Get a sense of the TGV

I highly recommend subscribing to the YouTube channel from the user dashloc. He works as a TGV operator for SNCF in France, but is also talented behind the camera and has made some great videos.

His films are good ways to get a sense of where and how fast the trains can run, and can also give a bit of an idea of what sort of noise they give off. High-speed trains sound a bit like jet airliners flying through the sky until they get close and you can hear the whooshing noises as each individual rail car goes by. It's hard to tell how loud they are, though I wouldn't want to live really close to a high-speed line where trains run at full speed.

TGVs generally operate with a top speed of 186 miles per hour (300 km/h), though I think there's at least one line where they can go a bit faster.

Oh, and a little note about terminology: TGV stands for Train à Grande Vitesse ("high-speed train"), while LGV stands for Lignes à Grande Vitesse ("high-speed line"). TGV trains can operate on both LGV tracks and at limited speeds on lignes classiques, the historical rail network (and yes, TGV trains do go through some grade crossings on those older lines). Conversely, non-TGV trains can also run on the LGV network as long as they meet appropriate requirements such as having the right signaling equipment and, presumably, run fast enough to not get in the way too much.

Mass transit and bridges

Streetsblog ran the above image in an article yesterday, mostly focused on the Brooklyn Bridge. It shows that bridges in New York City carried the most people back in the days when subways and streetcars used them more heavily. There are a few caveats for the image—for instance, the Manhattan Bridge was partially closed in 1989, so that affects its numbers. The diagram also leaves out the fact that some of the rails were moved into tunnels under New York-area waterways. However, there was an overall loss in the number of rail links into Manhattan.

To me, this underscores the value of making a "whole count" of traffic on a street or bridge. As a former University of Minnesota student, it also makes me think of the double-decked Washington Avenue Bridge, the most multi-modal bridge in the Twin Cities. Mn/DOT and other traffic agencies focus on automotive traffic, and have neglected to count pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. What is the overall traffic on Washington Avenue? I wish I knew. That bridge carried 28,000 vehicles per day on the lower deck, but the only number I've found giving an indication for the upper deck is 5,000 people at the peak hour—a rather useless measure for me, and I'm not sure if that's exclusively the upper deck or if it's meant to be for the entire bridge.

Right now, the Washington Avenue Bridge is being partially disassembled to make way for light-rail construction—half of the lower bridge deck is currently removed. The Central Corridor line will take away two traffic lanes, and will even eliminate private car traffic entirely along a stretch of Washington Avenue (the road) on campus, but it could very well have the effect of increasing the total number of people crossing the bridge each day.

Northern Lights Express survives Republican challenges

The proposed Northern Lights Express to Duluth has run up against some conservative political challenges recently. Three city council members in Duluth had put forward a proposal to dissolve the Minneapolis–Duluth/Superior Passenger Rail Alliance, but the proposal was rejected on March 28th. The council also continued support for $190,000 in local funding for the line. Apparently this has been part of a pattern recently—the third time these councilors have tried it in the last 4 months.

On the statewide funding front, one of the more egregious proposals put forth in the Minnesota House was one by Larry Howes of Walker, Minnesota, which was intended to pull back state funding from a number of projects—some of which had originally gotten money back in 1994. The proposal appears to have died out because there wasn't a companion senate bill.

The total amount of reclaimed cash from the bill would have been $51 million, of which $26 million was allocated in 2009 for rail projects across the state including the NLX, the Twin Cities to Chicago route, and Twin Cities to Rochester. It looks like Mn/DOT is planning to spend the $26 million this year. $9 million will go to the NLX project, and is expected to be used as part of a 20% state & local match for a pot of federal funding—The state, local, and federal funds will cover most or all of the $65 million needed to do preliminary engineering work along the line.

Rail projects in Minnesota have potentially taken a hit under the senate's budget bill: Funding for Mn/DOT's Passenger Rail Office, which has only been in existence for a few years, was cut from $1 million to $600,000.

Oh, and just as a side note—there has been a bug in the RSS feed system on the Northern Lights Express website which posts articles on the correct day and month, but doesn't pay any attention to the year. An article popped up last month showing that in 2009, Tim Pawlenty supported Barack Obama's plan for high-speed rail in the United States.

