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Los Angeles has commuter rail to Palmdale / Lancaster, Valencia / Santa Clarita, Ventura / Oxnard / Camarillo, Irvine, Riverside, San Bernardino. There is talk of a commuter rail to Palm Springs, but sounds like it is more of a pipe dream. Metrolink is incredibly extensive, it just has pretty weak ridership.
One other feature of Metrolink that is pretty unique is that it has a line from the Inland Empire to Orange County, which was the first suburb-to-suburb commuter rail in the country.
Amtrak to Hartford has scheduling delays, its a mess.
I have been saying this since I joined this forum and have had the displeasure of driving in CT into NYC, the traffic in that corridor is awful and it further confirms my belief that from Springfield to NYC are all one area, even by development it looks like a tail cutting through CT along the Long Island Sound and going north from New Haven into MA and there are no breaks in development either. They need more train service in that corridor. Springfield to Scranton are the low cost frontiers for exurban NYC, I for one wouldnt be shocked to see them added to NYC's expansive CSA because I already think of them as the same area. Unfortunately commuter rates dont support that theory right now but I dont have any doubts on the direction theyre headed in IMO.
The MARC train in DC goes all the way to West Virginia. Also the Penn and Camden lines go to Baltimore and the Penn goes even further to Perryville. There are plans to extend the Penn line from Perryville to Wilmington, DE in the future.
I'm not sure if either the MTA or Septa owns the tracks between Perryville to Newark, DE. I would assume that both transit agencies would have to work together to get that accomplished. Perryville, MD is actually an exburb of Philly and it would be nice for Northeast Maryland to have direct rail service to Philadelphia.
In the last couple of years they went from 2 trains a day each way to 3 in a few years ago and they just started 4 a few months back and they are looking at expanding service into Modesto too.
BTW, are there any intercity, HSR, or BT train plans in any cities from city to their suburbs and exurbs? How's the ridership? For metros that dont have commuter rail to exurbs, are there any plans?
Amtrak Capitol Corrridor also. SMART is also under construction in the North Bay.
eBART is also under construction in Eastern Contra Costa.
And then there's that gawd awful high speed rail that is supposed to connect LA-SF. It would have been better to build a bulllet train within NorCal and another separate bullet train withib SoCal.
Also, BARTs current plans have it ending right at the border of the East Bay and Stockton at two fronts. The valley has to be next up for expansion. An SFO to Tracy line would probably be the longest 'subway' line in the world.
The Twin Cities have one commuter rail line to Big Lake. Initially, it was planned to go to St. Cloud (pop. ~70,000). Funding was cut, and "phase II" was tabled until ridership numbers justified it. Unfortunately, without going to St. Cloud, the attractiveness of the line suffered, so it's in a weird catch-22 where ridership will increase if the line is extended to St. Cloud, but the line won't be extended to St. Cloud until ridership increases.
DC has commuter rail service to Baltimore, and exurbs of each are served along the way, if I recall correctly...
Amtrak to Hartford has scheduling delays, its a mess.
Springfield to Scranton are the low cost frontiers for exurban NYC, I for one wouldnt be shocked to see them added to NYC's expansive CSA because I already think of them as the same area. Unfortunately commuter rates dont support that theory right now but I dont have any doubts on the direction theyre headed in IMO.
To be honest it wouldn't even surprise me either if the New York area added Scranton, PA to it's CSA within the next 20 years or so. The New York CSA just recently added the Lehigh Valley and Monroe County, PA(which actually borders Lackawanna County) so now the NYC CSA now borders the county Scranton, PA is located in. Once New Jersey Tansit restores rail service to the Lackawanna cutoff, the commuter rates for the Scranton area will increase dramatically.
Miami's Tri-Rail commuter rail serves Juno Beach & Jupiter in northern Palm beach county which is some 70 miles away. There is also talk of extending service to St. Lucie county now that it is part of the Miami CSA area.
With the opening of the A-Train in 2011, Dallas now has a commuter rail connection with Denton. The A-Train hooks up with DART in the suburbs. Whether Denton is considered a exurb, though, I'm not sure.
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