternative (using "B" ridership figures, of course):<br />
<ul>
<li>Scenario 1C: $210 million, 185,100 annual passengers</li>
<li>Scenario 2C: $194 million, 180,300 annual passengers</li>
<li>Scenario 3C: $114 million, 177,600 annual passengers</li>
<li>Scenario 4C: $95 million, 155,500 annual passengers</li>
</ul>
<br />
Scenarios 1 through 3 all have lower operating subsidies than scenario 4 because of those extra riders, but the higher construction cost is a big barrier. The cost per passenger is lowest for scenario 3, however—only modestly lower for the numbers above ($904 vs. $910).<br />
<br />
<center>
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mulad/19239121940" title="_mg_0177 by Michael Hicks, on Flickr"><img alt="_mg_0177" height="333" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/372/19239121940_b3e62284c7.jpg" width="500" /></a><br />
<small>Planned and in-progress projects like this addition of a $63 million second main track from Big Lake to Becker make the study's cost estimates out-of-date already.</small></center>
<br />
However, the cost savings grows if you include the added cost of new rolling stock (add $46 million to all scenarios), and remove the cost for improvements already planned for the route to Minneapolis (subtract $8 million from scenarios 1 and 3). It's possible to subtract a large chunk of cost from scenarios 1 and 2 to St. Cloud too, since BNSF Railway already has a $63 million project underway to add a second track in a gap that exists on their line between Big Lake and Becker.<br />
<br />
The cost of extending the train to Minneapolis, at least in terms of the basic rail infrastructure, could be paid back in less than 10 years due to reduced operating losses. Admittedly, the feasibility study only considered the tracks and platforms, and ignored things like a new waiting area, but that could/should be carved off into a separate project, especially considering how it would be shared with the Northern Lights Express to Duluth, an eventual extension of Northstar to St. Cloud, a second daily train to Fargo, and other projects that have been on the drawing board for years already. <br />
Southeast of the Twin Cities, Canadian Pacific Railway also has improvements planned, including <a href="http://lacrossetribune.com/news/local/canadian-pacific-looks-to-add-third-track-on-north-side/article_b585c469-4d8d-5fc6-b6b6-5bd2ff1aeb50.html">a third main track near the Amtrak station in La Crosse</a>. It's not clear whether that's included in the current figures or not, as the study only gave a singular high-level cost estimate for the whole distance between St. Paul and Milwaukee—a big amorphous blob of millions of dollars with zero detail given.<br />
<br />
Great. Thanks.<br />
<br />
The fact remains that adding a second train between the Twin Cities and Chicago is a good idea and has been for a long time. Over the long term, the per-passenger cost (including capital and annual subsidy) is comparable to or less than the price to fly the route—and the train connects eleven cities rather than just two.<br />
<br />
This is the type of improvement that should take less than a month to decide on and less than a year to implement. It doesn't take an airline three years to choose whether or not to add one more flight on a route that's already in service. It doesn't take a freight rail company three years to decide whether to run another oil train from a productive area. But somehow, adding one daily round-trip between the Midwest's two most prosperous metro areas has already taken at least that long and is probably on track to take at least that long again.<br />
<br />
Perhaps what this report needs is to be fed through an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpX1bsihugY">anger translator</a>: A second train should be started <i>tomorrow</i>. Other places should be connected too, but they might take a little while—How about we give it nine more months?Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-9557645785811197432015-05-17T23:47:00.003-05:002015-05-18T10:21:16.206-05:00Quick note: Commuter rail agencies have a huge role to play in the NECHere's something to think about in the wake of the crash of Amtrak 188 in Philadelphia last week: Only about 4% of the rail passengers in the Northeast Corridor ride on Amtrak trains. <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/05/17/407447380/as-amtraks-train-cars-age-ridership-skew-young">This oddly-titled NPR article</a> mentions that there are about 750,000 daily passengers on the NEC across 2,200 trains, but doing the math on Amtrak's annual ridership gives them only about 32,000 passengers out of that total. Everyone else is riding commuter trains.<br />
<br />
Amtrak riders take longer trips, so the ratio of passenger-miles is probably significantly different, but won't put Amtrak in the majority.<br />
<br />
So, while Amtrak deserves plenty of scrutiny for what they have and have not been able to achieve in the corridor, the commuter agencies also need to be considered. Have they done everything necessary to support and fund needed upgrades? Have the owners of non-Amtrak sections of track (MTA Metro-North, ConnDOT, and the state of Massachusetts) been putting in the needed effort? Have the freight operators that use segments of the line been helping at all either?<br />
<br />
Of course, Amtrak owns most of the corridor, so they should be responsibly pricing track access and the contract operating services they provide to regional commuter services in order to fund appropriate repairs and upgrades along the route. Have they been doing that? I don't really know.<br />
<br />
I haven't had a chance to count up all of Amtrak's trains along the NEC, but I think they only have about 80 daily on the route out of the total 2,200 (again, most trains only travel short distances). [Edit: <a href="http://transportation.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/MIT_Amtrak_Report_2013.pdf">This report from 2013</a> says there are 154 Amtrak trains that use the NEC daily. I think I'll have to do my own count eventually.] There's no way that they could pay for all of that upkeep solely on the profits of the <i>Acela</i>, <i>Northeast Regional</i>, and the smattering of other Amtrak-branded trains that run in the corridor.<br />
<br />
If Amtrak was the only service in the NEC, they'd only need two tracks, but much of the corridor is four tracks wide.<br />
<br />
