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November 11, 2009
MetroRail trains to run afternoon tests starting next week
Capital Metro’s commuter rail trains, which for months have made test runs primarily in the morning, will move to afternoon testing starting Monday.
Look for the red trains running from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. on the line, which runs from downtown Austin, through East Austin, then northwest through North Austin, Cedar Park and Leander. The trains will be running on simulated schedules comparable to what Capital Metro will use when service begins sometime next year. That would mean northbound trains running every 30 to 35 minutes, with a few southbound trains as well.
“MetroRail will be traveling at full operating speeds, nearly twice as fast as freight trains,” Capital Metro said in a news release today. “Additionally, train activity will increase significantly. For these reasons, motorists, cyclists and pedestrians are encouraged to always expect a train, and to stay off the tracks.”
The MetroRail line, in its 32-mile path, crosses about 70 streets, highways and private drives. The agency has crossing gates, in some cases special four-armed gates, at almost all of those intersections, and had experienced trouble this year getting the gates to open and close at the proper times. Recent progress reports from the agency have indicated that those problems had been solved for all but a couple of intersections near Lamar Boulevard and Airport Boulevard.
Those glitches, along with more complex questions involving the track’s signal control system, have pushed back indefinitely what was at one time to be a March 2009 opening. Agency officials now hope to have the trains in service by the end of March.
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October 12, 2009
Unintended consequences in Dallas
The Dallas Observer has a fascinating article about unintended consequences of putting four rails lines through downtown Dallas on the same street. Already with just three of those lines operational, the article says, 46 to 47 light rail trains an hour pass through downtown on Pacific Avenue, and every one of them has a signal preemption device that stops cross traffic.
To be fair, Austin at this point has no comparable rail plan. We would have a single streetcar system running downtown, although there would be trains running in each direction. But it’s still interesting to explore what a train line can mean for existing modes of transportation.
Here’s the article.
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September 23, 2009
Spring? Summer? Fall? Why quibble on original projection of commuter rail opening . . .
When I interviewed a group of Capital Metro officials for a story that ran Sunday about the delayed commuter rail opening (read it here) I mentioned at one point that the original agency projection was that the line would open in “Spring 2008.”
I don’t know where the came from, one official said, indicating that he’d never heard anything in the early years of the project other than a projected start date of Fall 2008 (which later became March 2009, and then fell into the indefiinite hold we’re still in). I was so flummoxed by this comment that all I could say was, “Well, it was in all the papers.”
Which it was. Statesman stories before the November 2004 election said the agency was pointing toward opening the 32-mile line in spring 2008. This was based on interviews with Capital Metro officials. But there were also campaign materials put out by Right Track PAC, a political action committee pushing for passage of the rail referendum, saying that the line would open in “early 2008,” which one might even interpret as January to March of 2008. Before spring 2008, in other words. That political committee, officers of it have said since, was getting all of its information from Capital Metro.
Anyway, a tipster this week let me know about a sign at the Leander park-and-ride, which is also the northernmost point of the commuter rail line. Or will be when it opens. The sign, which I went out and visited (and photographed), apparently was posted for quite some time at the station, but has now been taken down by Capital Metro and is resting ignominiously between two vending machines at the station.
Look at the photos of the sign yourself and decide where some might have gotten the crazy impression that Capital Metro thought the line would open before “Fall 2008.”
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September 8, 2009
Transit troubles hitting even Portland
Even Portland, often held up as an exemplar of all things public transit, the recession is combining with expensive rail projects to force the agency to cut bus service.
Read about it here.
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August 31, 2009
New problems crop up on commuter rail startup
NOTE: An earlier version of this blog posting incorrectly said that Capital Metro had announced a three-month delay in the rail project. Agency officials instead said that while problems encountered last week with the track control system will cause further delay, they could not estimate how long the delay will be. — Ben Wear
A test on Capital Metro’s commuter rail line last week in Leander, witnessed by federal regulators, turned up a defect in the “vital logic” of the signals used to tell trains to slow down and stop when there is trouble ahead.
In addition, the Federal Railroad Administration officials in town for the test “strongly urged” Capital Metro to compile a “systems integration” document having to do with the agency running both freight and passenger trains on the same 32-mile slice of track from Leander to downtown Austin. Capital Metro, because it plans to operate the freight trains at night and the passenger trains during the day, had not previously put together the report, according to board member Mike Martinez.
And Capital Metro officials revealed changes in the planned schedule for commuter rail when it opens, with six run inbound from Leander in the morning and six outbound in the afternoon.
That is one fewer during each rush hour than what the agency had said previously would run on weekdays. And the split between runs will be 35 minutes rather than 30 minutes as previously estimated. There will be three Leander-bound runs in the morning for reverse commuters, and four Austin-bound runs in the afternoon.
How much of an additional delay do the new problems (joining persistent glitches with crossing signal gates and other system bugs) represent? Capital Metro officials couldn’t say.
“We just don’t know how long it will take,” said Doug Allen, Capital Metro’s executive vice president and chief development officer. “We have to really dig into it.”
Warren Flatau, a spokeswman for the railroad administration, said in an e-mail that after the regulators visited last week Capital Metro agreed to make changes in the traffic control system “to prevent freight trains from entering shared track.”
In the short term, Flatau said, Capital Metro could have a person verify that track controls are properly aligned to keep freight and passenger trains separated. Long term, he said, the agency will have to make software changes.
The commuter line, estimated to open in spring 2008 before voters approved it almost five years ago, was later delayed to fall 2008, then March 30 of this year before going into an indefinite delay.
The “vital logic” problem surfaced in a faux test of the signal lights along the line. Those lights are intended to remain in green mode when a train can move along at full speed, but go to yellow or caution mode to warn a train of a red, or stop, signal ahead. Freight trains, because they take longer than passenger trains to stop even at the slower speeds they run, need two yellow signals so as to begin the stopping process sooner, officials said.
In the drill, one of those signals was purposely put in the wrong, or green, mode. The centralized control system installed by Capital Metro in anticipation of having commuter rail service was supposed to default to its freight mode, thereby providing the longest stopping distance for whatever train happened to be on the track.
It didn’t, according to Capital Metro rail manager Bill LeJeune.
As for the systems integration report, “apparently we never turned it in,” said Martinez, also an Austin City Council member.
Asked why the report wasn’t done a year or two ago — Capital Metro has been working on the passenger rail system since before the November 2004 referendum that authorized it — LeJeune said that “I’m not exactly sure it’s required.”
So why is the agency doing it? The railroad administration officials in Austin last week “strongly urged us to do it,” LeJeune said.
Here’s a timeline of the delays on the Capital Metro commuter rail project:
Fall 2004: Capital Metro in the runup to the November 2004 election where voters authorized building the Leander-to-downtown passenger line, says that it likely will open in “spring 2008.”
2005: The agency, given the delivery time for the six rail cars it is having manufactured and delivered by a Swiss company, begins saying that the line will open in “fall 2008.”
Oct. 1, 2008: With some rail stations and sidings not yet under construction, the company holds a press conference to announce a specific opening date of March 30, 2009, including a weekend of celebratory activities leading up to actual service.