CCLRT construction exposes old streetcar right-of-way

I knew that the Central Corridor light-rail line was going to be built on the old streetcar right-of-way, but I didn't really know that the old right-of-way could basically be defined as a single (almost-)continuous object. After my boss told me he'd seen some rusty streetcar rails piling up along University Avenue, I decided to check it out, and took these pictures before and after work.

Brick, wooden railroad ties, and the steel rails themselves are being ripped out of the ground, and will be for quite some time. Amazing to think that these have been sitting in the ground for 57 years since the last streetcars ran. Service ended in Saint Paul in 1953, though they continued running in Minneapolis until mid-1954.

BRT on the cheap using freeways

View Freeway BRT options in the Twin Cities in a larger map

[Edit 4/7/2011: Symbols with dots in them are supposed to indicate existing stops/stations. The colors are meant to be an indication of how easy it is to maneuver through an interchange to load/unload passengers. Green is supposed to mean minimal maneuvering, mostly going in a straight line or with an immediately-accessible turn-around area that is actively being used. Generally, green also overlaps with existing infrastructure. Yellow generally refers to diamond interchanges that are not currently in use (but probably could be), or other similar infrastructure (such as two half-diamonds a short distance apart with frontage roads in between). If an active, existing station has a yellow marker, it probably means that I think the buses using it need to make too many turns and go too far out of their way to load and drop off passengers—existing locations prime for an upgrade. Red refers to interchanges that would need infrastructure upgrades to support fast service, such as turnarounds or special bus-only lanes, but only for short distances. They are typically 3/4-diamond with a single cloverleaf or folded ramp, but I also included some SPUI interchanges and other things. I designated the Huron Boulevard bus stop used by Route 94 as red with a dot because it does exist, but only in the westbound direction, and it would be fairly difficult to upgrade that one.

I only spent a few hours poking at the map, so there are probably a number of interchanges that lack sidewalks and have other issues. Similarly, I may have missed a few existing stops, or misclassified a few things. Apologies—it's a bit of a work-in-progress.]

I've always wondered why metro-area bus agencies haven't made more extensive use of freeways to move passengers at higher speeds. There are numerous express routes which use them, of course, but they mostly make several stops in the suburbs to collect passengers, then run non-stop until reaching one of the downtowns. This makes the bus network pretty incomprehensible, since you can't immediately tell whether a service is only commuter-oriented or if it runs all day. I'd much rather see a system of trunk routes implemented with high service frequency, and collector buses running generally perpendicular routes.

But how much opportunity is there? By my count, there are probably 130 simple diamond interchanges in the Twin Cities which could have service implemented in no time flat, and another set of about 40 interchanges (mostly ¾-diamond which would need a turn-around zone for one direction) which could be fixed without too much effort—certainly each one would be a fraction of the cost of the 46th Street station on I-35W. That would make a pretty impressive network all by itself, and additional interchanges requiring more complicated infrastructure could be implemented later.

There are inherent drawbacks to putting service in a freeway corridor, such as noise and pollution, and the fact that accessing bus stops along freeway on- and off-ramps may require walking in front of a driver who isn't expecting to see any pedestrians. Annoyingly, it's also difficult to make connections between freeway-based services because most expressways in the Twin Cities use cloverleaf interchanges or other specialized designs that don't have convenient stopping points. It could work to re-route one of the services along surface streets for a mile or three, but doing that could dramatically slow down the service.

I dunno—I suppose people will say that the density just isn't there, and that's probably true. On the other hand, the average Hiawatha LRT passenger is drawn from more than 3 miles away from the route, so if you could build something that is just half as attractive as the LRT, it could draw quite a following.

Well, my biggest concern about all this is that it could draw riders away from using surface routes which actually go past walkable business corridors. It might not be so bad, though—how many people would become more interested in using public transit in general if a stronger core network could be created?

Mini-travelogue (and a graph!)

Traffic simulation of buses in downtown Brooklyn, courtesy of Top Gear.

I had the day off on Friday, so I took the opportunity to check out some parts of the transit system in the Twin Cities that I usually don't see in action. Both my apartment and workplace are in between the two downtowns, and I do actually see (and hear) a huge number of buses each day, mostly coming from the bus barn just southeast of the State Fairgrounds. At work, we can look out the windows and see University of Minnesota shuttle buses ferrying passengers along the intercampus transitway.