All of the trains that operate on the NEC need to be dispatched in a unified way, and they need to have suitable signaling systems that all interoperate (for a discussion about this, take a look at <a href="https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/infrastructure-basics-north-american-railroad-signaling/">this Let's Go LA blog post</a>). Since the federal government remains intransigent about giving Amtrak appropriate funding, the railroad should lean more heavily on the commuter services in the corridor and the states that they serve.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-51837803328716961572015-04-21T10:08:00.000-05:002015-04-21T10:08:25.667-05:00Transit versus the overly-accessible freeway<iframe height="480" src="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=z5eZDSK0y-kw.kTJBD35eNkn8" width="640"></iframe><br />
<br />
In the run-up to construction of the Green Line between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, neighborhood activists spent a huge amount of effort to get three extra stations included on the route at Hamline Avenue, Victoria Street, and Western Avenue. These extra stations cut the distance between stations in half on that section, from one mile down to half a mile. This put nearly all of the buildings that face the Green Line on University Avenue within a 5-minute walk of the stations.<br />
<br />
Getting that change to happen required advocacy work all the way up the chain of command for transit projects in the United States. In early 2010, the Federal Transit Administration <a href="http://www.mprnews.org/story/2010/01/13/new-fta-rules">changed the rules</a> to de-emphasize a calculation called the Cost-Effectiveness Index (CEI) while adding an option to include livability as a factor. The change didn't just affect the Green Line, but meant that any other projects around the country could also benefit.<br />
<br />
Considering that tremendous battle, it's amazing to see that on-/off-ramps to surface streets on Twin Cities freeways—the car equivalent to stations on a transit line—are often spaced less than a mile apart. In the map I made above, around 40% of the area's ramps are spaced one mile apart or less, and the great majority—about 85%—are less than two miles apart.<br />
<br />
The shortest distance I found between two full interchanges is in Golden Valley by the headquarters for General Mills. It's about 0.3 miles along Highway 100 between Olson Memorial Highway (MN-55) and Shelard Parkway/Betty Crocker Drive.<br />
<br />
The ramps at Shelard/Betty Crocker are also very close to the interchange between MN-100 and Interstate 394, though in making the map, I ignored exclusive freeway-to-freeway interchanges, since they don't provide any access to surface streets.<br />
<br />
The longest stretch of closely-spaced ramps appears to be along MN-36 between Cleveland Avenue and Lexington Avenue—five interchanges on a two-mile stretch of highway, each a half-mile apart.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SNtV0n-yo6k/VTPO8eVnkvI/AAAAAAAAHGw/feO4Sdp5jjI/s1600/transit-mode-characteristics.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SNtV0n-yo6k/VTPO8eVnkvI/AAAAAAAAHGw/feO4Sdp5jjI/s1600/transit-mode-characteristics.png" height="425" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Now take a look at this presentation board from the Robert Street Transitway study and the station spacing suggested for each mode. It's head-scratching to see these ranges and compare them to what we expect when building infrastructure for cars.<br />
<br />
For highway bus rapid transit services in particular, the suggestion is to space stations about two miles apart. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, particularly when highway BRT is laid on top of a system that already has closer stop spacing, but it is striking to compare it with a freeway system where most interchanges are much more tightly spaced.<br />
<br />
I'm of the opinion that most of the Twin Cities bus network has stops that are packed too close together—usually around 1/8th of a mile apart on local routes, and sometimes even less. This isn't a huge problem on less-used and less-frequent routes, but busy lines are made interminably slow when they need to stop every block (and sometimes even more often than that!), but buses that run every 10 minutes or less are typically busy enough to need their stops spaced out a bit.<br />
<br />
Two main problems arise when transit lines have closely-spaced stops: First, passengers get on and off at stops that are as close as possible to their destinations (good for them, but not always so good for the system). Second, passengers can end up making nonsensically short trips, such as waiting 5 or 10 minutes for a bus that will take them a quarter-mile down the road—a distance that can be walked in 5 minutes.<br />
<br />
Limiting the points of access reduces those issues and makes for smoother trips. Yes, it is an inconvenience for some, but it tends to provide benefits to far more riders than it hurts.<br />
<br />
Would similar effects be possible by spacing out some of our freeway access points? Can traffic congestion on highways be alleviated by encouraging some of the extremely short trips to happen on surface streets instead?<br />
<br />
In urbanized areas with valuable land, this might be a simpler and better alternative to highway tolling, which have historically required toll plazas (difficult to fit into urbanized areas, although they are less necessary today due to RFID and other technologies that don't require physical payment).<br />
<br />
Interstate 94 between downtown Minneapolis and downtown Saint Paul has a fraught history, but it probably has one of the region's better designs. Ramps are mostly spaced about a mile apart, with additional roadway crossings every half mile and pedestrian bridges in between those. There's a crossing of some type <a href="http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/2013/09/bridging-highways-and-rail-lines-for.html">almost every quarter mile</a>.<br />
<br />
Freeways can provide a great improvement in travel speeds, but designers have often been too focused on providing more car access to the freeway than improving the ability for people in all types of traffic to get across freeways or around and between nearby neighborhoods.<br />
<br />
Some ramps should be removed, though in most cases the bridges crossing the freeway should be maintained. The bridges could also be reworked to add new freeway BRT stops, like the 46th Street station along Interstate 35W in Minneapolis—rather than removing access, it would change the type of freeway access from automotive to transit. In the long term, that would improve the overall throughput of the freeway system by getting more people into high-capacity vehicles.<br />