Feb. 26, 2009: Capital Metro officials say that MetroRail might open with service on inbound from Leander in the morning and outbound from downtown in the evening, or might open one to two weeks late.
March 2, 2009: The agency gives reporters and some members of the public a ride on the train from the North Austin operations center to Leander, and back. Although officials acknowledge that the onboard WiFi may not be ready by March 30, the overall tone is upbeat.
March 14, 2009: Capital Metro, giving up on the March 30 date, says the line could open up to a month late, but that the opening festivities will still go on in late March.
March 20, 2009: Under criticism for holding a celebration of a opening yet to happen, Capital Metro cancels the festivities and says the opening is now delayed indefinitely. It promises an update in mid-May. Monthly updates through the summer report progress on addressing signal glitches and other problems, but also include no predictions of an opening.
Aug. 31, 2009: Agency, after the Federal Railroad Administration reviews the readiness of the line and its control systems, says that work on the “vital logic” of the track controls will cause a further, unspecified delay.
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August 10, 2009
Widespread public transit in the U.S., and the tradeoffs
Interesting column by Los Angeles Times writer David Lazarus on the why it would be a huge political challenge to get European- and Japanese-style public transit systems going in the United States.
Read it here.
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July 20, 2009
TxDOT rail wish lists includes Central Texas projects
Early planning work on three proposed Central Texas passenger rail projects is on a $1.9 billion wish list that the Texas Department of Transportation submitted to the federal government last week.
The “pre-applications” for Austin-to-San Antonio and Austin-to-Houston lines, as well as some improvements at an Austin-area railroad junction, were among 19 that TxDOT turned in as part of a bid to get money from $8 billion of stimulus funds allocated to passenger rail. Texas’ bid amounts to almost a quarter of the available money, far more than Texas is likely to get.
The bulk of the Texas bid is in one $1.7 billion item to do environmental work and preliminary engineering for a high-speed rail corridor running north-south from San Antonio, through Austin, on to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and then into both Oklahoma and Arkansas.
But separately, the list includes $80 million for prelimary engineering and environmental study relocating Union Pacific freight traffic from its current route through the heart of Austin, San Marcos and San Antonio to a rural corridor east of all those areas. Relocating the line would make possible a 115-mile Georgetown-to-San Antonio commuter rail line.
The TxDOT news release notes that the $80 million would be only a tiny fraction of the $2.5 billion estimated cost of moving freight to an eastern alternative corridor. No funding source for the rest of that cost has been identified at this point, although a commuter rail district formed several years ago has some limited taxing authority in the vicinity of future rail stations.
The list also includes, without naming a cost, study of the feasibility of Austin-to-Houston passenger rail. And it includes $6.3 million for a siding extension at the interchange in Northwest Austin between the Union Pacific line and Capital Metro’s rail line.
No decision will be made for several months about dispersing the money.
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May 13, 2009
Cap Metro: No rail start date possible yet
Capital Metro officials, although they are reporting substantial progress today on the Red Line passenger rail project, say they can’t yet set an opening date. But the public can expect to begin seeing the trains running at full speed, with the attendant opening and closing of gates at intersections, as the agency begins final testing.
On-schedule testing, with the trains running every 30 minutes at morning and evening rush hours, should begin soon. But the agency this morning did not give an approximate date for that to begin.
The agency will make another progress report in mid-June.
“Capital Metro will report back to the community by mid-June,” said Fred Gilliam, the president and CEO of the agency in a news release. “We are as eager to get MetroRail started as you are. My pledge to you is a safe, reliable and high-quality system that Central Texas will be proud of. Our citizens need and deserve new transit options, and the MetroRail Red Line is just the beginning.”
The agency, when it announced in late March that the start date of the 32-mile Leander-to-downtown-Austin had been indefinitely postponed, had said it would report back to the community by May 15. The agency released an e-mail minutes ago that constitutes that report.
Officials have several elements of progress to report:
** “Grinding” of the line, removing rust to improve electrical conductivity along the line, was completed last week. In turn, the problem with balky signal gates appears to have been solved.
** The agency transitioned last weekend to a “centralized track control” system, which depends on computer monitoring at a North Austin facility. Before that, the agency had been using a radio-based system.
** The agency is still working on “signal preemption” equipment at various points in the system where the track is only feet away from a road traffic signal. The potential problem is that cars caught by red lights will back up and park on the railroad tracks. The preemption system would cause traffic lights to go green as a train approaches, allowing cars to move and get off the track.
** Dispatchers have been certified under the new track control system, and engineers are part way through that process.
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April 27, 2009
KXAN poll shows support for more rail
A poll released last week shows that Austin area voters, by about a 3-2 margin, would support more commuter rail lines beyond the one Capital Metro is attempting to open sometime soon.
The poll by KXAN television was mostly about the mayoral race. But the 1,001 people polled by telephone (yielding a 3 percent margin of error) were also asked about expanding rail. The poll did not ask people who they would prefer to pay for such an expansion.
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April 14, 2009
Maybe Round Rock is serious about this rail thing
Remember that the Statesman reported a few months ago that the City of Round Rock is toying with the idea of building passenger rail running from Texas 45 North out to the Dell Diamond and north toward Georgetown? Well, based on a press release the city sent out this morning, it looks like Round Rock is still thinking about it at the least.
The city is looking for volunteers to tell them about their daily commute as a point of comparison to a potential rail trip. But there appears to be no payment for participating. Anyone, here’s the press release if you’re interested:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Released by Will Hampton, Communications Director 512.218.5409
Staff contact David Bartels, Public Works Administration 512.671.2760
Round Rock looking for commuters to participate in survey for rail
studyThe City of Round Rock is looking for individuals willing to
participate in a 5-day commuter survey. The data collected will be
used to determine the time-competitiveness of a commuter rail trip
over a typical auto trip for daily commuting. Participants will be
asked to keep a log of their drive times for five (5) days, noting
place of entrance onto IH 35, place of exit from IH 35, total drive
time, and any time taken to run errands.The survey will be conducted from April 20 to May 1. Participants
can record their commutes on any five (5) days within that period.
The days do not need to be consecutive but should be representative
of a typical commute.To qualify participants must: live in Williamson County; commute daily along IH 35; and work in central or downtown Austin.
Anyone interested in participating should download the driver’s
log from the City’s web site, record their information and send
the data back to our study team by May 9. Two methods of submittal
are explained below - users can choose the one most convenient to
them.To print and mail the data, users should download the Commuter
Daily Log (www.roundrocktexas.gov/docs/dailycommutelog.pdf) in
Adobe Acrobat PDF format; fill out the information for five (5)
commuting days and mail the completed form to:The Goodman Corporation 1715 E 6th Street, Suite 112 Austin, TX 78702
To email the data, users should download the Commuter Daily Log
(www.roundrocktexas.gov/docs/dailycommutelog.pdf) in Adobe
Acrobat PDF format and use it in the car to record their daily
commute. When done, transfer the information to the Commuter Daily
Log (www.roundrocktexas.gov/docs/dailycommutelog.xls) in
Microsoft Excel format and email the file
to:smaclay@thegoodmancorp.comCommuters’ participation will help us make more informed and
strategic decisions on the transportation investments needed for
Round Rock.
