Commuter rail: fast but right
Tuesdays’ public meeting on commuter rail showed two approaches to implementing commuter rail. The first is contained in the report itself, which lays out a five-line, $3 billion system with totally new lines inside the 610 loop and terminal stations and maintenance facilities designed to support even more lines. The second approach came from Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, who wants to get two lines – Galveston and Hempstead – up and running as soon as possible.
There’s a definite appeal to Emmet’s vision. The sooner trains are running, the sooner we begin to see benefits. But there are pitfalls as well. The most dangerous of these is political. If a quick commuter rail implementation is ineffective — if it results in long, inconvenient trips, if it carries low ridership – it might cause riders and voters to give up on commuter rail altogether. So while it’s nice to be quick, it’s equally important to be good. Whatever the first line is, it must be effective.
The easiest way to implement the Galveston and Hempstead lines would be to extend them no further inside 610 than their first intersection with any other freight rail lines. This would create two temporary commuter rail terminals: one somewhere near Northwest Mall, and one around Broadway and Lawndale in the outer East End, near Pasadena. Here, commuter rail riders would need to transfer to continue their trips to Downtown, the Medical Center, or Uptown. Unfortunately, neither of these places will have light rail by 2012. That would leave riders transferring to buses. Even if those buses use HOV lanes, that would not be an improvement on current service. It might be cheap, but it’s not useful.
So here’s the question: is there a way to get commuter rail to light rail – and closer to the major activity centers – without massive new infrastructure? For the Galveston line, I think there is.
The railroad line that runs to Galveston – the UPRR Galveston Subdivision – is suitable for a quick implementation of commuter rail because it’s not very busy. Outside 610, it carries fewer than 10 trains a day, while Houston’s busiest lines carry 40 or 50. This line actually extends inside the loop to within a mile of Downtown, and even there it carries fewer than 15 trains a day. The problem is that it intersects at grade with two much busier lines. The other problem is that it does not extend to the planned downtown commuter rail terminal at the Intermodal Center; in between the two is a mile and a half of extremely congested track called the West Belt. Those three bottlenecks – the two crossings and the West Belt – are keeping Galveston trains away from Downtown.
How do we fix those bottlenecks? The crossings are straight-forward: build new commuter rail overpasses. Commuter rail trains, unlike freight trains, can climb fairly steep grades, so this isn’t much different than a road overpass, and it could be built within the existing rail line right-of-way.
Solving the Downtown terminal problem requires rethinking an assumption that came from previous planning efforts. The Intermodal Terminal is not the only potential site for a Downtown station; in fact, there could be more than one Downtown station. Right at the end of the Galveston Subdivision is a fairly lightly used freight rail yard – Congress Yard – that happens to be alongside the Southeast Line light rail alignment. There’s room here to store and maintain the handful of trains that would be required to operate this one line, and there’s room for a passenger platform that could be linked with an overhead walkway to a new station on the Southeast Line, only two stops away from the Downtown office core.
These three improvements – along with a refurbishing of the track inside 610, and maybe an additional siding or two — would add to the cost of the line. But we’re talking tens of millions here, not hundreds. [As Mike notes in the forums, I'm referring to the costs of these individual improvements. The cost to get the entire line up and running would be hundreds.] And the result would be a line that would deliver high quality service from day one.
Unfortunately, there’s no similar solution for the 290 line. Between Northwest Mall and Downtown is the Terminal Subdivision, one of the most congested and disruptive sections of the Houston freight rail network. It needs to be fixed, and that fix will be a major project that needs to address freight rail, commuter rail, and light rail. It’s not something that can be done quickly.
But, as Tory points out, there’s another rail line parallel to 290: the BNSF line along 249. Because 249 doesn’t extend to the loop, commuters from this area have to choose between getting stuck on 290 or getting stuck on 45, and the commuter bus service doesn’t benefit from an HOV lane. And not only is this line not busy, but it also intersects with the light rail North Line just north of 610. A new station platform could be built on the overpass where the light rail line crosses the railroad, connected with stairs to a commuter rail platform below (this would have to be taken into account in the design of the light rail overpass, so there’s a limited window of time to make this decision.)
From here, it would be a 15-minute ride to Downtown; that could actually be cut to 10 minutes by running express service that would skip stops between here and UH Downtown, then run local along the rest of the Main Street Line. New Jersey’s Hudson-Bergen Light rail does this successfully. That same service could also benefit local riders coming from the transit center at Northline Mall. Once again, this line would improve on current transit service from day one.
Both of these solutions suit themselves to an incremental approach. They could be implemented relatively quickly, relatively affordably, but they would provide useful, convenient service. But they also do not preclude the larger terminal facilities or the additional lines contemplated in the HGAC plan. The places on the other lines in the HGAC plan — and places not included in that plan — want service, too. And a bigger system would require more infrastructure. Perhaps the most important part of the HGAC study is its recommendations to safeguard right of way now to build stations, tracks, and maintenance facilities later. Building commuter rail won’t get easier as the city gets denser — it will only get harder. And it’s not easy even now.
Where do you want to go in 2012? Tell us in the forums.
[map below: these two commuter rail lines is purple, HOV lanes in orange, 2012 light rail in blue]
