Next city/metro to gain commuter rail system? (Chicago, cons, downtown)
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And there’s a difference between light and heavy commuter rail. Austin’s metro is light commuter rail. Are the newer Denver RTD lines heavy? I know RTD to be mostly light rail.
And there’s a difference between light and heavy commuter rail. Austin’s metro is light commuter rail. Are the newer Denver RTD lines heavy? I know RTD to be mostly light rail.
Yes, the commuter rail lines are faster, carry more passengers and make less stops.
The city center as a workplace is on the decline. Who wants to spend 2+ hours of their day commuting if it's unnecessary? Plus, people will always choose to commute via car unless traffic/parking becomes unbearable. More people working remote means less traffic and more parking, which means no one really cares about rail anymore. It's like arguing over which city has the most telephone booths. The future is remote work and living wherever you want unless you have one of the few jobs that requires you to be in an office.
Austin and Houston could be the "Tale of Two Cities". Austin's economy is dominated by high tech, which embraced remote work until recently and then reverted because of COVID. Tech prefers low-rise suburban corporate campuses to high-rise office space.
The conservatives running Corporate Houston have been pushing "Back to Normal" for the last 6 months.
I always like to say that the skyscrapers in Downtown Houston were built because there was excess steel (for oil and gas pipelines) that the Ship Channel (industrial East Houston) steel plants were producing. Eventually we became the first Southern U.S. city to have our current skyline. The reason why we were early was because of the oil boom during the '70s and '80s.
I have to say that Houston is odd among other U.S. cities because the Energy Industry prefers high-rises to corporate campuses, even in suburban settings. The closest thing to suburban corporate campuses around here are Edge City Mid-rise clusters. Despite the presence of multiple Edge Cities, Downtown is still a major employment center!
Most transplants and visitors bring up the No Zoning issue, but the resulting multiple Edge City clusters inside the I-610 Loop makes Houston one of the few global cities to have a 360-degree skyline is lesser-known outside the city. (This is also one of the major obstacles to building commuter rail instead of deploying Park-and-Ride buses!)
But regarding this thread, what Austin is investing in is urban light rail, not commuter rail. There are some upgrades to the existing commuter rail line to allow for higher capacity and frequency, but that's really a footnote of the overall plan.
I think that's more reflective of the sad state of transit in American cities. Regions with 2M+ elsewhere would have better transit networks. In the U.S., the standards are lower. San Diego is sad, Austin is sad, U.S. cities are generally sad. Nice quip though!
If you look at the website you referenced, it literally says "Most travel is not work-based travel, but data on such journeys is not readily available." Your single data point was insufficient and really didn't capture transit use for workers (regionally) or just generally for households inclusive of all trip purposes. There's also zero info for non-residents, which actually is a big trip generator for tourist cities...like San Diego.
There are a few interesting metrics in addition to the ones below: ttps://htaindex.cnt.org/map/
Transit Ridership % of Workers (region)
- Baltimore 9%
- SD: 7%
- Portland: 7%
- Salt Lake City: 6%
- Cleveland 4%
- Pittsburgh: 3%
- Austin: 3%
Annual Average Transit Trips per Household (region)
- San Diego: 229
- Baltimore: 142
- Salt Lake City: 134
- Portland: 129
- Cleveland: 72
- Austin: 56
- Pittsburgh: 43
In the case of San Diego, this doesn't even cover all the transit trips by non-residents. Comic Con alone alone produces 200-300K additional trolley trips by itself...that's approximately one-third of Austin Metrorail's annual ridership. And all the Amtrak trips down to San Diego too. Also, a lot of SD locals do in fact use transit to attend events, go to school, or go to the beach. None of that is capture by the limited "commute trips" data point.
I ranked Austin very highly because Project Connect is very ambitious and impressive. In general, metros that are around 2 million in size embark on larger transportation plans. Austin's is significantly more impressive than almost every region and its worth mentioning. The vision sells itself--no need for cherry-picked data points. It's very exciting to see Austin make this investment and I hope other cities will take their lead by investing in better & more mobility options. I love that Austin is using its moment in the spotlight to demonstrate that investments in urban infrastructure & multimodal transportation systems is critical to promote and accommodate growth. Maybe places like Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, etc. will make those decisions too after seeing what the competition is doing!!!