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March 24, 2009
Collector's item
Well, I just received in the mail my invitation to the Capital Metro’s commuter rail opening festivities this Friday and Saturday. “Look what just rolled in,” the cover to the card says above a classy Art Deco-style illustration of a red-and-silver MetroRail train under a starry sky.
“With sincere gratitude for making our progress possible,” the card says inside.
The problem, as most of you probably know, is that Friday night party at the downtown Austin Hilton Hotel and the Saturday demonstration train rides have been called off, at least for now. The cancellation happened Friday coincident with Capital Metro deciding to indefinitely postpone opening the Leander-to-downtown-Austin line while it addresses a variety of remaining safety and training concerns.
That postponement occurred March 20. The postmark on my invitation: March 17.
Ouch.
I called the RSVP phone number listed on the invitation, by the way. The voice mail message, which evidently was recorded before March 20, probably needs to be updated.
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Consolation for disappointed rail fans
Looking for something fun to do with the kids now that Capital Metro has cancelled its rail opening festivities for this Saturday? An alternative has surfaced.
Danny DeVito, famous for being husband to the actress who played Karla on “Cheers,” for playing the insufferable movie star in “Get Shorty,” for innumerable other movies and for being very, very short, will be live and in person here at 11 a.m. Saturday. Now the venue — Twin Liquors at Hancock Center on 41st Street — might seem unorthodox for a Saturday outing. But, hey, a movie star is a movie star.
DeVito, it turns out, has his own brand of Limoncello, “the classic Italian after-dinner drink” as the press release on his appearance puts it. He’ll be at the liquor store for two hours, offering tastes of Limoncello.
Just tell the kids it’s lemonade.
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March 14, 2009
Cap Metro to delay rail start date
Capital Metro officials said Saturday that they will delay much-anticipated commuter rail service that was scheduled to begin March 30 amid new federal and state safety investigations.
Officials received notice Friday from the Federal Railroad Administration and the Texas Department of Transportation that they were looking into incidents in February in which two rail operators entered a section of track without proper approval.
Officials said the delay could last several weeks, or possibly 30 days, but that it likely will not extend longer.
“Safety is always the most important factor,” Capital Metro President and CEO Fred Gilliam said in a statement. “The extra time will help us ensure all components of the system are ready. We look forward to offering a safe, reliable and high quality transportation option to Central Texas commuters.”
According to Capital Metro and Veolia officials, the two rail operators were testing the system and had traveled in rail cars north to Leander. They were required to get permission from a dispatcher and a field controller but instead began traveling in the reverse direction with approval from only the dispatcher.
Bill Le Jeune, senior director of rail operations for Capital Metro, said the operators realized their mistake after traveling about a third of a mile.
“They realized it very quick, shut it down, got their authority and proceeded on,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you move five foot or 500 foot, you basically have gone against the rules of operation.”
Veolia Transportation spokeswoman Erica Swerdlow said that the workers, who she would not identify, received “appropriate discipline” and retraining. She declined to say how they were sanctioned.
Officials at the agency had signaled in recent weeks that the start of service might be delayed in some way because of concerns over safety signals and a shortened window for training operators.
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March 2, 2009
Meet the engineer
Our engineer for this first semi-public ride on a Capital Metro train: Rumen Geshev.
Geshev, who works for the operating contractor hired by Capital Metro, Veolia Transportation, is 35 and hails originally from … Bulgaria. He had been an engineer of freight trains in Europe, Geshev said, before moving to the United States eight years ago.
He has worked on this Capital Metro/Veolia gig for six months, said.
Veolia has hired 12 engineers and 12 dispatchers.
1:44 p.m., we’re back at the North Operations and Maintenance Center. Other than the station announcements, which were thrown out of sync by our unusual route (we just heard that we were arriving downtown, in English and Spanish) it was a smooth, trouble-free ride.
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About face
A mellow male voice over the intercom just informed us, in English and Spanish, that we were leaving Leander station and needed a valid ticket. Not today.
Each of the line’s nine stations, by the way, will have a couple of automatic ticket dispensing machines. You can pay with cash or credit card, and the machines have English and Spanish writing. And the machines have an audio feature that allows a visually impaired customer to make a purchase. The audio likewise is in both English and Spanish. Not at the same time, fortunately.
It’s 1:10 p.m. and we’re heading the other way. Riding backwards in the northern end of the car. Disconcerting.
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We're in Leander
“Welcome to Leander!”
That was Leander mayor and Capital Metro board member John Cowman, coming through the train as we reached Leander station.
It’s 12:52, 22 miles in 39 minutes.
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Was that Cedar Park?
We’re passing through Cedar Park right now.
Emphasis on “passing through.” Cedar Park pulled out of the Capital Metro system a decade ago (which meant that people would no longer pay the agency’s 1 percent sales tax on purchases made there). Subsequently, the city of Cedar Park reinstituted that 1 percent sales tax for city needs, and there’s no longer room under the state’s 8.25 percent sales tax cap for a Capital Metro tax in Cedar Park.
Which means no Capital Metro bus service in Cedar Park, and no train station even though the train goes through town on its way to and from Leander.
Leander Mayor John Cowman, a Capital Metro board member, has said he hears Cedar Parkians will drive north to Leander and catch the train there rather than going south to Lakeline. They’re afraid, the story goes, that the trains will fill up in Leander and they’d be left stranded at Lakeline.
If all that’s the case, it will be tricky politically. People in Austin, who pay the Capital Metro sales tax, may have to stand there and look at Cedar Park citizens ride by on the train.
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When will it open?
March 30. Maybe.
As the Statesman reported last week, training of dispatchers and engineers got started about a month and a half late. And there’s a problem with “shunting,” which is a system of electronic impulses passed along the track to tell gates when to open and identify where trains are at all times.
Bill Le Jeune, Capital Metro’s rail manager, said the commuter train wheels are not as big as freight train wheels, which has the effect of muting the electronic pulses. The agency is adjusting the sensitivity of the equipment, and may install “inciters” to boost the signal.
The agency wants to see how that works, and how the expedited training goes, before deciding if it can start on March 30. That decision is at least a couple of weeks away.
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Talking about the train
Some information about the trains themselves:
Maker: Stadler Bussnang, a Swiss company
How many: Capital Metro bought six of them. Typically five will be in operation, with one held in reserve.
How many seats: 108, with standing room for 92 more. There will be hooks to hang six bicycles.
How are they powered: There are two diesel engines (400 HP, made by Cummins in the United States) in the middle of the 200-foot-long cars, with passenger compartments to either side. There’s a pilot house on each end, allowing the train to switch directions at each end with the engineer simply walking from one end to the other.
Bathrooms: None.
Food and drink: Not allowed.
Dogs: Only service animals
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All Aboard
12:10, and we’re about to pull out.
Leander Mayor John Cowman is aboard, taking his first ride on the train. He headed for the other half of the train, the part with the seats facing the other way.
“I want to ride backward,” Cowman said. Why? “Just to see how it feels.”
“All aboard!” rail manager Bill Le Jeune just yelled.
We’re at the North Operations and Maintenance Center, 10 miles from downtown and 22 miles from Leander.
Train pulling out. It’s 12:13 p.m.
