Duluth train finishes major stage of environmental review

The proposed Northern Lights Express train from Minneapolis to Duluth ("NLX") took another step forward on Monday last week when the long-awaited Tier 1 Service Level Environmental Assessment was finally released. Initially expected to be completed by October 2011, the environmental review was delayed as the scale of the project was reassessed after early cost projections came in higher than expected. Since 2007, the route has been planned to operate at a top speed of 110 miles per hour, though the proposed length of that fast section of the route was reduced in 2011, lengthening the typical end-to-end travel time from two hours flat to 2 hours and 17 minutes. Today, the $820 million service is planned to have eight daily round-trips with six total stops: Minneapolis, Coon Rapids, Cambridge, Hinckley, and Duluth in Minnesota, plus Duluth's twin port of Superior, Wisconsin.

One of the first comments I got after posting a link to the EA last week was a question: "Why do we need an environmental assessment to run a daily passenger train to Duluth over existing tracks?"

That's a good one to ask, and I don't have a very good answer. The route has existed for well over a century, and passenger trains ran on the line until 1985, so it's worth asking why something that is partially a restoration of former service should require an extensive environmental process. However, the proposal does push beyond the historical level of service considerably. A full history may reveal more, but this 1951 timetable shows just two daily round-trips along the route, plus another three on parallel railroads (both of which have seen major chunks of the route abandoned). In order to achieve eight round-trips a day and to allow faster speeds, a new parallel track is planned for 41 miles between Isanti and Hinckley. Most of the rest of the route would be limited to speeds of 79 or 90 mph, while this new segment of double-tracking (where there has historically only been a single track), will be the section dedicated to 110-mph operation.

Some other shorter segments of additional track will be installed in Minneapolis, between Fridley and Coon Rapids, and on the northern end in Superior. However, all of these are expected to fit within the original right-of-way granted to the railroad in the 19th century. There is certainly some call for the Environmental Assessment, though it shouldn't be treated any more significantly than a typical highway widening. Ultimately I'll answer the question with a question: Was the Northern Lights Express put through any more hoops than a project to add lanes to a freeway? If this review was more complicated than that, then some priorities need to get straightened out.

Another comment I received related to the pace of construction for the route. Wouldn't it be better to start out with one or two trains a day and then scale it up incrementally?

That has certainly been considered, but there are many examples from around the country which show that incremental builds take ages to complete.  Among the dozens of routes Amtrak operates nationally, only a handful of corridors have 8 or more daily round-trips today, a level of service that would be considered modest in Europe.

In the Northeast, only the  Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, DC and branches off of it from New York to Albany, Philadelphia to Harrisburg, and DC to Richmond have 8+ daily round-trips.  In the whole rest of the country, only two other corridors in California do as well: Los Angeles to San Diego, and Sacramento to Oakland.


View map

A few other routes have five to seven trains each direction each day. Why should a route to a relatively minor metropolitan area of 280,000 people be at the same level as these major corridors? Another very good question. There really should be many corridors across the country that see that much passenger train traffic or more. This route is also planned to have an average end-to-end speed of 67 miles per hour, and there's only one route anywhere in the U.S. running faster than that today: The Acela Express from Washington, DC to Boston. Everything else falls in the range of 38 to 57 mph.

The NLX planners used computer models of ridership to come up with the speed and frequency of service. The models told them that this speed and number of trips are the bare minimum needed in order to operate the trains without a direct subsidy year over year. 67 mph is just barely faster than a typical driver will do over a whole trip (keep in mind that Interstate 35 has a 70 mph speed limit for most of its length between Duluth and the Twin Cities—most drivers will have top speeds reaching or exceed that, but any stops or slowdowns along the way will cause average speed to drop rapidly).