<br />
Looking the other direction, our region's current pattern of freeway ramp spacing should provide some lessons to transit planners. Even though the primary mode of transportation on the highway is by car, the spacing varies significantly in response to geography and the surrounding development pattern.<br />
<br />
In my mind, it doesn't make sense to say that commuter rail should only stop once every 7 miles, as shown in that display board—many parts of the world have "commuter" trains that stop about as often as our Blue Line light-rail service. Transit planners should be more adaptive and do what's right for a particular corridor rather than sticking too close to an often-arbitrary modal definition.<br />
<br />
Besides, how can we expect people to switch to using buses and trains more often when it's harder to reach them than it is to get to the nearest highway? These are some of the questions we need to consider as we work to ensure a stable footing for the future of the region.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-49123458576070013202015-04-06T11:00:00.000-05:002015-04-06T11:00:02.721-05:00Following the tracks to Duluth<iframe height="480" src="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=zJ7tTmaN1yqU.kKj7j1JPaI4I" width="640"></iframe><br />
<br />
Here is a map showing the route for trains that are expected to run from Minneapolis to Duluth once the Northern Lights Express project is completed. Like my <a href="http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/2015/02/following-tracks-of-empire-builder.html">previous map for Amtrak's <i>Empire Builder</i></a>, this shows segments of single- and double-tracking (usually sidings) along the corridor. This highlights the places where trains may be able to pass each other, and gives an idea of how much capacity there is on the line.<br />
<br />
There aren't any regularly-scheduled passenger trains on this route today. Amtrak stopped service in the 1980s, though there are usually one or two excursion trips per year operated by the <a href="http://www.261.com/">Friends of the 261</a>.<br />
<br />
Ever since Amtrak stopped running on the line, there have been efforts to restore passenger service to Duluth. The <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/nlx/">Northern Lights Express</a> (NLX) is the current project, which is in the midst of Tier 2 environmental review and preliminary engineering.<br />
<br />
The Northern Lights Express is planned to have several daily round-trips and end-to-end travel times somewhere between 2 and 2½ hours. On existing tracks, the route is about 153 miles, though abandoned track in and near Duluth has caused the route to become a bit more circuitous than it used to be. Today, the trip would be about 4 miles longer than what it was for earlier passenger trains on the route. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JWOVuJk_K1o/VSFvjBBrtEI/AAAAAAAAHGU/aawfZuxvJtE/s1600/duluth-1961-cir_031_005-1280px.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JWOVuJk_K1o/VSFvjBBrtEI/AAAAAAAAHGU/aawfZuxvJtE/s1600/duluth-1961-cir_031_005-1280px.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bridges at the mouth of St. Louis Bay in Duluth<br />
as seen in 1961.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-86TqLaJ8buU/VSFcusb0YiI/AAAAAAAAHGE/wPPpgdxcc0E/s1600/great-northern-duluth-1966.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-86TqLaJ8buU/VSFcusb0YiI/AAAAAAAAHGE/wPPpgdxcc0E/s1600/great-northern-duluth-1966.jpg" height="338" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Timetable of Great Northern trains to Duluth from 1966.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
A notable change in Duluth was the abandonment of bridges across the St. Louis Bay which ran near the Blatnik Bridge (Interstate 535/U.S. 53). Both of these were taken out in the 1980s. Farther south, there was also a realignment the main line leading to a junction at Boylston, Wisconsin. Today's Target Field station in Minneapolis is also about half a mile farther south than the old Great Northern depot, which was demolished in 1978.<br />
<br />
There used to be a few competing services running between the Twin Cities and Duluth—the Great Northern from Minneapolis (today's route), the Northern Pacific from Saint Paul (closely followed by Interstate 35 today), and another route from the Soo Line which ran further east. Both of these latter two routes have seen big segments of track be abandoned, so they aren't practical for reuse without huge investments.<br />
<br />
In the 1950s and 1960s, each railroad operated one or two trains per day on their line to Duluth, so their were about 5 daily round-trips in total. To the right is a Great Northern timetable, which shows the express <i>Gopher</i> train and the local <i>Badger</i>. Both trains ran through Minneapolis and terminated at Saint Paul Union Depot, but for comparison's sake, I'm going to ignore that last leg.<br />
<br />
The express <i>Gopher</i> train took 2 hours 50 minutes northbound from Minneapolis to Duluth and 2h45 southbound, while the local <i>Badger</i> took 3h10 northbound and 3h05 southbound including all of its extra stops. Over the distance of 149 miles, the average speed ranged from 47 to 54 mph across these different trips.<br />
<br />
When Amtrak took over the nation's passenger trains in 1971, Duluth was initially cut out of the passenger system, but service returned after several months. Frequency ranged from one round-trip per day to only a few round-trips per week, down to about one-tenth as much service as there had been a couple decades earlier if all three railroads were counted. The service finally ended in 1985.<br />
<br />
What will it take to get passenger service restored to Duluth?<br />
<br />
Great Northern successor BNSF Railway owns the tracks today, and there are about <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/ofrw/freight/data.html">17 daily freight trains</a> on the route according to MnDOT. The same map shows a current speed limit of 50 mph, though it's unclear if passenger trains would be restricted to that same number (passenger trains are typically allowed to run 10 to 20 mph faster than freight trains on the same tracks).<br />
<br />
Between Coon Rapids and Boylston, the average single-track section is about 10 miles long. There is one 16.3-mile section of single-track between Cambridge and Grasston which limits capacity. Another 20-mile section between Andover and Cambridge only has short sidings and might be considered as one segment of single-track.<br />
<br />