Patrick Brouard, director of rail operations for Veolia Transportation, Capital Metro’s contractor that will be running the trains, said these Swiss-made, diesel-powered cars can go over 100 mph. However, the Federal Railroad Administration had directed that Capital Metro run them at no more than 60 mph.
At this moment, just out of the Ops Center, we’re still crawling along on a siding.
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January 22, 2009
Cap Metro releases tentative rail schedule
Capital Metro today announced a tentative schedule for its commuter rail line, scheduled to begin service March 30, that would have seven trips in from Leander in the morning and seven out from downtown in the afternoon.
There would be three trips in the reverse direction at both morning rush and evening rush. Capital Metro estimates that the 32-mile trip from Leander to downtown near the Hilton Austin hotel, with seven stations in between, will take 57 minutes.
The first inbound train in the morning would leave Leander at 5:40 a.m. Trains would leave every 30 minutes thereafter, with the last morning train leaving at 8:40 a.m. and arriving downtown at 9:37 a.m. The evening outbound trains would depart every 30 minutes between 3:45 p.m. and 6:45 p.m.
The three morning northbound trains would leave at 6:47 a.m., 7:17 a.m., and 7:47 a.m. The three evening inbound trains leave every 30 minutes starting at 4:40 p.m.
There will be no weekend service.
To see the entire proposed schedule, including when the train would arrive at the intermediate stations, go to http://capmetroblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/capital-metrorail-schedule-first-pass.html.
Capital Metro, in announcing the schedule, emphasized that it likely change to some degree based on real-time practice runs on the line scheduled to begin Feb. 12.
Capital Metro spokesman Adam Shaivitz said that the agency in the future intends to increase service to intervals shorter than 30 minutes.
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January 14, 2009
Working group gave thumbs up to downtown rail plan
Catching up here …
The Transit Working Group Monday gave its approval, on an 11-1 vote, to the 15.3-mile, $625 million downtown light rail plan. Technically, the board was approving it conceptually and saying in effect, now go ahead and figure out this might be paid for. The working group had done a similar thing several weeks agao with the proposed commuter rail line from downtown to Elgin.
In the emerging parlance of rail here, the city of Austin is the “sponsor” of the downtown rail project, not Capital Metro. That would mean, in theory, that the city would be in charge of finding the money and would make the decisions. Capital Metro, however, would be at the table in some meaningful way and might even end up operating such a line once it opened.
So, what does this mean in the larger scheme of things? Well, nothing definitive. In the end, what matters most with both rail plans is finding the money, and that will be no easy thing in either case. Capital Metro doesn’t have enough anymore to do all or even most of either rail project. So others — the city, the county, smaller cities, developers, Uncle Sam — will have to kick in.
But, if nothing else, the strong vote by this group of elected officials and civic leaders is a sign that political support for passenger rail is significant. The only negative vote was cast by former Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, a long-time opponent of rail projects. Even working group member Terry Bray, who has asked many skeptical questions during the working groups many meetings over the past year, voted yes.
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January 5, 2009
Brave new world of transit decision-making confounds
Figuring out significant mileposts in the passenger rail debate used to be easy around here. Capital Metro’s board would decide to do something (milepost) and then put it before voters (milepost), who would then say yes or no (milepost).
Then came the “transit working group.” This creature was invented a year ago, mostly by state Sen. Kirk Watson and Austin Mayor Will Wynn. It has some elected officials (including two who are leaving office about now) and some private citizens. What it doesn’t have is any sort of written charter or any actual authority.
Which makes it very difficult, watching the group’s weekly Monday morning meetings these days, to figure out when something significant might have happened. It seems the members are having the same problems.
The working group, originally formed in late 2007, initially existed, basically, to say yes to Wynn’s downtown streetcar/light rail plan and get it on the November 2008 ballot. But by the time the group went on hiatus last May, it had instead helped create a “decision tree” to evaluate any rail projects that came before. That implied, of course, that the working group would then give a thumbs up or thumbs down to such rail projects.
But if they do — and now the group is pondering both the Green Line to Elgin and Wynn’s light rail plan — what exactly does that mean?
These thoughts came to mind today while watching the transit working group hear a presentation from City of Austin officials on the 15.3-mile proposed light rail line from the Mueller development in Northeast Austin, to UT, to downtown, then across Lady Bird Lake and then east on Riverside Drive to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
The line, officials said, would cost about $625 million, which would have to come from multiple sources, and would take nine to 11 years to pull off once it is decided to do it.
But there’s the key: Where would that decision point be, and by whom? The working group, for its part, is thinking seriously of taking some sort of vote on the light rail plan next week. But that wouldn’t really trigger anything definitive, other than more study, and maybe another working group vote sometime.
The working group, technically, is a creature of the Capital Area Metropolitican Planning Organization board. Federal funds cannot be spent on a transportation project — and everyone dearly hopes that federal money will be available for this project, unlike Capital Metro’s Red Line — unless the CAMPO board says yes. So that would seem to be a milepost.
That milepost, if it occurs (and it probably will), likely will happen in spring 2010 when the CAMPO board approves the next version of its 25-year transportation plan. A project has to be in that plan to get federal funding. Of course, the CAMPO board could vote between now and then to amend the current 2030 plan, so that would be a milepost instead.
However, almost any funding plan for this rail project (or the Green Line for that matter) is sure to include either Capital Metro’s participation, which would trigger a public vote, or some sort of bond election, which would also require public approval. That is the real milepost, or at least the last one.
State Rep. Mike Krusee, a working group member, at today’s meeting said basically the milepost that matters to him is the economic stimulus package that Congress likely will past this month or next. The U.S. House transportation chairman, Krusee said, has said mass transit projects could get about $12 billion in the bill, which by the time it works its way down to Austin could mean $100 million or more. But only if there’s a project in the pipeline ready to receive that money.
“We shouldn’t be talking about six years, we should be talking about six months,” Krusee said. “We need to be moving on this as quickly as possible.”
That may or may not happen, and the mileposts for the time being may be hard to pinpoint. But the political momentum, based on what has been happening with the working group, other local officials and the changes happening in Washington, certainly seems to be moving in passenger rail’s direction.
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December 1, 2008
Public gets first chance to board Metro train Dec. 11
Been itching to climb aboard a Capital Metro train? Understandable, given that we’ve been talking about light rail/commuter rail around Austin since the mid-1980s.
Well, that first chance will come next week when Capital Metro and the Downtown Austin Alliance host a “hop ‘n shop” at Brush Square. Up to now Capital Metro has allowed only the media and few selected others to take an up-close gander at the red-and-silver-and white train cars.
Brush Square is bounded by Fourth, Fifth, Trinity and Neches streets, and it’s also the location of the new commuter train’s southern terminus. The station is on Fourth Street.
The event will be Dec. 11, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Mind you, you won’t be able to actually TRAVEL on the train. Testing is still underway for the March 30 opening of the 32-mile line between downtown and Leander, and Capital Metro can’t legally carry the public in the six trains it bought.
But you can get on a stationary vehicle, and there will be one there at Brush Square. There will also be a Dillo decorated in Christmas lights and other seasonal garb, along with music and merchant booths. The idea is to promote downtown shopping at Christmas, while simultaneously reminding people that Dillo routes and frequency have changed. And that in a few months there will be train service as well.