When costs are spread out across the number of passengers who will use the service over time, it also works out pretty well. A typical Amtrak short-distance "corridor" route requires an operating subsidy of $20 for every 100 passenger-miles traveled, the projected average trip length for NLX passengers. Existing corridor trains have periodic needs for additional capital costs as well. The Northern Lights Express is expected to start out carrying over 900,000 passengers in early years, and slowly but steadily growing from there. Over the next 30 years, that probably translates to 33 to 40 million passengers. If the project can achieve what the computer models say and operate without significant subsidies, the capital cost per rider would work out to somewhere between $20 and $25 for that time span.

So you can start out with a slow, infrequent train and pay half the cost of each rider's trip in order to entice them to use the service, or an up-front investment can be made to improve travel times and add frequency, and the overall cost works out to be about the same—potentially better in some cases. If we went with an incremental approach, there would be years and years worth of direct operating subsidies, plus the capital investment would probably work out to just as much as what's currently planned.

While the initial price tag is certainly giving some of our state politicians heartburn, in the long run, it works out better to invest in the route now.

Inducing demand for sustainability

The idea of induced demand is a strange one. You would think that building a highway or widening a road would alleviate congestion by spreading out the existing traffic across more space, and that would be the end of it. Toss in a little extra width in anticipation of population growth, and it should be possible to leave it alone for several decades, right?

In reality, new and expanded highways tend to see traffic counts rocket upward and approach full capacity in just a few short years. Highways can pull traffic from nearby low-speed streets and also practically create demand out of thin air. When new trip opportunities open up, people take them. New destinations become reachable, which drives more traffic, which drives more businesses and people to locate out along the highway, continuing the dizzying spiral. This cycle has motivated a lot of economic activity across the country, but it has caused a great deal of damage to our environment in terms of pollution as well as dramatically altered landscapes. In many ways, our culture has shifted from being freed by car ownership to being shackled by it. Most American cities only have tiny areas in them where it's possible to go about doing everyday tasks on foot, by bike, or on public transit without spending inordinate amounts of time doing so.

The country has spent about 90 years first building out a basic highway network, and then overlaying freeways on top of that a few decades later. Today, car-based travel retains a huge advantage over every other way of getting around the vast majority of the time. Despite that, there are small pockets showing that it is possible to dethrone the car as the king of the mountain, though it's harrowing to ponder whether alternatives can scale up fast enough to help us prevent the planet from melting.

Cities across the country have watched bicycle ridership boom as new bikeways are added, whether they are traffic-calmed neighborhood streets, new bike lanes on busier thoroughfares, or dedicated infrastructure. Use of public transportation has also been growing rapidly in recent years, with 2012 reported as the second-busiest year for urban mass transit since 1957. Amtrak has been setting ridership records constantly, more than doubling ridership since the railroad's introduction in 1971. Of course, the country has grown in population by 100 million since 1971, and far more since '57, so there's still a long way for them to climb.

Some transit systems around the world have been dealing with continuing growth straining their systems for decades. The London Underground comes to mind as one—in recent years, the system has been so crowded in central areas that kiosks with maps and other wayfinding information have been installed above-ground to encourage people to walk rather than ride the rails to their destination.

Meanwhile, the TGV network in France has shown that it's possible to operate trains profitably at high speed while offering very low fares. While most other high-speed services have marketed fast trains as a premium service, France has pivoted in the opposite direction by making them cheap to encourage their use over slow, meandering classic routes that had been congested with passengers hopping between small cities and towns. Recently, the "OuiGo" service was introduced with fares starting as low as €10 and maxing out at around 85 for a 500-mile journey. With a range of $0.02 to $0.17 per mile, it's extremely cheap—the low-end fare is as low or lower than what it would cost to simply provide power (fuel) to an electric car over such a trip, not counting wear-and-tear or other operating costs.

Of course, one of the TGV network's tricks has been to progressively increase the capacity of their trains over time. Individual bilevel TGV Duplex trains carry more than 500 passengers each, and two trains are often coupled together to have a capacity over 1,000. The trains used in OuiGo service bump that up to around 1200 by converting café cars into more seating space. So if you have 1,200 passengers, it's possible to get by with razor-thin profit margins per seat.