Excepting a couple of short outliers, the average passing siding on the route is about 1.6 miles long, or around 8,450 feet. Freight trains can be up to around 7,000 feet in length, so there are some sidings where they are a tight fit.<br />
<br />
The 20-mile section from Andover to Cambridge probably limits rail traffic to about two trains per hour at current speeds. There's an upper limit of about 48 trains/day on this line, though that would require a completely even distribution of traffic at all hours with each train operating at a consistent and relatively slow speed.<br />
<br />
The most likely plan I've seen for NLX has had 8 daily round-trips. Adding 16 passenger trains to the existing 17 freights would result in 33 trains/day, and that's with a mix of trains operating under different speed limits. The line definitely needs some improvements to handle that much traffic and leave enough headroom for schedule slips and other disruptions.<br />
<br />
It may make sense to double-track the entire corridor someday, though some early estimates for doing that ended up with $1 billion-plus cost figures.<br />
<br />
Lengthening the short siding in Bethel and adding another near Stanchfield would chop the longest non-passing segments in half. Combining that with lengthening some existing sidings and adding three or four others would probably double the line's capacity, making it far easier to add passenger trains to the route while maintaining the ability to move freight and keep everything running on schedule.<br />
<br />
Based on <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerrail/mwrri/files/Appendix%20E-Cost%20Estimating%20Methodology.pdf">this cost estimating methodology from MnDOT</a>, adding these sidings would be relatively inexpensive, probably around $40 million. However, since higher speeds are needed on this line to attract as many passengers as possible, it would only be one modest component of the total cost.<br />
<br />
It's possible to dial the expenditures up or down on the route in order to target a "sweet spot" of benefits versus costs. As I mentioned in <a href="http://hizeph400.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-market-and-math-to-make-pasenger.html">a post last month</a>, if a passenger service is able to control its operating budget properly, it should be possible to pay off infrastructure cost through fares.<br />
<br />
Previous studies have suggested that the Minneapolis to Duluth corridor could attract 900,000 or more annual rail passengers if the speed and frequency of service were high enough. This puts the Duluth line at or near the zone where it could make sense to for a private operator to put in around $2 million per mile, or around $300 million total, particularly if they received a low- or no-interest loan for the buildout.<br />
<br />
It would be a challenge to construct a fast, frequent service for that amount, but might just be doable. But even if federal, state, and local governments had to cover the remaining amount in a public-private partnership, it could accelerate development of one of the most important transportation links in Minnesota.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-70991782976842001582015-03-23T11:00:00.000-05:002015-03-23T11:00:01.573-05:00Ban the ban, not the planLast week, Minnesota House representative Pat Garofalo (R-Farmington) issued a news release touting a compromise between him and supporters of the Zip Rail line being planned between the Twin Cities and Rochester. Oh good! Compromise! Our representatives must have done their job and avoided petty politics! That's what we always want our representatives to do, isn't it?<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, this is no compromise—merely a softening of the harsh and arbitrary position Garofalo set out in a bill he authored in January. The initial bill <a href="https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?b=House&f=HF0011&ssn=0&y=2015">would ban funding and planning</a> of the Zip Rail line entirely. Now he says <a href="http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/pressrelease.asp?pressid=8557&party=2&memid=12262">he'll drop the language that bans route planning</a> by the state, Metropolitan Council, and regional rail authorities, but would still prevent those entities from funding any construction.<br />
<br />
Right now, our transportation system is like a house where all of the money has been spent on windows and walls, but nothing has been put into adding a roof. We don't sit in our houses asking for money to magically print out from the ceiling to pay back its installation cost, but the benefits of having it in place add up: Better health for the people who live there, lower maintenance costs, and the ability to heat and cool the space without spending a fortune, among many other things.<br />
When highways are built, we don't necessarily expect them to pay back their costs in full. Many of them do, but others don't. For instance, Minnesota 212 in the southwest suburbs <a href="https://fremontavenueexperience.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/heres-the-type-of-roads-were-building/">isn't covering its costs</a> with revenue from the gas tax, motor vehicle sales tax, or license fees. There are some improvements planned for U.S. Highway 14 in southern Minnesota that almost certainly won't be directly paid off by the automobiles traveling over it.<br />
<br />
Benefits from things like improved safety and higher travel speed often covers the financial gap. These are less tangible since they don't translate to a direct revenue stream, but it still means that projects like these can be worthwhile anyway. This is one of the most important roles of government—running projects that help society at large but are too expensive or complex for individuals or small groups to do themselves. The right projects will reduce overall social costs or boost the economy enough to cover the difference.<br />
<br />
The frustrating thing is that rail projects are always put under the microscope and scrutinized to a far higher degree than highway expansion, even when the rail lines are expected to show good benefits. State-sponsored studies have looked at passenger rail to and through Rochester for nearly 25 years and have consistently shown it providing a net benefit to the state and region. For good reasons, it has bubbled up to the top tier of routes to be built under MnDOT's <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/railplan/">state rail plan</a>.<br />
<br />