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October 1, 2008
Passenger rail opening date: March 30
Capital Metro trains will pull out of the station beginning March 30, the transit agency decided today.
Construction is just now underway on the stations at Kramer Lane and MoPac Boulevard, work is yet to begin on a key siding track at Kramer, and other stations and sidings are in various stages of readiness. And most significantly, officials said, the system of signals and computer controls on the 32-mile passenger line from Leander to downtown Austin won’t be fully ready until December of this year.
Final training of engineers and dispatchers can’t begin until that system is ready, and that will take at least six weeks, officials said.
“We can operate a system without two stations; What we can’t operate a system without is a (control) system and proper training,” said Doug Allen, an executive vice president at Capital Metro and its chief development officer, in recommending the March 30 opening date. That would allow, after the training period, another six weeks of “non-revenue service” when engineers run self-propelled, shiny red trains on the line without passengers aboard.
The Capital Metro board, meeting at a “retreat” to hear about the status of the passenger rail project, did not take a formal vote. But the six members present, through nods and brief words of assent (“Sounds good to me,” one board member said), gave the agency staff the go-ahead to plan for the March 30 opening.
Voters in November 2004 gave the agency authority to build the Leander line.
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September 16, 2008
Crash comments leave spokeswoman unemployed
The spokeswoman for Metrolink, the Southern California rail agency whose commuter train crashed into a freight train over the weekend, has resigned, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Denise Tyrell’s problem, it appears, was too much candor about the wreck, which killed 26 people and left about 130 other people injured, many of them critically. Tyrell, who had been a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based transit agency for seven years, was quoted the day after the accident saying this:
“We are deeply sorry and we are totally at a loss. At this moment we must acknowledge that it was a Metrolink engineer that made the error that caused yesterday’s accident.”
Tyrell was saying, in effect, that the 46-year-old engineer (who died in the crash) ran a red-light further up the link and thus ran head-on into a freight train that had authorization to be on the line at that time and place. There have been reports, based on an interview with a person who knew the engineer, that he was text-messaging shortly before the accident and might have missed the stop light because of that.
Tyrell’s admission of agency responsibility apparently angered investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board, who were only then beginning to analyze what happened. And her comment of course confirmed the agency’s liability. The Metrolink board, after an emergency meeting this weekend, pronounced Tyrell’s comments “premature.”
She resigned Monday.
In the Wall Street Journal article, Tyrell stands by what she said.
“The statement was and is accurate,” she said in an e-mail. “It was the right thing to do regardless of how ticked off it made the NTSB.”
The engineer, by the way, worked for Veolia Transportation, according to Agence France-Presse, which operates the train service for Metrolink. Veolia for some years had operated part of Capital Metro’s bus services, and is now the contractor charged with running Capital Metro’s existing freight service and the passenger line due to open in a few months.
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July 28, 2008
Denver offers cautionary tale for rail
As public officials, and the public they serve, consider further rail investments in Central Texas, the burgeoning rail budget in Denver is worth considering.
Last week, consultants hired by the City of Austin offered a 15.3 mile streetcar proposal that they said would cost $550 million to $614 million to build. They didn’t say in what year that spending might occur.
Th date becomes relevant when one considers what is going on in Denver. In 2004, voters there approved raising their sales tax 0.4 percent to pay for a $4.7 billion “FasTracks” program of light rail. But according to a July 18 article in the Rocky Mountain News, that tab has risen to $6.1 billion and likely will increase again.
Construction costs in Colorado, according to the article, have gone up more than 60 percent since 2004, a figure comparable to those released by the Texas Department of Transportation in recent months.
The changing tab is causing rail leaders there to consider, according to the article, three unpalatable options: build the rail expansions slower, thus allowing more time for the sales tax to raise money; build shorter rail lines; or ask voters to increase the sales tax again.
“We’re dealing with that reality, and I am going to have to adapt the program to fiscal reality,” said Cal Marsella, the manager of RTD, the transit agency in the Front Range area.
Just a couple of years ago, Marsella was in Austin confidently and proudly recounting how his area had passed FasTracks.
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July 16, 2008
Commuter rail manager leaving Cap Metro months before line opens
Rich Krisak, who has run Capital Metro’s commuter rail and freight rail program for the past three years, is leaving the agency to take a similar position with Atlanta’s transit agency. His departure, set to occur July 25, comes just months before Capital Metro opens its first passenger rail line.
Krisak, pictured at right, will be replaced on an interim basis by Bill LeJeune, who had been the agency’s freight rail manager before Krisak arrived and served under him.
Krisak will be assistant general manager of rail operations at the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transportation Authority. According to an e-mail he sent Wednesday to Capital Metro executives, he will be in charge of the agency’s rail operations. MARTA’s passenger rail, Krisak said in the e-mail, has 250,000 boardings a day. The system has four operating train lines.
Capital Metro’s sole line from Leander to downtown Austin, when it opens in a few months, is expected to have about 2,000 boardings a day initially.
“There are few rail systems in the U.S. with this size of impact on a region and it is an opportunity that I find extremely challenging,” Krisak’s e-mail said. “Atlanta also puts me much closer to my family. Decisions of this magnitude are rarely made on one sole factor and this one is no exception. My decision was not an easy one but when weighing both personal and professional aspirations it was an opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up.”
Krisak will be the second top Capital Metro official to leave for MARTA in the past four months. Dwight Ferrell, Capital Metro’s second in command as executive vice president and chief operating officer, left March 31 to become deputy general manager and chief operating officer with MARTA.
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May 13, 2008
Capital Metro considers zoned fares for commuter rail
Capital Metro officials are considering “zoned” prices for commuter rail.
Basically, the way this would work is that the farther you go, the more you pay. Capital Metro board chairman Lee Walker said Monday at a board meeting that if for no other reason that “psychological equity” it makes sense to have zoned prices.
But doing it may not be easy. The problem is that Capital Metro has open platforms and will have no conductors on its trains. This is similar to light rail systems, which typically don’t have zoned prices. But light rail systems most of the time also don’t have a 32-mile long run for a line like Capital Metro’s commuter rail.
Some systems, like Washington, D.C., have “closed” platforms. You buy a card with a certain amount of money programmed into it, even $20, then you pass it through an electronic reader at a turnstile. That records where you got on. Then, when you leave the train, you put that card through another turnstile on the way out, which notes where you got off.
Your card is thus charged an amount commensurate to the distance travelled, and you get it back with that amount debited. Here, however, there will be no turnstiles, no fences.
The way the commuter line will work, when it opens later this year or early in 2009, is that you will simply walk up to the platform, put your money in a machine and get a ticket. Then, when the train comes, you’ll board. Unlike on a bus, where you pass by the driver and pay right in front of him or her, the train driver (pilot? engineer?) will be in a closed compartment and won’t be involved with passengers.
Maybe, now and again, a Capital Metro employee will be on board to check and make sure people have tickets. But by and large the honor system will be at work.
Unless the board decides on zoned prices, then someone who gets on in Leander and goes 32 miles to downtown Austin would pay no more than a person who gets on at the last stop, Saltillo Plaza near Fifth and Comal streets, and travels 0.8 of a mile.