At such prices, the French rail operator SNCF is most certainly inducing travel demand that would otherwise not exist. One could ask, have they gone too far? That's a question for the age, isn't it? Of course, high-speed trains run on electricity and French ones primarily get power from nuclear plants, so these new riders probably aren't making much of a dent with CO₂ emissions, but there could be other effects such as the depopulation of small towns away from the high-speed network in favor of others that lie directly on it.

Back here in the U.S., Amtrak tends to charge high fares on busier corridors with higher service frequency, while charging less for quieter ones. And the only high-speed train in the country, the Acela Express, seems to get a price category all of its own. Long-distance trains are mostly priced in the $0.15 to $0.20/mi range, with shorter-distance "corridor" trains ranging from $0.20 to $0.45/mi. The Acela tips the scales with an average fare of $0.78/mi, probably at least eight times the average OuiGo fare. But even here, we can see the effect of lower fares on ridership.

In the above graph, I plotted passenger-miles versus train-miles, with color indicating frequency of service, and the size of the circle showing the average fare per passenger-mile. It always amazes me that the Empire Builder does so well in terms of ridership when it runs through the sparsely-populated states of North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho on its way to the Pacific Northwest. It was ranked 3rd in terms of passenger-miles according to the FY2011 data I used, trailing only the Northeast Regional and Acela Express on that measure (for clarity of other routes, they have been cropped out of the graph).

Now why would the Empire Builder do as well as it does? Part of it is just that the train goes a long distance and has many places to pick up and drop off passengers along the way, but there are other long-distance routes in the system that go just about as far and hit far more well-populated areas. That remains something of a mystery to me, though there are a few other points in its favor. The Empire Builder is also really two or three trains in one, branching into two parts to reach both Portland and Seattle, plus often gaining an extra car on the leg between Saint Paul and Chicago. Looking at this plot of data, it also seems that cheap fares could attract many people who would otherwise stay away.

Perversely, one of the major outliers in this graph is the Auto Train, an oddball non-stop service between the D.C. suburbs and Florida which lets passengers bring their car along. Even when Americans ride trains, we are enticed by new ways to move our cars around.

Anyway, could Amtrak benefit from flipping their current pricing model on its head and driving down costs on its popular services rather than ramping them up further and further? It sure seems like many higher-cost routes have suppressed passenger demand. It might work in some cases, but Amtrak has always been hamstrung by an inflexible route network and fleet of rolling stock. There simply isn't the equipment to duplicate the French model of dumping 1,000 or more passengers into a single train and sending it down the track. The Acela has been stuck with a fixed seating arrangement carrying barely more than 300 passengers at a time. Amtrak also hasn't been able to benefit from a fresh new network of high-quality lines built with good levels of cost control. Rather, the railroad has been saddled for decades with aging equipment and routes in need of maintenance. Efforts to remake the railroad have always come in fits and starts, without the sustained cohesive planning and funding necessary to really make it work the way it should.

Of course, one thing that is true about the French rail network is that the track owner (RFF) raises prices for whole trains as routes get busier, but SNCF (the company operating the rolling stock) has done what they can to use economy of scale to drive down costs for individual passengers. It'll be interesting to see if they can continue the process in the years to come, or if the commoditification of travel will finally hit a wall at some point.

Zooming back out (or perhaps back in) to look at other ways of getting around, urban mass transit may have similar forces at play compared to what drives railroad ridership. Even though our regional bus network has rush-hour fares of $2.25 for local buses and $3.00 for express, many people balk at paying that price to get to work or other destinations around town. It's not all that much—you can make it to work and back for less than the price of a medium dark chocolate mocha at the local coffee shop. But still, when overall transit ridership remains relatively low, why don't agencies simply look at reducing fares or even eliminating them in order to attract more people?