Zip Rail planners have often mentioned that the line is attracting interest from companies willing to help pay its construction costs. I've always assumed that this would be in the form of a public-private partnership (PPP), where a company or consortium would pay for some of the startup cost and would operate the line in exchange for taking back a chunk of the route's annual revenue, but the "compromise" from last week suggests that someone is be willing to pay the entire cost to build the route.<br />
<br />
An organization called <a href="http://nahsr.com/">North American High Speed Rail Group</a> has come forward as a potential backer of the route. That's great, if true, but shouldn't be a reason to restrict the availability of public funds at this point. We don't really know if they have the resources to pull it off at this time, especially since construction and operational costs haven't been determined yet.<br />
<br />
Garofalo's bill should just die in committee with no further action taken. Leaving the issue alone will let the Environmental Impact Study phase play out, and the line's backers will have to come back to request funding anyway, if they need it. The bill does nothing to "<a href="http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/pressrelease.asp?pressid=8557&party=2&memid=12262">protect taxpayers</a>", and would be likely to do more harm than good.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1008568241665831715.post-17725777214180480252015-03-09T11:00:00.000-05:002015-03-09T11:00:01.807-05:00The market and the math to make pasenger rail work<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/73784413@N00/5598572634" title="Pointless arrow in "Pure Michigan" by Russell Sekeet, on Flickr"><img alt="An Amtrak train passing a farmhouse in Michigan" height="431" src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5230/5598572634_4d93a79f39_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
<i>Photo of an Amtrak train passing a farmhouse in Michigan (CC-BY Russell Sekeet)</i><br />
<br />
The Twin Cities region sits at the edge of the populous eastern third of the United States. There aren't big million-plus metropolitan areas for long distances to the west, so when looking at plans for passenger rail expansion, there aren't many obvious destinations. However, the lone intercity train to pass through Minnesota, the <i>Empire Builder</i>, is popular enough to suggest that lightly-populated areas can still provide enough ridership to be viable.<br />
<br />
That's something positive to consider as our state looks to improve the transportation system for people who can't or don't want to drive everywhere. Development has been proceeding for routes in MnDOT's <a href="http://www.dot.state.mn.us/planning/railplan/">passenger rail plan</a>, but the pace has been hampered by weak political backing and limited budgets. But what if there's a real business case for these routes? Could that accelerate development?<br />
<br />
<b>Airlines as a guide</b><br />
<br />
People have a number of different ways of getting from city to city, but today, if they don't drive, they usually fly. Chicago is one of the first places people think about when contemplating rail projects for Minnesota, but we have fairly frequent and inexpensive flights from Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport to both O'Hare and Midway. It's easy to dismiss the idea of improving rail travel when a flight is only $30 more expensive than today's Amtrak service, yet gets you there several hours faster.<br />
<br />
But if you look beyond Chicago to the other routes being contemplated, there's a price gap that certainly looks big enough to run a train through. Here's a table of direct, one-way airfares I found for April 2nd, 2015 (including a $20 to $25 fee for one checked bag):<br />
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: solid 1px black; max-width: 640px;"><tbody>
<tr><th>City/Airport</th><th>Median price</th><th>Flight distance</th><th>Price/mi</th><th>Annual passengers to/from MSP</th><th>Daily round-trips</th><th>Average per flight*</th></tr>
<tr><th>Chicago O'Hare</th><td style="text-align: right;">$130</td><td style="text-align: right;">334</td><td style="text-align: right;">$0.39</td><td style="text-align: right;">1,644,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">25</td><td style="text-align: right;">90</td></tr>
<tr><th>Chicago Midway</th><td style="text-align: right;">$108</td><td style="text-align: right;">349</td><td style="text-align: right;">$0.31</td><td style="text-align: right;">902,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">8</td><td style="text-align: right;">154</td></tr>
<tr><th>Des Moines</th><td style="text-align: right;">$391</td><td style="text-align: right;">232</td><td style="text-align: right;">$1.69</td><td style="text-align: right;">194,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">5</td><td style="text-align: right;">53</td></tr>
<tr><th>Duluth</th><td style="text-align: right;">$331</td><td style="text-align: right;">155</td><td style="text-align: right;">$2.14</td><td style="text-align: right;">152,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">5</td><td style="text-align: right;">42</td></tr>
<tr><th>Fargo</th><td style="text-align: right;">$480</td><td style="text-align: right;">223</td><td style="text-align: right;">$2.15</td><td style="text-align: right;">332,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">7</td><td style="text-align: right;">65</td></tr>
<tr><th>Madison</th><td style="text-align: right;">$408</td><td style="text-align: right;">228</td><td style="text-align: right;">$1.79</td><td style="text-align: right;">296,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">5</td><td style="text-align: right;">81</td></tr>
<tr><th>Milwaukee</th><td style="text-align: right;">$102</td><td style="text-align: right;">296</td><td style="text-align: right;">$0.34</td><td style="text-align: right;">570,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">6</td><td style="text-align: right;">130</td></tr>
<tr><th>Rochester</th><td style="text-align: right;">$250</td><td style="text-align: right;">76</td><td style="text-align: right;">$3.29</td><td style="text-align: right;">104,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">2</td><td style="text-align: right;">71</td></tr>
<tr><th>Sioux Falls</th><td style="text-align: right;">$441</td><td style="text-align: right;">195</td><td style="text-align: right;">$2.26</td><td style="text-align: right;">252,000</td><td style="text-align: right;">6</td><td style="text-align: right;">58</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
(* Average per flight based on number of flights for April 2nd.)<br />