Too bad I can't get on any of those buses (well, I could take a campus bus, but that's a 2-mile hike from my apartment).

Anyway, I had taken the 84 up to Rosedale for a late lunch, then rode the 260 from there and got my first taste of the Marq2 project from inside a bus. Marq2 is a pretty remarkable sight when it's running at full tilt. It reminded me of the scene when my brother and I first popped our heads out of the subway station in Brooklyn late last summer—Massive amounts of traffic including bus drivers jockeying for position as though they were driving sportscars. At least in Minneapolis there seemed to be less honking, and the buses were mostly going in the same direction.

I took a little detour to take a look at the godawful "kitschy" The Normandy and wander around the Elliot Park neighborhood of Minneapolis a bit, then set about trying to find a way to reach the still fairly new 46th Street BRT station along I-35W.

That turned out to be a more complicated than I expected. There wasn't any obvious big thick rapid transit line on the maps I found in downtown. I looked up the first stop for route 535 via a NexTrip app on my phone, but when I walked to the 3rd Ave & 2nd Street intersection, the stop was just a sign attached to a pole. In the schedule information, I think it simply said "MVTA" and "SouthWest" or something like that. No positive reinforcement at all—I wasn't sure whether I should be looking for an MVTA bus, a Metro Transit one, or something else entirely.

I gave up, wandered over to Nicollet, and got on the slow route 11 bus instead. 40 minutes later, I got off at the 46th Street station.

I was a little miffed that the first thing I saw was a schedule showing how the place is closed on weekends. The bus system in the Twin Cities is heavily geared toward the rush-hour crowd, even though that only represents a fraction of overall travel. I won't be able to consider any bus service in the Twin Cities "bus rapid transit" until it operates on the weekends, (and still frequently).

Anyway, I wandered down to the freeway level, and expected to find a map of where the services go, but got shafted on that front. There was a listing of the different buses that serve the station, mostly route 535, but the only map seemed to just be a zoomed-in view of Metro Transit's normal system map, which is fairly unintelligible for route 535 service. The next southbound 535 bus was due to arrive shortly, and the next one wasn't going to show up for 20 or 30 minutes after that, so I took the opportunity to head south. One thing I did notice as the bus pulled up was that the pedestrian pavement seemed to be lower than normal—rather than raising the height to create an LRT-like platform to facilitate level boarding, it seems that designers went the opposite way, making me have to step up quite high to board a low-floor bus! That was pretty idiotic, in my opinion.

I must have picked the last 535A bus of the day or something. Lacking any sort of intelligible map, I wasn't sure where the Knox Park & Ride was, so I figured the bus would go down to the Southtown shopping center and continue onward. However, it turns out that the park-and-ride is basically on the campus of the Best Buy headquarters, before the bus would reach Southtown! I'm surprised that Best Buy decided to allow space for a park & ride, though it is annoyingly located way down next to I-494. It seems that route 535 buses all go and turn around at this lot, a quarter-mile south of 76th Street, before continuing on to other sites (for every route except the 535A), but the exact method of operation is somewhat of a mystery—when I headed back north, the 535 bus (all northbound buses are simply 535, no matter where they start from) skipped the turn down to the park-and-ride, so maybe I'm misreading things.

I'd hate to be a person who parked at the official park-and-ride and was waiting for a bus that only went 1/4 mile away. I figure it would be better for Best Buy to designate a segment of their big parking garage for transit riders instead of having buses go down and make a half-mile detour to jab at a lot farther to the south. Yes, I'm an advocate of increasing stop spacing, but I don't think it's a good idea to force absolutely everyone to walk their maximum tolerable distance all the time.


A graph showing pedestrian sheds for bus stop spacing of 1/8-, 1/4-, and 1/2-mile, respectively. While increased spacing decreases the population within 1/4 mile of a stop, the resulting speed improvement more than makes up for increased walking time/distance.

Anyway, a lot of fairly free-flowing traffic has made me re-evaluate my previous thoughts about stop spacing a little bit. While my own regular route 3 tends to get slowed a lot by passengers showing up at random locations, I did notice it went pretty fast in the evening as I came home. The biggest gains in speed from increasing stop spacing would occur during rush hours—there's generally less gain to be had in the off-hours. A lot of the game has to do with perception, though—it's important to provide the best rider experience possible whether they use the service during rush hours, midday, evenings, or weekends. With the ubiquity of cars, it doesn't take much to turn people off. Being inside a bus while it makes unnecessary turns or does other things that waste time tends to drive people away.