Well, we do have a couple local examples of that happening. The Northstar commuter line had fares reduced last year, and reports are that it has had a strongly positive impact on the number of passengers carried. Of course, the fare reduction was also accompanied by a targeted advertising blitz and the opening of an additional station in Ramsey, so there was probably a combination of things going on there. At the University of Minnesota, the campus has been running a free-fare bus service for students for at least 15 years now. It's the second-busiest transit system in the state, so they must have done something right. But service frequencies dropping as low as a minute or so apart, some would argue that it's too nice of a service to have. Students are highly opportunistic in their use of the campus shuttles, and will sometimes take them even if it doesn't really save any time when compared with walking.

For motorized transportation of various kinds, we know that use can scale up almost 1:1 with capacity, particularly if the cost to use the system is free or nearly free. At a certain point, it becomes necessary to start diverting or suppressing traffic by adding costs, or adding barriers of sorts, such as intentionally slowing things down or reducing service. But as congestion gets monetized, it's also important to make sure that the cash flow doesn't become an incentive to overbuild.

And before I wrap up, it's important to note that walking and biking, which are extremely cheap and have essentially no carbon footprint, should be prioritized highest of all in our ways of getting around. Both have been extremely neglected over the last century. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean building sidewalks everywhere or continuing to rip out rail infrastructure in order to build new bike trails, but it does mean that planners should always be thinking with their feet. How will this new development face the street? Will the design reinforce our human curiosity and make it an interesting place to walk or bike past, or will it silently push people away with blank walls and dull tones? Do our streets and rail lines have safe ways for people to get across?

The current generation has to work on flipping our transportation system upside-down, not to mention retrofitting our massive inventory of buildings, in order to find the efficiencies needed in order to keep climate change at bay. Finding a true balance between need, desire, and sustainability is the challenge. It will require new ways of thinking, but it can be done.

How (not) to fill a train

I wrote a simple Python script to simulate customers attempting to book passage on a 100-seat train making journeys of anywhere between two stops and 40 stops (each number of stops was simulated 20 times). Each customer chose a random start and end point for their journey. Seats are filled on a first-come, first-served basis: The first passenger always gets seat "0". As each customer comes along, the program checks to see if seat "0" is occupied for any portion of the planned trip. If it is, then the program moves on to seat "1". The process repeats as necessary until the list of seats is exhausted. I set up the program so that 500 attempts would be made for every test—for a stop count of 2, 100 passengers were able to get seats, but 400 other customers were rejected.

That's a very simplistic algorithm which doesn't work very well. It becomes difficult to add more passengers after just 5 stops. Amtrak does better than this, though it's also worth noting that Amtrak reservations are typically on a per-car basis rather than per-seat (per-seat was more straightforward for me to model), so some of the seat conflicts are resolved naturally.

There are a lot of computer performance graphs out there which look exactly like this. In particular, I think of multi-processor systems of yore (i.e., 10–15 years ago). Today, well-written software is much better at scaling almost linearly with the number of processor cores. Some better scheduling software would probably help Amtrak on routes with many stops, but unlike computer programs, people can't be moved around in the same ways.

Here are graphs using both a normal and log scale for the number of stops:

How distance matters: A map and two charts

I've made a couple of aborted attempts at ranting at the Brookings Institution's Amtrak report published on Friday. Instead, I'll just post some graphs I made from their data which seemed interesting.

On Amtrak routes, ridership per train appears to scale with the log of distance. Ridership continues to rise as route length increases, though the rate of increase drops off as routes get longer. Shorter routes tend to have higher frequency of service and more closely-spaced stations. The longest routes also go through some of the least-populous areas of the country (western states). Of course, the sparseness of population doesn't explain why the Empire Builder is the most-ridden long-distance route. The fact that it's basically two (or even three) trains in one might, though.

First, I'll toss in my map of Amtrak station ridership across the country, since I haven't posted about it yet (I still have to work on describing it better at some point):



Now here is ridership per train (annual ridership divided by trains per year) versus distance (log scale), with the size of the circle showing riders per train-mile. Circles are colored according to frequency of service.