<br />
Passengers can get a discount on the expensive legs if they connect to other flights, though that also effectively raises the fare to the cheaper destinations on the list (digging into the <a href="http://www.transtats.bts.gov/Tables.asp?DB_ID=125">relevant data</a> for Q1 2014, the median MSP–O'Hare airfare worked out to be $0.51 per mile because of that). There are a lot of people paying hundreds of dollars to make hops that would have been far less expensive by ground, and maybe just as fast.<br />
<br />
<b>Trains are cheaper and more effective</b><br />
<br />
By contrast, a typical Amtrak fare is about 10 to 20 times cheaper than what the airlines charge for the smaller cities listed, and often half that of the larger destinations. For each passenger, the <i>Empire Builder</i> averages ticket revenue of about $0.17 per mile on its <a href="http://streets.mn/2015/02/17/following-the-tracks-of-the-empire-builder/">long route</a>. Even at that low fare, it covered about half of its operating cost, and it's a big, expensive train to run. The <i>Empire Builder</i> has sleeping cars and lounge/dining cars that aren't necessary for short routes that only take a few hours to cover.<br />
<br />
Across the Amtrak system, the full cost to operate a train tends to land in the range of $0.30 to $0.70 per passenger-mile, though that number is dependent on a lot of things, perhaps the most important being the number of passengers onboard. Nonetheless, all of Amtrak's routes are less expensive per passenger-mile than any of the small-market airline routes listed above. (Amtrak's worst performer by far in 2014 was the Chicago–Indianapolis <i>Hoosier State</i> at $1.14 per passenger-mile).<br />
<br />
This shows how much economic benefit there could be from rebuilding proper passenger rail service across the state and country—existing travelers could save money, and new passengers who previously couldn't afford to fly would now have a cheaper option.<br />
<br />
Corridors up to about 150 miles in length are the easiest ones to make competitive with air travel, since regular trains traveling up to the normal limit of 80 mph can cover the distance as fast or faster than flying. Airline passengers get bogged down by TSA security lines, more time spent boarding (airliners have just one door while trains can have many), dealing with luggage (trains allow much larger carry-on bags than airlines do), and getting to the departure point.<br />
<br />
Railroad stations are often downtown versus airports that are ten to twenty miles away. Trains can also make stops along the route to serve towns that are too small or too close to larger airports to justify air service of their own. Combine that with fares that can be many times cheaper than flying, and ridership could climb several times higher than what the airlines can do, even on routes that extend significantly further than 150 miles.<br />
<br />
<b>Finding the magic combination</b><br />
<br />
Unfortunately, Amtrak has failed to properly tap into the short-haul travel market, partly because they've never had great funding. A number of ingredients need to be properly mixed in order to build a train service that can carry people profitably: The train needs to be fast enough and frequent enough to attract passengers—with a price to match—while having low operating and maintenance costs.<br />
<br />
I'll start with the last item first: <br />
<br />
No matter how much money you initially put into a train service, operating costs are what can really make or break the rail line. If your fares aren't enough to cover the cost of the onboard crew or the day-to-day maintenance of a train, then there isn't really a way to pay off the fixed infrastructure or rolling stock.<br />
<br />
I have a recommendation: Run trains with high-capacity passenger cars—as few as you need to carry your passengers. <br />
<br />
<b>Long trains don't help</b><br />
<br />
My reasoning is pretty simple—just look at this plot of commuter train operating cost versus length for different providers around the country (data from the 2013 edition of the <a href="http://www.ntdprogram.gov/">National Transit Database</a>):<br />
<br />
<iframe height="400" src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GgzC-XQuAz2jUikLe8mwLEpbPJDKCR6elgZkxkDegtM/pubchart?oid=1292643442&format=interactive" width="600"></iframe><br />
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This really surprised me when I plotted it out. I would have expected operating cost to taper off as trains grow in length (some economy of scale), but the linear trend line on this graph shows that each extra car on a commuter train adds an operating cost of almost $600 per hour. Many costs are included in these values, including overhead like management, insurance, and payments to the railroads, so it's remarkable that it fits so well.<br />
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This makes it easier to think about what it takes to operate a train at a profit—rather than worrying about the train as a whole, we can just think about whether each individual passenger car can cover its costs or not. It doesn't matter very much whether a train is long or short.<br />
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Still, even though the trend is very linear, there's still a big range across the systems in the database. The lowest outlier turns out to be an Amtrak train, the Boston to Maine <i>Downeaster</i>, which is overseen by a regional rail authority that submits their cost data to the NTD. It costs $1,004 per train hour, or about $219 for each car per hour.<br />
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The country's most expensive commuter train in terms of cost per car hour is our own Northstar commuter service, which clocks in at a massive $4,590 per train hour, or $1,179 per car hour. (This is bad and should be fixed.)<br />
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It's hard to say why these are so different, but it's safe to assume almost any new train would be less expensive per hour than Northstar. And, with the <i>Downeaster</i>'s low cost, there's good reason to believe that new intercity trains would fall somewhere below that graph's trend line.<br />
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<b>Use bigger cars instead</b> <br />
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Commuter trains around the country often use bilevel passenger cars with two floors of seating, and Amtrak also runs bilevel trains on many corridors using their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superliner_%28railcar%29">Superliner</a> equipment or some of the related spinoff designs. While they don't double capacity, they do increase the number of seats on a car by 50% or more.<br />