“My instinct would be to go with zoned prices,” Walker said. Board members Brewster McCracken and John Cowman liked the idea too, they said Monday.
Randy Hume, Capital Metro’s chief financial officer, said the way it might work is that people getting on at the two stops farthest out, Leander and Lakeline Mall, might pay the full suggested price of $1.50, then people at the seven stops further in would pay a lower rate comparable to a regular bus price. That’s 50 cents now, but under a fare increase plan the board is discussing that base bus fare would go up to 75 cents in 2009.
But there are problems with all this. What if you’re going the other way? Let’s say two people get on at the downtown stop near Fourth and Trinity streets, one of them going all the way to Leander and the other just to the MLK Jr. Boulevard three miles into the route. Remember, there’s no conductor.
So, what do you charge the Leander guy? $1.50 or 75 cents? And how do you ensure that he pays the right amount? It all gets back to trusting folks to pay the right amount, along with that occasional checking and, perhaps, some sort of penalty for violators.
When you come down to it, two zones might not be enough. A person going from downtown to the Howard Lane/MoPac stop will be travelling a whole lot farther than the person going only to Saltillo Plaza. There might be a psychological equity gap there as well.
Up to now, of course, Capital Metro hasn’t worried much about this distance thing. People on express bus routes (from Leander, far Northeast Austin and Oak Hill to downtown) do pay double, a dollar versus 50 cents. But there are plenty of very long regular bus trips where people pay the same amount of folks much closer in who take short trips.
The Capital Metro board is just beginning to discuss all this. But they’ll have to settle it soon. A specially formed fare committee of local elected officials must approve all fare changes. And in this case, since there is no fare at all set now for commuter rail, the fare would be zero unless that committee acts between now and opening day.
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May 1, 2008
Wit alert
I don’t know who “Jojo” is, or if that is his/her real name. But I nominate him/her for Most Clever Comment on ShortCuts since I started it several months ago. Jojo, reacting to a posting about Austin City Council Member Brewster McCracken’s “bucket list” of possible ways to finance light rail, had a novel alternative suggestion:
“The property sales tax capture is intriguing. I propose a water slide running from the top of the Austonian out to the airport. Every city that has built a water park has seen the property values skyrocket around it. Water could be drawn for free from Bird Lake. This has proven effective and efficient with the Comal and Schlitterbahn. Think of it; cool refreshing, fast and saves bathing time for the urbanist on the go.”
My only concern: conflict with the Capitol view corridor. A water slide beginning some 600 feet in the air and then heading southeast toward Austin-Bergstrom International Airport no doubt would obstruct views from Travis Heights, East Riverside and perhaps even Montopolis.
Perhaps the trough and supporting poles could be plexiglas and thus see-through. Details still have to be worked out, including the cost estimate. The early back of the envelope figures have it costing somewhere between 65 cents and $1.8 million a mile.
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April 28, 2008
Bucket list
Austin City Council Member Brewster McCracken, in talking up the proposed light rail (or streetcar/ultra light rail) line in Central Austin, has been discussing how the money for it could be drawn from 15 “buckets” of money.
Today, at the weekly meeting of the Transit Working Group that is trying to figure all this out, moderator and state senator Kirk Watson shared with everyone a distillation he’s prepared of McCracken’s buckets of dough, based on a list he got from McCracken Then he went through it with the committee of politicians and civic leaders.
As Watson was at pains to point out, some of the buckets draw from the same well — property taxes or sales taxes or parking fees. And none of it is “free” money. If you do “value capture” of increased property taxes for development along the route, then you can’t spend that same money on other things. And if Capital Metro puts 15 percent of sales tax revenue into a light rail line, or into operating one, it can’t spend that money on paratransit or higher salaries for bus drivers or more fuel-efficient Dillos.
McCracken said, well, in some cases you wouldn’t get that extra property tax money without building the rail line. Maybe so. But those 30-year-old shopping centers along Riverside Drive, sad sacky as many of them are, probably will continue to increase in value anyway through the years. Some of those extra property taxes would have come in regardless.
Anyway, here’s the bucket list:
- Capital Metro’s budget: the sales taxes mentioned above.
- Tax increment financing, or value-capture: involves creating a special district along a rail route, and then devoting all or some of the increased property or sales taxes from that area to the rail project.
- Public improvement district: the city would designate a district around the rail line, and charge an “assessment” to property owners within that district. Which sounds a whole lot like a property tax.
- Toll roads: Some of the “profits” to come from toll roads could be diverted to rail costs. Uh-huh.
- Airport: Airport profits (from parking, concessions at the terminal) could be used to build the part of the rail line on airport property.
- Parking enterprise: Create a sort of city-run parking business, build garages and then use the profits from this (if there are some after paying off debt for the garages) on rail.
- Rail revenue: Fares for people riding the train. Again, this would come out of the budget of whatever entity (Capital Metro?) is operating the trains. But it pretty much makes sense to do so.
- Federal funds: For rail, at least, these have become very hard to get.
- General obligation bonds: These are the kind you have to get voter approval for, and that come with a property tax increase to pay off the debt. And McCracken said this rail line could be done without raising taxes. Should this be on his list in that case?
- Hotel/motel taxes: The city collects these and uses them for various purposes. Rail could be another one.
- Austin Energy transfer: The city already supplements its general fund spending with profits from the electric utility. Maybe the lucrative utility could be tapped for rail as well.
- Development revenue: Watson and McCracken didn’t explain this one. But the city charges developers fees, so this may be what’s in this bucket.
- Parking franchise: The city charges private parking lot owners at the airport fees for the right to run their franchises. McCracken said such fees could go into the kitty for rail.
- Water/wastewater profits: See Austin Energy above.
- Road capital improvement projects: Austinites pay a transportation fee, money that is used to repair city roads. There really isn’t a surplus here, but, hey, throw it on the list.
Task force members suggested the “public/private partnerships” should go on the list, and Watson added it. But private companies tend to only get involved in things that make money, which rail doesn’t, so it’s not clear what might be involved here.
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April 25, 2008
Jim Skaggs live chat
Earlier we chatted with Brewster McCracken about his light rail plan, and you can read it here. At 2 p.m. we hosted a chat with Jim Skaggs, who opposes the plan. You can replay the chat with Skaggs below.
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Live chat with Brewster McCracken
This is Ben Wear. Austin City Council Member Brewster McCracken held a live chat with statesman.com readers at 10:30 a.m. Friday on the light rail proposal that he and Austin Mayor Will Wynn are pushing. You can replay the chat below.
Come back at 2 p.m. if you want to quiz rail skeptic Jim Skaggs.
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April 22, 2008
ROMA to recommend 14 miles of light rail in Central Austin
A consultant hired by the city is recommending a 14-mile light rail or “ultra-light rail” system for Central Austin, not streetcars as proposed earlier by Capital Metro, according to Austin City Council Member Brewster McCracken. The system would run from the airport to downtown, through the University of Texas and then east to the emerging Mueller development.
The route is essentially the same one that McCracken and Austin Mayor Will Wynn have been talking about over the past six months or so. The proposal comes as a “transit task force” formed by Wynn and state Sen. Kirk Watson moves into the final stages of creating a “decision tree” to analyze rail proposals.