This graph plots riders per train-mile versus distance (log scale on both axes), with riders per train as the circle size. Also colored according to frequency of service.


There's a common statement in rail punditry that 400 miles is the limit for viable service, and it's often stated as though ridership suddenly drops off a cliff at that point. I suspect the 400-mile distance really has more to do with political and geographical boundaries. Within the U.S., individual states are often 200 to 400 miles across. In Europe, the Mediterranean Sea is about 400 miles away from Paris.

Anyway, these graphs also indirectly show that ridership scales more or less linearly with frequency of service -- add a second train, and you should expect roughly twice the ridership. So one question worth asking is whether operational costs scale linearly with frequency of service or not.

I'll note that I mostly used frequency of service from Brookings' report. Frequency and route length both become a bit fuzzy since some corridors will only have trains run for part of the distance. I've also noted in the past that Amtrak counts "corridor" trains as Northeast Regionals for the distance they run in the NEC. So the Regional's numbers are probably inflated, while corridor train numbers are deflated (such as the Vermonter). I haven't tried to compensate for that in these graphs. My only change to Brookings data was to tweak the frequencies for the thrice-weekly Sunset Limited and Cardinal and the quad-weekly Hoosier State.

Seeking the transit-friendly highway

The one-way-only Huron Transit Station near the University of Minnesota. Literally a half-hearted attempt at using freeways for bus service. [View Larger Map]

As I first started exploring Metro Transit's bus network in college, I was struck by how much freeway mileage in the Twin Cities doesn't carry any transit service.  Having grown up near Rochester and typically only visiting or driving through the metro area a few times per year, my mental map was mostly built up of Interstates and other major highways, so many of the landmarks I wanted to visit would require long, slow trips on urban local bus routes, and many destinations were simply out of reach with the time I had available.  That might not have been the case if there were more freeway-running routes that had more symmetrical schedules throughout the day.

There is an extensive network of express routes for ferrying suburban workers and students into our twin downtowns and the University of Minnesota—and some highways (such as I-35W near Lake Street) do see buses going by a couple times per minute at peak times.  But, with a few notable exceptions, express routes tend to run as if they were local routes for a short distance to pick up riders out in the suburbs, then go non-stop to a major core-area destination.  There are some places where express buses stop partway along highway, but even then, it may only be a flag stop for riders getting off or the bus may skip past the stop on certain runs.  The inconsistencies can induce nightmares for first-time passengers.

Good transit lines, on the other hand, make regularly-spaced stops.  The spacing can vary depending on how much speed is desired, but they really gain strength from connecting a variety of different locations rather than focusing on bunch of origins clumped together at one end and a cluster of destinations at the other.  The number of practical trip combinations is usually much higher and attracts more riders.

The core reason why express bus routes avoid stopping along the way comes down to the defining feature of a freeway:  They're made for non-stop travel by vehicles making point-to-point trips—they're not made for buses picking people up and dropping them off along the way.  Continuous flow is the goal with a freeway, and the only places where a vehicle is supposed to stop are at the ends of off-ramps.

A freeway corridor is an assault on the senses for any pedestrian, with noise, pollution, and the risk of being run over on nearby streets by drivers who haven't quite gotten their mind out of "freeway mode" yet.  So while it's pretty easy to put bus stops right at diamond interchanges, they can be very unpleasant places to be.

Diamond interchanges are some of the best candidates for bus stops along freeways, since buses can pull off the highway, hit a stop, and then get right back on. However, many interchanges these days use different designs that don't allow buses to get off and right back on. In some parts of the Twin Cities, there are some bus routes which get off the highway and then loop around on local streets and special service roads to access nearby transit stations, but that drastically reduces the average speed of travel for passengers.