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This can help a lot when trying to get enough fare revenue from passengers to cover costs. For instance, a long-distance <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amfleet">Amfleet</a> car has 60 seats, compared to 90 or a bit more on Superliner cars. At the <i>Empire Builder</i> fare of $0.17 per mile, an Amfleet car averaging 60 miles per hour would max out at $612 per hour, while the comparable Superliner would bring in $918 if it was fully loaded.<br />
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Northstar's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_BiLevel_Coach">commuter coaches</a> pack riders much more tightly, averaging 145 seats per car. A full car could bring in $1,479 per hour at 60 mph, exceeding even its outlandish costs.<br />
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However, it's impossible to always run fully-occupied trains, and intermediate stops to let passengers on and off can drag down the load factor. Passenger loads in the 50% to 70% range are much more common. A train with Northstar-level costs would need to raise fares to keep ahead, so it's extremely important to drive down operating expenses as much as possible—if it had <i>Downeaster</i>-level costs, it would manage some major surpluses on the operating budget.<br />
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Bilevel trains are probably a bit more expensive than their single-level counterparts, but it's hard to say how much more. Commuter rail services with single-level passenger cars seem to have lower costs than the ones that run bilevel trains, but they are often used in areas that have electrified trains which need to fit underneath the catenary wires that power them. Electric locomotives are less expensive to operate and maintain than their diesel counterparts, which skews the numbers a bit.<br />
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Hopefully the cost per car of a bilevel intercity train could land in the range of about $250 to $500 per revenue hour.<br />
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<b>Get them at the right price</b><br />
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Trains do have one great advantage over the airlines—they're ten times cheaper to buy than an equivalent aircraft.<br />
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A Boeing 767 with 350 seats runs about $180 million, more than $500,000 per seat. In contrast, a fairly standard train with four 90-seat <a href="http://www.nipponsharyousa.com/tp121106.htm">Superliner-style bilevel cars</a> (360 seats total) and a new locomotive would probably run $12 to $18 million, up to about $50,000 per seat.<br />
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A Northstar train with 145 seats per coach could bring the cost down to a bit over $20,000 per seat—a whopping 25 times cheaper than a jetliner. That's not quite the right equipment for trips lasting a few hours, though. Some seats would need to be taken out to add space for luggage and a little extra legroom.<br />
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Let's say you have something middle-of-the-road with 120 seats per car at a price of $30,000 per seat. If you want to pay off that piece of train equipment within its first million miles (a point when rail vehicles often go in for a mid-life overhaul), you'll need to dedicate about $0.06 per passenger-mile to the cause of paying off the train.<br />
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Jumping back a second to operating costs, if that 120-seat car cost $375 per hour to operate (halfway between $250 and $500), about $0.09 would be needed per passenger mile to cover expenses. Add that to the $0.06 to pay for the equipment, and you've got a narrow surplus of $0.02 per passenger mile.<br />
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<b>Run them often enough and fast enough</b><br />
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One thing that helps keep flying popular is the ability to choose from multiple flights each day. Frequency of service is a <i>huge</i> failing of Amtrak's current system, perhaps only matched by the extremely skeletal nature of their network. It's rare to find a regularly-scheduled air service that has fewer than four round-trips daily, so it's remarkable that most of Amtrak's stations only see one train per direction per day.<br />
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Running multiple daily round-trips is key to attracting passengers to the rails. The Northern Lights Express to Duluth is planned with eight daily round-trips, and the Zip Rail service to Rochester may have even more. Only <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=zJ7tTmaN1yqU.kaG84xPlNq2g">small parts of the country</a> in the Northeast and California have intercity trains running that often today, which has severely limited the attraction of train travel up to now.<br />
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Operating expenses found in Amtrak's statistics and the National Transit Database typically include some payment to the railroad to cover track maintenance and access charges, but that may not be enough to pay for more track capacity. Money is needed upfront to add room for passenger trains, and it often adds up quickly.<br />
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The big problem is that it can take tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to build capacity and/or buy the access to run that many trains, with costs climbing to the billions for longer and faster routes. A basic upgrade would include things like signaling upgrades and a few added or expanded sidings for trains to pass each other. That's something that could be done for $1 to $2 million per mile. Adding extensive amounts of double-tracking would probably raise the cost into the $4 to $5 million per mile range, and entirely new track could run upwards of $10 million.<br />
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People shouldn't immediately be scared off by the cost, though. If we take the hypothetical train car I described in the last section and charge a fare of $0.30 per mile, the first fifteen cents would go to operating costs and paying off the rail vehicle, while the other fifteen could go to paying off track and do it at a decent rate. Relatively modest travel markets with 500,000 to one million annual passengers over the entire distance—probably within shooting distance of several of the cities I listed at the start of the article—could pay off simpler track improvements within about 15 years.<br />