That group would almost surely analyze this proposal. But it is not clear if such an examination could occur quickly enough for the light rail proposal — assuming it passes muster with the Wynn-Watson group and then the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization — to be put before voters in November. Wynn has said he would like to have a rail election this year.
McCracken, at least, believes that the proposal can quickly make it through that gauntlet to a public vote in November.
“Yes, I think that’s likely,” he said. Although the city, in McCracken’s concept of the situation, would take the lead in building the line, Capital Metro probably would run it.
“I don’t see that anyone else knows how to do that,” McCracken said.
The recommendation, to be released this evening at a community forum, will not include a specific cost estimate, McCracken said. However, McCracken said that the cost would be somewhere in the broad range between $5 million a mile and $30 million a mile, depending mostly on how many underground utility lines would have to be relocated for such a project. That would put it between $70 million and $420 million.
Those figures, he said, likely do not include the cost of the cars.
The diesel-powered cars Capital Metro has purchased for its “red line” commuter service from Leander to downtown, set to open in a few months, cost about $6 million apiece and the agency bought six of them to start with. But light rail cars typically cost less than that.
According to McCracken, the recommendation from the ROMA Design Group will propose putting double tracks (allowing travel in both directions simultaneously) from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and then heading west on Riverside Drive. The route would turn north at Congress Avenue (although there could be a spur to the parking-poor Long Center, McCracken said), cross the Ann Richards Bridge and then go through downtown either on Congress or San Jacinto Street.
Then it would pass through UT, turning east at Dean Keeton Street and going along Manor Road to the Mueller development.
A major criticism of the light rail plan that voters rejected in 2000 was that it would take street lanes away from car traffic. Not so, in this case, McCracken said, although the tracks would be in “dedicated lanes” segregated from cars. The space for the tracks, McCracken said, would come from available right of way on Riverside east of Interstate 35. Then, downtown, the tracks would run on pavement currently occupied by parked cars, he said.
The tracks, McCracken said, might take two lanes from the bridge over Lady Bird Lake, he said, although alternatively it could use the bridge space now taken up by sidewalks. In that case, a sidewalk alternative bridge, such as was added to the South First Street bridge, would continue pedestrian and bicycle access across the lake on Congress.
Light rail, as opposed to the commuter rail opening late this year or early next year, is generally powered by electricity and has a system or overhead wires that connect to devices on the top of the cars called “catenaries.” Light rail cars run faster than streetcars, but at speeds comparable to the car traffic around them.
Although having dedicated lanes would spare the light rail cars from delay associated with car traffic, they would still have to stop for red lights on city streets.
Capital Metro officials have said they have no money left in the kitty to pay for more rail. So where would the money come from to build this?
McCracken said that city officials tonight will discuss a funding scenario that includes taking about a quarter of Capital Metro’s 1 percent sales tax (although the agency has indicated it needs it all for current bus and rail expenses), contributions from the city and other local government, from property taxes likely to be generated by new development along the line and potentially from airport bonds.
“We think it is possible to build this with no new taxes,” McCracken said.
Details will be revealed at the forum this evening, which begins at 5:30 p.m. at the Town Lake Center Building, 712 Barton Springs Road.
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March 10, 2008
UT's take on streetcars
OK, I’m a bit late on this. Like, a week.
But it’s still worth reporting some of what University of Texas Vice President Pat Clubb and Associate Vice President Bob Harkins had to say last week about a potential streetcar system. They spoke to Austin Mayor Will Wynn’s transit task force.
In short:
** They threw water on the idea that a streetcar connection between UT and downtown Austin would be a much-used link. What they want are slick, quick connections to three things: the Pickle Research Campus, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (which would go through downtown, of course) and the commuter rail line that will be running essentially north-south through East Austin about a mile away from the campus.
“We have had the School of Engineering come and ask us to build a tunnel to the Pickle Campus,” Clubb said. “Seriously.”
(T’aint happening, of course. That would be VERY expensive. Just ask Bostonites about the Big Dig.)
** The campus has about 50,000 students, 17,000 staff and faculty and about 3,000 visitors on a daily basis. And 15,000 parking spaces. You can do the math there.
“I fear the day when all the students wake up and decide to drive to campus that day,” Harkins said. The reality is that many live on campus or within walking or biking distance of campus, and thousands more take the shuttle buses. About 11 percent of Capital Metro’s 94,000 rides a day on its fixed route services are UT-related. And the shuttle system averages 13,400 rides a day over 365 days, more than that during regular school days when you consider that weekends and summer have lower ridership.
** UT isn’t real happy that the proposed streetcar line would go out Manor Road to the Mueller development, while the commuter rail stop would be a few blocks south on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. So anyone coming in on the commuter rail line to go to UT, rather than being able to then catch a train into UT at the MLK stop, would instead have to take a bus.
So why is the proposed streetcar line on Manor instead of MLK? Two reasons: An MLK line would have to cross Interstate 35 on an overpass, which is harder to do from an engineering perspective than the underpass at Dean Keeton Street (which then feeds into Manor a couple of blocks later). And a streetcar line from downtown that goes east on MLK would basically just graze the south end of the campus, as opposed to one cutting through the campus on San Jacinto Street and then heading east on Dean Keeton.
OK, then why is the commuter stop at MLK then? Why not just put it at Manor?
Answer: transit-oriented development. There is land aplenty around the railroad at MLK for development, which increasingly is the prime reason-to-be for the train line (since it won’t carry enough people to make much of a dent in traffic).
Possible solution: stops at MLK and Manor.
We’ll see with all this. When UT speaks in Austin, people usually listen.
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March 6, 2008
Wynn rail group meeting canceled
Those of you anxious for your Monday morning fix of transit talk will have to find another drug next week. Austin Mayor Will Wynn’s transit task force meeting for March 10 has been canceled.
Don’t worry, though, the weekly 9 a.m. meetings at Austin City Council chambers will resume a week later on March 17.
The group of a dozen or so, which includes some elected officials like Wynn, Council Member Brewster McCracken and state Rep. Mike Krusee, as well as citizen members, has been meeting since December. The goal is to somehow cobble together a rail plan, and an accompanying funding plan, for the next phase of passenger rail after Capital Metro opens a commuter line to Leander in the next year. In theory, all of this could lead to some sort of rail election as soon as November, though many doubt that it can happen that soon.
Wynn had indicated at the end of this week’s meeting that somehow a workable subset of the task force could show up March 10, even though that day falls during spring break for most schools and colleges here. That group on hand would not have included state Sen. Kirk Watson, however, who formed the task force to begin with and is playing a key role. Watson said he has a family trip planned.
Whether or not others have flaked in the 72 hours since is unclear. But the meeting is off.
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February 25, 2008
A new, big pink wrinkle in rail debate
By now, three months into their regular Monday morning meetings, it’s become pretty clear that the luminaries on Austin Mayor Will Wynn’s passenger rail task force are mostly of one mind: Central Texas needs rail, somehow. The two conspicuous exceptions on the board of about a dozen are Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty and attorney and civic leader Terry Bray, but their reservations typically are met with confident, politely dismissive rebuttals.