Along the nearly-opened Red Line in the south metro, the first station south of the Mall of America is the Cedar Grove Transit Station. It's next to the 65-mph Minnesota State Highway 77 (also known as Cedar Avenue), but accessing the station requires looping back from the junction with Diffley Road 3/4 of a mile away. Stoplights and lower speeds on surface streets mean that reaching the station adds around 6 minutes to the travel time.  This is along a route that's only going to operate over a 9-mile route when it opens (expected to grow to 12 or 15 miles eventually).

So why didn't planners simply decide to put in a station right at the Diffley Road junction?  I don't know the definitive answer, but it's worth pointing out that the distance between the northbound and southbound on-/off-ramps is around 900 feet, and the distance between the nearest frontage roads on either side of the highway is almost twice that (about 1760 feet).  The sheer scale of suburban and rural freeway junctions creates a huge barrier—most transit bus riders are only willing to walk about 1/4-mile (1320 feet) on each end of a trip, meaning that the pedestrian "shed" for such a stop would be completely devoid of any potential customers. That's in contrast to junctions along urban corridors like I-94 in western Saint Paul and I-35W in south Minneapolis, where the distance between eastbound/westbound or northbound/southbound ramps is about 330 feet.

This isn't just a problem for metro-area transit buses, though—intercity routes also have similar problems.  While Interstate highways sliced right through residential areas of major cities across the U.S., smaller towns were usually bypassed instead.  Places where the main drag was once a state or U.S. highway often saw the new freeway entrance built a mile or two away.  While the "highwayless town" does have certain advantages, it did mean that bus routes which once hopped along from one small town to the next (often attempting to mimic old rail lines that had also gone right through town centers) had to shift to picking people up and dropping them off out on the fringes.

Official stops for services from Jefferson Lines, Greyhound, and other bus lines are typically located as close to the highway as possible in the parking lots of gas stations, McDonald's restaurants, and so on.  Windswept, empty places without much shelter (at least once the convenience store or restaurant manager tires of letting passengers hang out inside).

Other problems with connectivity also plague freeway-borne bus routes. In south Minneapolis, the 46th Street station on Interstate 35W is skipped by many buses that run east-west along MN-62, simply because it's difficult to maneuver southbound buses across 3 or 4 lanes of traffic in the 1-mile distance between the station and the MN-62 exit.  The first true freeway BRT station in the Twin Cities is underutilized as a result.

When done right, freeways are engineering marvels. They dramatically increased mobility across the U.S. following World War II, but they've been lacking crucial design elements to make them proper conduits for mass transit as well as cars and trucks.  These highways could have been built differently, with better options for bus stops and stations, and possibly dedicated ramps and busways for reaching city and town centers more rapidly than what would be possible by car.

Are there opportunities to flip this equation around?  The Twin Cities does have the country's most extensive network of bus-only shoulders to bypass congestion on freeways (as well as some surface highways), but most of that mileage only improves travel times for suburban commuters and does little to help urban dwellers who dominate transit ridership in the region.  In some cases, buses on freeways won't provide any better access than urban or suburban local routes, but it's a ready-made network of high-speed, grade-separated infrastructure that shouldn't be ignored as we face the challenges of the 21st century.

Saint Paul Union Depot reopening tomorrow

An aerial view of the Saint Paul Union Depot under construction in 1923.

After laying dormant for 41 years, the concourse and waiting room of the Saint Paul Union Depot will reopen to the public tomorrow, Saturday, December 8th. The reopening comes after a two-year, $243 million rehabilitation of the massive building and the 33-acre site it occupies, which included $148 million in construction and renovation plus $95 million for property acquisition, environmental remediation, and other work.

The Union Depot building itself is divided into three pieces: the headhouse, which sits between 4th Street and Kellogg Boulevard, the concourse, which crosses over Kellogg, and the waiting room, which extends farther south toward the Mississippi River.  (The waiting room is missing from the aerial shot above, but the headhouse and concourse are visible.)  The concourse and waiting room connected passengers to a massive train deck below, which raised the tracks and platforms about one story above ground level (a good way to keep tracks dry considering the Mississippi's frequent floods).