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<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: solid 1px black;"><caption>Annual passengers needed to pay capital cost @ $0.15/mi:</caption> <tbody>
<tr><th>price/mi</th><th>$1 million</th><th>$2 million</th><th>$5 million</th></tr>
<tr><th>5 years</th><td style="text-align: right;">1,333,333</td><td style="text-align: right;">2,666,667</td><td style="text-align: right;">6,666,667</td></tr>
<tr><th>15 years</th><td style="text-align: right;">444,444</td><td style="text-align: right;">888,888</td><td style="text-align: right;">2,222,222</td></tr>
<tr><th>30 years</th><td style="text-align: right;">222,222</td><td style="text-align: right;">444,444</td><td style="text-align: right;">1,111,111</td></tr>
<tr><th>70 years</th><td style="text-align: right;">95,238</td><td style="text-align: right;">190,476</td><td style="text-align: right;">476,190</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Even when the price climbs beyond what can be paid off in a reasonable timeframe just by passenger fares, it's important to remember that existing freight operators also benefit from track upgrades. They might split the cost with a passenger operator if it helps them move trains more effectively. Faster trains can pay down their hourly costs more quickly since they cover more distance in that time, but that's just a slice of a slice of the overall budget—higher speeds attract more riders, though.<br />
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Some upgrades can't really be justified by a profit motive, though—catenary for electrified trains, for example. Unless you're pushing a huge number of trains down the track and grabbing tons of passengers, it would be a net negative for investment since you just don't save enough on fuel and maintenance costs. But, electric trains do have great environmental benefits, so government grants should be considered to cover that cost for relatively busy lines.<br />
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<b>A case for doing something rather than nothing</b><br />
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Rebuilding the passenger rail network for cities around Minnesota and across the country is important for building a stable platform for the future. Our transportation is out of balance, and far too dependent on automobiles which have completely altered the face of our towns cities over the last century. As our region continues to gain population, new growth should be focused in ways that are better for the environment and the people who live there.<br />
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To reconstruct our cities on the scale of the pedestrian and cyclist, we have to turn the dial back against car-dependent development patterns. Transit systems and bikeways work for the city and metro scale, but intercity lines have to be resurrected or built up from scratch to handle travel over longer distances. Trains help restore walkability to the towns and cities they serve, which will help us turn the tide on climate change.<br />
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There is a significant slice of the travel market that isn't well-served by existing options, and I believe the window is large enough for new operators to come in and make money. I've focused on what can be done for conventional-speed trains at short distances, but states with larger populations and different distributions have a wider variety of options. Who might take the plunge, though?<br />
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<b>Finding the right pocketbook</b><br />
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Whoever funds the next passenger rail line in the region will need to have a lot of funding available, since the initial costs are pretty high no matter how you look at it.<br />
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It would be great if Amtrak itself was pushing for new routes, but they've usually been hamstrung with just enough funding to pay for their operations and their maintenance backlog. Not much has been available for upgrade or expansion. They're almost certainly out of the picture unless a state or other partner organization comes along with the money.<br />
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The major freight rail companies were collapsing under their own weight at Amtrak's formation in 1971, but have made remarkable turnarounds. The largest companies now make billions of dollars annually and could easily run passenger service again while barely denting their budgets. They know their lines the best and control the flow of traffic, so they would be in prime position to implement the services as inexpensively as possible.<br />
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Unfortunately, they have many employees who only see passenger rail as a drag on their freight business, and would be opposed to any expansion. There are a couple of freight companies bucking that notion, particularly <a href="http://www.allaboardflorida.com/">one in Florida</a>. It isn't clear if any others will change their positions, though.<br />
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Foreign passenger rail companies from Europe and Japan have also poked around at a number of markets in the U.S., so there might be a push from outside our borders at some point. But they would need to have strong partnerships with American companies and investors to pull it off.<br />
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Airlines would be interesting candidates for entering the passenger rail market. It's difficult for them to make money at short distances, so it would make sense to build ground-based feeder networks to airports that specialize in long-haul travel. Many corridors would only cost as much as one or two jumbo jets.<br />
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In the end, I don't particularly care who funds and builds any future passenger trains that will be available to me—it's just clear that our current efforts at expansion are moving way too slow to affect things like climate change or handle our aging population. Any new entrant who has the right formula and the right funding has a pretty wide open field to build something successful.Mike Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15257599090818492294noreply@blogger.com2