Austin’s current transit network is crap compared to SD’s currently anyway as it’s full of holes and last mile issues atop only half a rail so it’s kind of difficult pitting the two together right now. Project Connect is supposed to be the line that connects the dots so to speak so currently we don’t really know what Austin’s true ridership potential is as our bus and rail service isn’t anywhere near as optimized as what’s seen in the Pacific states. I would say that if we had a more functional transit system where we stand now (not baring Project Connect, but rather a system that was more advantageous than driving) .. we would probably have higher ridership... especially if we had a line to the airport.
This is mainly to state that I believe Austin’s problem is transit dysfunction rather than ridership potential... project connect will alleviate a lot of the former.
San Diego has very mediocre bus service (travel speeds, notably), so I'm not sure they are drastically different in the bigger scheme of things compared to LA or Boston.
It's very challenging to compare regions that are at different points of their histories and different sizes. When San Diego was at 2.2M (Austin's current size), it definitely had a more comprehensive rail network than Austin. But, assuming Austin builds out the Project Connect network in 10 years and gains another 500K residents, I think it's entirely possible that Austin will have achieved more than San Diego had when it had 2.7M residents. That's why I placed Austin in the first tier. Note that Portland and Salt Lake City are definitely exceptional outliers. Austin and SD are pretty similar in the pace of these infrastructure investments relative to region size.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Need4Camaro
Austin’s current transit network is crap compared to SD’s currently anyway as it’s full of holes and last mile issues atop only half a rail so it’s kind of difficult pitting the two together right now. Project Connect is supposed to be the line that connects the dots so to speak so currently we don’t really know what Austin’s true ridership potential is as our bus and rail service isn’t anywhere near as optimized as what’s seen in the Pacific states. I would say that if we had a more functional transit system where we stand now (not baring Project Connect, but rather a system that was more advantageous than driving) .. we would probably have higher ridership... especially if we had a line to the airport.
And there’s a difference between light and heavy commuter rail. Austin’s metro is light commuter rail. Are the newer Denver RTD lines heavy? I know RTD to be mostly light rail.
I think at least with US cities people tend to classify commuter rail as the type of vehicle class being used, which are typically diesel/DMU types. Technically there LRT and HRT systems that serve the same purpose and travel the same distances.
There are a few issues standing in the way of the US ever being able to adopt European or Japan-levels of rail effectiveness.
The most glaring is that our population centers sprawl out haphazardly. In Europe (less familiar with Japan), there are very dense city centers, and slightly less dense (but still very dense compared to the US) "suburbs" within a few miles of the center. Then there is typically some type of urban growth boundary, effectively cutting off sprawl as we would recognize it here. So, it is easy to serve a high % of the population with rail that residents can walk/bike to because they only need to cover a relatively small area. Even our "dense" cities have not-dense suburbs, making it a requirement to drive to commuter rail nodes in most places.
The other issue is the decentralization of the employment centers. Transit works most effectively when it converges on a single point. But in many (most?) cities, there are nodes set up all over the metro area, but not large enough to redirect rail lines to. Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA could be an example of this: it has is an exploding employment cluster for biotech/tech/education. But all of the commuter rails terminate in Boston (believe one passes through Cambridge, but not Kendall?) It makes commuting to Kendall inefficient because for most people it will not be a direct shot. The DFW area has dozens of examples of this: most offices aren't in downtown Dallas, but that's where all of the transit lines go.
It pains me to say, as I am a big believer in public transit and reducing our carbon footprint. But it's hard for me to see any way that these systems could work and not be a complete financial boondoggle for most cities. Heck, they barely function in our largest & densest cities compared to other western nations.
James Kunstler once was quoted as saying that the American suburb was perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. Kinda hard to disagree.
Denver currently has 4 commuter rail lines. All opened within the last 5 years. A regional commuter system along the front range would be nice though
If that happened would it run northbound to say Ft. Collins and south to dare I say Colorado Springs?
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