While the headhouse has largely remained open to the public ever since the depot first opened, the rear of the building was closed off in the 1970s.  When Amtrak was formed in 1971, railroad operations in the Twin Cities were consolidated into the Great Northern Depot in Minneapolis, though that was demolished in 1978 after Amtrak moved operations to the current Midway station in an industrial area on the west end of Saint Paul.  Tracks remained in place behind the Union Depot for several years, but were ripped out in the late 1970s when the U.S. Postal Service acquired the concourse, waiting room, and train deck below.

The USPS built skyways to a new structure on the train deck which was used as a semi-trailer truck loading dock.  In order for trucks to access the loading dock, a ramp was sliced right through the train deck at Broadway Street, making it impossible to restore train tracks until the gap was filled.  Much of the deck area was also converted into parking lots.  With only minimal maintenance, the building and deck deteriorated over time, with peeling paint inside and rusting metal and crumbling concrete outdoors.  It took on the aura of an abandoned industrial zone, seemingly too expensive to tear down, so it just became covered in asphalt and forgotten about.

The building did receive some attention over the years, particularly the headhouse which had gone through some cleanup and remodeling.  39 condominium units were added in the early 2000s to the upper floor circling around the west, south, and east sides.  However, the true extent of the accumulated grime wasn't clear until the headhouse was cleaned up in 2011—Interior columns that had seemed to have a glossy gray color turned out to be a matte pink once the layered soot and grease was removed.

A concrete pedestal that had once displayed the William Crooks locomotive was removed in the renovation.  It had been disguised as the Christos restaurant seating area for many years.  While some railfans lamented the fact that the first steam engine to operate in Minnesota won't return to its old display location (it's now up in Duluth), the removal of the concrete pad made the Great Hall area a much more flexible space.

While the Great Hall reopened to the public at the end of 2011, renovations continued elsewhere in the building, and new structures were also added.  Amtrak is not yet able to move from Midway station to the Union Depot because it has taken a long time to schedule the necessary track work to connect the new rail platform to Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific tracks that pass nearby, but Metro Transit bus service will begin at the depot tomorrow, followed in a month or so by Jefferson Lines.

The huge train deck has been slightly reduced in size to make room for wider sidewalks along Kellogg Boulevard and Sibley Street, and a bike path has been built to ride along the northern edge of the deck area (whether it connects to anything yet is unclear—the U.S. 52/Lafayette Freeway Bridge construction zone to the east may prevent it from going anywhere for a while).

At its peak around the time it opened, the Union Depot saw hundreds of trains each day.  Many of these were local commuter services, a role that has been supplanted by buses today.  A portion of the train deck has been dedicated to use by local, commuter, and intercity buses, while the platform Amtrak intends to use is at the southern end, closest to the Mississippi River.  The ramp that the USPS sliced into the train deck has been rebuilt with a roughly right-angle turn to take buses up to this new transit center, making room for a few tracks to be restored.

In terms of tracks and platforms, the historic station was on par with the current capacity of Penn Station in New York City (which handles 15 times as many passengers daily as the Union Depot did at its peak), so it was oversized from the beginning.  Unfortunately, construction of the depot wrapped up right as passenger train travel was peaking in the United States.  There had been even grander visions, and at one point prior to completion, there was even talk of diverting the Mississippi to make way for additional tracks and platforms.  At least the planners of the day didn't go that far overboard.

It would be a surprise if the depot ever again sees as many train passengers each day as it did in the 1920s, so a multi-modal approach is critical to bringing in enough traffic to keep the building active.  Finding ways to use the depot as a public space with community events will also be essential, and hopefully some retail businesses will also be able to carve out their own spaces and find success as the structure revives.  The surrounding Lowertown neighborhood has turned into one of the densest neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.  While it will take a few months longer for actual trains to arrive, and years more before faster and more frequent service arrives, hopefully the return of a long-lost space will help the area continue on its upward trajectory.

