Where the rails lead
Last week, the METRO board voted to build all five 2012 lines as light rail instead of bus rapid transit. That answers the people in the North Side, the East End, and the Third Ward who have been disappointed since 2004 that they would not be getting rail. It also means the system will have more capacity for growth: the Main Street line is already operating more service than a BRT line could, and it’s running standing room only at rush hour.
But there are other implications to the change as well.
Trains can run from one line to another. As I noted last week, the North Line will now be an extension of the Main Street Line, which means a one-seat ride from Northline to Downtown and the Texas Medical Center. If that’s your commute, that’s a big deal. The other big opportunity for through-running is the University Line and the Uptown Line. It makes no sense to force anyone headed to Uptown from anywhere else in the system to transfer at South Rice. I was pushing for University Line trains to run into Uptown even when the Uptown line was BRT. Now that it’s light rail, that’s trivial. Last week, METRO Chairman David Wolff said it is now the plan. That will make easier trips for a lot of people — in fact, I’d wager that the more convenient connection will increase ridership.
METRO needs to re-examine how the Southeast and Harrisburg lines get into Downtown. The BRT plan called for reserved lanes with rail already in the ground and light rail style stations — with one exception. Downtown, the BRT vehicles were to run in existing “diamond lanes,” with no reconstruction of the streets and fairly minimal station platforms. That plan made service slower and less reliable, but it avoided significant construction Downtown. The diamond lanes also allowed METRO to devise an awkward but cheap arrangement of right angle turns to get from Scott to Capitol and Rusk.
Now METRO can go back to the rail plan shown in the DEIS — two tracks in the center of Capitol Street — or devise an alternative. One idea I’ve heard from METRO staff is to take the Southeast and Harrisburg lines to the Intermodal Center instead of Downtown. That may be cheaper, and construction would be less disruptive. But it would lead to longer trips for most riders (which means it’s a bad idea). In either case, a smoother connection to Scott is required, and that will take additional property.
Of course, the Capitol plan has its own flaw — a ridiculous 3 to 4 block walk to transfer to the Main Street Line. As BRT, once could at least reason that the plan was temporary. As light rail, this is a permanent fixture. The good news: this can be fixed fairly easily.
The Intermodal Center may matter less — or it may matter more. If the Southeast, Harrisburg, and North lines run directly into Downtown, the Intermodal Center becomes less important. It’s still the Downtown commuter rail terminal, and it’s still served by some local bus lines, but it’s merely an intermediate stop — not a transfer point — on the light rail system. Of course, if the Center is the transfer point between the Southeast, Harrisburg, and Main Street lines, it’s more significant than it was before.
The light rail fleet just got bigger. METRO is estimating that the new lines will require around 120 light rail cars, as opposed to 18 today. There are economies of scale in ordering that many trains. And the extra trains will come in handy for special events: the fleet can be shifted from line to line to add additional service.
We need more storage yards. A bigger fleet needs more places to park. The BRT fleet was to be stored and maintained at existing bus operating facilities, but obviously those can’t handle trains. The Fannin South light rail shop will still be the place where heavy maintenance is done, but it was never designed to hold the entire system’s fleet. It will be home base for Main/North trains. The DEIS for the University Line already proposed a second facility for the University Line fleet, located at South Rice or Hillcroft. Presumably, it will now handle Uptown trains as well. The Southeast and Harrisburg lines will need a third shop. The DEIS for the Southeast Line showed it just east of Downtown, alongside the railroad tracks. Since then, though, more construction in that area has made it more difficult to assemble land.
We’re less than a year from construction. Some of these things will need to be figured out pretty quickly. But they should not be figured out hastily — we’ll live with the answers for a long time. So, even as the North Side, the East End, and the Third Ward celebrate, they should be paying attention. There will be Revised Final Environmental Impact Studies to read, there will be field offices to visit, and, hopefully, there will be METRO open houses to explain all of this. Since 2003, we’ve gotten used to things moving slowly. They will move a lot quicker now. Keep up in our forums.