In my previous post about how much time could be saved, I didn't really think about the fact that service often runs with little delay in off hours or other (fairly random) periods, so my perception of how much time could be saved was probably a bit off. It would still be a noticeable improvement, though.

I'd really like to see frequent limited-stop bus service running along the highways in the Twin Cities (oh, did I mention that the 535 is officially a limited-stop service with the same fare as a local route?  That's one good thing, I guess.) Anywhere that a major highway meets another road with a diamond interchange should probably have a bus stop with service running every half hour.  No need to go and spend millions on a BRT station (at least not right away).  Making use of existing high-speed infrastructure is a good way to improve user perception of service.  That's my opinion, anyway...

Back to some rail news

I got an e-mail from Alex saying that the commenting system wasn't working recently.  I was able to post some comments this morning, so hopefully it's working again.  I used Firefox, so if anyone continues to have issues, try using that.

It seems that Blogger is rolling out some changes, so there may have simply been a bug.  I'm glad that they're actually doing something—Blogger seems to be fairly behind in the technological curve, which seems strange for a Google-owned property.

Anyway, while I'd like to keep talking about the Metro Transit funding situation a bit more, there have been some rail developments that I should probably make note of:


Locally, the Red Rock Corridor is reaching another milestone as station-area planning wraps up for the stops in Hastings, Cottage Grove, Newport, and at Lower Afton Road in St. Paul. They're going to have a final meeting about those stops next week:

Wednesday, April 6th, 5–7 pm
Washington County South Service Center
Room 147/148
13000 Ravine Parkway
Cottage Grove, MN, 55016
(map)

Wisconsinites are dealing with a bit of cognitive dissonance because Governor Scott Walker, he of NoTrain.com, does actually kinda sorta support trains. His administration is submitting a $150 million request for funds which could go into upgrading Amtrak's Hiawatha Service between Milwaukee and Chicago. This is confusing in the context of Governor Scott Walker's resistance to the extension of service to Madison, though it is fairly consistent with what he had said during his campaign. He wanted to see upgrades to existing Hiawatha and Empire Builder service rather than expansion to new areas.

It did immediately strike me as strange when I learned that the original planned $810 million extension from Milwaukee to Madison was planned to go up to 110 mph, yet that project was supposed to keep the speed between Milwaukee and Chicago at 79 mph (at least initially). Why not upgrade the existing route too?

Of course, most of the $810 million got pulled back by the federal government back in late 2010 when Gov. Walker was just Governor-elect.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says that the new $150 million would be "a step toward increasing the speed of the trains to nearly 110 mph", so it isn't clear to me whether there would be any significant track upgrades or grade separations. It looks like the money is primarily meant to pay for trains and a maintenance facility that would have been built for Madison extension if that project had gone forward.

The Spanish company Talgo put together a factory in Milwaukee to build two trains for the Hiawatha, plus options for more. Two additional trainsets would have been built for the Madison service, and that's how many trains would be funded with this request. Walker's predecessor Jim Doyle had also committed Wisconsin to spending $30 million on a Talgo maintenance facility. For the $150 million grant, the state might only need to match 10%, so it's clearly in the state's best interest to try and get $150 million, since it could effectively save them $15 million.

I support upgrades to the existing service, though these details do make me uneasy. There should be some modest speed improvements just by using the new Talgo trains since they use a passive tilting technology, though the track is fairly straight in the first place and supported trains running well over 100 mph in the past. The biggest obstacles to increasing speed on the line are the numerous grade-level crossings, plus the existing Canadian Pacific freight traffic and Metra commuter traffic closer to Chicago.

Well, there would be two big tests for Walker in regard to trains: First, if the state receives the money, we'll have to see if it actually gets spent on trains and doesn't get redirected to highway projects. Second, Walker said he supported improved Empire Builder service. I know that Mn/DOT and the Ramsey County Regional Rail Authority are pushing for a second daily train along that route, so we'll have to see if that project makes progress in the coming months.


Another thing I should note—Here's a new animation of the Central Corridor LRT in the University of Minnesota area:


Central Corridor - Washington Avenue