Better balance in transportation possible as legislature swings to DFL

Just two years after the Minnesota State Senate and House of Representatives came under Republican control in the Tea Party wave of 2010, both houses flipped back to Democratic-Farmer-Labor majorities in the election this past Tuesday. This was a big surprise to local news outlets, who had expected Republicans to retain the upper hand. The state has had a string of Republican and third-party governors in recent decades, so this marks the first time since 1990—the Rudy Perpich administration—that the governor and the leadership in both chambers have been in DFL hands.

I won't try to decode what was going through voters' minds on Election Day, but this had certainly been the least popular legislature in memory: The public blamed them for the 2011 state government shutdown by a 2–1 margin over Governor Mark Dayton, and approval of the legislature dipped to 17% in February this year. Perhaps buoyed by the turnout against two constitutional amendments that grabbed serious attention, the electorate created a Democratic wave just as big as the one that brought many Tea Party-infused candidates into position just one cycle ago.


The change in Saint Paul, as well as shifts in power nationally, should lead to better outcomes for advocates of balanced transportation including infrastructure for walking, biking, transit and trains to complement our current system heavily biased toward auto and air travel.  This past legislature had reduced funding for or declined to fund projects including the Southwest LRT line from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie (now known as the "Green Line Extension") and the Northern Lights Express intercity train from Minneapolis to Duluth.  They had also reduced the biennial allocation of funding to Twin Cities-area public transit by 46%, slashing annual state support from $72 million to $39 million.

Oddly, that particular legislation included guidance for the following biennium to restore most, but not all, of that particular pot of money—perhaps someone knew their moment in the sun was fleeting.

Rep. Michael Beard (R–Shakopee) in particular caused infuriation for transit advocates in his role as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, particularly after proposing drastic cuts and making comments indicating he viewed public transit primarily as a social service for people of little means rather than a legitimate transportation alternative for the public at large. (Surprisingly, despite the anti-train record, Rep. Beard has been known to take rail excursions such as those offered by the Friends of the 261, though I don't know if he's taken them of his own accord or was invited along by rail advocates.)

Mr. Beard easily retained his seat in this year's election, but will no longer hold the chairmanship of the Transportation Committee. Other seats along the Southwest LRT corridor did flip to DFL hands, however. Up north, Chip Cravaack lost his U.S. House seat from the 8th District which includes Duluth, being replaced by Rick Nolan, a former congressman. Cravaack was opposed to the Northern Lights Express train service, but Nolan appears to support it (though his campaign website specifically calls out "high-speed light-rail"... Oh dear).

Another major rail project that stalled in 2010 was the high-speed extension of Amtrak's Chicago–Milwaukee Hiawatha Service to Madison, Wisconsin, which probably would have been extended to the Twin Cities a few years later.  Curiously, while Minnesota's government went all blue in the general election, Wisconsin's capitol returned to red as the slim 1-vote Democratic majority in their State Senate (due to recall elections in 2011 and 2012) was washed away.  With a governor whose campaign drew upon and fueled ire against the Madison extension, it seems unlikely that there will be significant movement on this front beyond the current effort to run a second daily train on the route of Amtrak's Empire Builder.

Similarly, the political winds didn't shift quite as much in Washington as they did here, so funding from the federal government may continue to slow down. Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate largely ran the table, but the power shift was much less pronounced in the U.S. House, where the GOP remains in charge.

Will either the U.S. House or the Wisconsin Legislature become more moderate this time around? I can't say. Hurricane Sandy has been used to focus attention on climate change, and we need to restructure our land use, transportation networks, and utility networks to deal with that. Rising oceans wouldn't seem to affect Wisconsin much, but the storm was big enough to whip up big waves on Lake Michigan. We've had some big storms in the Midwest as well, such as the one that caused massive flooding in Duluth this past June. Perhaps outside events like these will help shift some opinions on a variety of transportation projects.