The rationale, as has become more typical lately in this endless debate, is not so much about mobility as it is economic development and fuzzier things like quality of life and notions of demographic equity. Nobody seems to be ready to predict a day when some double-digit percentage of us would regularly ditch our cars for a seat on the train.
Today was more of the same. But there was at least one fresh piece of rhetoric, this one from Fritz Steiner, dean of the University of Texas School of Architecture. His riff basically took off from the idea that most Central Texans, perhaps including the rail supporters sharing the dais at Austin City Hall with him, likely have trouble envisioning an Austin area radically different than the one we see around us. The corollary, for transportation, is that it would be hard to envision a Southwestern city like this one that isn’t dominated by people driving cars.
Look far ahead, Steiner urged Wynn and the others, 50 years or a 100 years or more into the future, to a time when there really might be a genuine scarcity of hydrocarbons. Think about what that Austin might need to be, and what political leadership should be doing now with that in mind. And for an example of that kind of thinking, Steiner looked back.
Ponder what kind of imagination and bravado it took, Steiner said, for the leaders who in the 1880s thought it made sense to plop the Capitol down in Austin, to build a 300-foot-tall granite building wider than a football field in a backwater capital of a frontier state. I looked it up later, and in 1880 Austin had 11,003 people. For comparison, that’s like someone deciding to build the Capitol in present-day Leander.
“We need to look ahead with a vision that’s that compelling,” Steiner said.
Intriguing point.
Now, that doesn’t magically sweep away all the practical, down-to-earth considerations of lack of money and the hundreds of thousands of cars stuck in rush-hour traffic each day. Or the fact that rail costs a lot to build and moves relatively few people. Maybe there’s a good reason that the area’s political leadership has never been able to quite crack the Rubik’s cube of rail policy here. But Steiner’s point — dream big, dream freely — is interesting.
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February 11, 2008
Firm takes a free shot at estimating airport rail cost
Take this for what it’s worth. And given that Parsons Brinckerhoff Americas, Inc., did it for free, its worth at this point is officially zero.
But the engineering firm today released a “preliminary in-house analysis of the feasibility” of a passenger rail line between downtown Austin and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. The firm, which has done similar analyses for the city before on the downtown streetcar system, decided to see if such a line could be done, for how much and what the various challenges might be.
So as not to bury the lead (too far): Yes, it can be done, 8.6 miles worth of double tracking on Congress Avenue, Riverside Drive and alongside Texas 71. For $302 million, an estimate that Parsons Brinckerhoff vice president Robert Spillar said includes about 30 percent contigency.
By comparison, Capital Metro has an estimate of $210 million for running double track on about 6.5 miles to build a streetcar line between downtown and the Mueller development in East Austin.
Parsons Brinckerhoff did the analysis after Austin Mayor Will Wynn and Council Member Brewster McCracken suggested last fall that a line from downtown to the airport along Riverside might be a good idea.
Spillar’s 11-page report (plus some maps and other exhibits) makes it clear that this is only a quick look, that full-fledged engineering would be necessary to move the ball forward. But among the challenges that Spillar notes:
The line, starting at 4th Street and Congress, would have to go over the Congress Avenue-Ann Richards Bridge. Embedding the track in the lanes of the 1980 bridge might or might not be advisable, the report says, a decision that would be subject to deeper research. Otherwise, the track might have to sit on the pavement, which could render those lanes unusable.
The route would have to cross three creek bridges, requiring reinforcement or additions, and Interstate 35. The report recommends that the tracks be routed into the middle of Riverside at Travis Heights Boulevard, with lanes added to the outside of Riverside from there all the way to Texas 71. That would require expanding the Riverside overpass over I-35.
The line would have to cross Texas 71 at Riverside and then pass over U.S. 183 (just west of the airport) on a brand-new bridge structure. And given that TxDOT is totally redesigning the nearby interchange of Texas 71 and U.S. 183, that could present problems if one project is planned without close coordination with the other, the report says.
Funding, which is really what it’s all about. Spillar suggests various ways that auxiliary airport revenue — parking, rental car taxes, development of spare airport property — might be tapped to help pay for the rail project. He doesn’t offer specific revenue amounts that might be gathered in this manner.
Spillar made the report to the task force chaired by Wynn that is looking at possible passenger rail projects in Central Texas. Panel member and state Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Williamson County, supports passenger rail. But he suggested that it might be wiser to use Capital Metro’s existing rail line in East Austin (which connects to downtown) as a starting point, taking off from that line and going essentially straight south across the river to the airport.
Again, this is preliminary, just food for thought. But fairly tasty.
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January 24, 2008
The price is right for commuter rail stop
Zero.
That’s what Capital Metro will pay the Texas Department of Transportation for the use of 7.3 acres on the corner of a major highway and a major city street. Not bad. Who says TxDOT doesn’t have a heart?
The Capital Metro board, not one to look a gift agency in the mouth, voted Wednesday to approve a “multiple use agreement” with TxDOT for the parcel on the southwest corner of the Loop 1 tollway and Howard Lane. Capital Metro needed the land so it can put a station there for commuter rail, which will open late in the year from Leander to downtown Austin.
Two earlier station locations nearby hadn’t worked out, the most recent one because residents living nearby were up in arms about it. They like this new location however. The parking lot that Capital Metro will build, with more than 200 spaces, will have an entrance from Howard Lane just west of the tollway.
Capital Metro, meanwhile, is trying to acquire an adjacent 6.5 acres or so that belongs to the Robinson Ranch, an acquisition that will allow them to slightly reroute the existing tracks there and perhaps sell off the land later for so-called “transit-oriented development.” The Robinsons, we’re led to believe, don’t intend to give their land away.
To be complete about this, the TxDOT land will remain free only as long as Capital Metro is using it just for the train station and parking lot, officials said. Should Capital Metro decide to have “vertical development” there — meaning leasing it for commercial or residential uses alongside the station, then it would have to negotiate again with TxDOT, which will still own the land.
Capital Metro board chairman Lee Walker, a former Dell Inc. president who taught in the University of Texas business school at one time, suggested to staff members Wednesday that perhaps now would be the time to work out some sort of option price for TxDOT’s land. The price will only get higher over time, he said.
Capital Metro capital projects director John Hodges told Walker that sounded like a good idea and that he’ll look into that possibility.
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January 16, 2008
Howard Lane station plan revealed
Capital Metro officials this evening will unveil to Hidden Estates and Ashton Woods residents what they can expect in the Howard Lane commuter rail station. People in those North Austin neighborhoods had fought plans to put the station along Loop 1 tollway’s access road, just south of Howard Lane.
In the wake of all that — including some intervention by Austin City Council members — the transit agency worked with the Texas Department of Transportation to put the station around the corner on Howard. Negotiations are still ongoing with TxDOT for the land, and the agency is also talking to owners of the Robinson Ranch for some adjoining land. But assuming all of that works out as Capital Metro thinks it will, this is what the station would look like:
Under this plan, the existing path of the rail line in that curving section of the railroad would actually be moved to the southwest. Capital Metro needs the Robinson Ranch land to move the track.
Given the ongoing land talks and that Capital Metro expects to open the Leander-to-downtown-Austin line in nine or ten months — and that actually moving the tracks and building the station and parking lot will take some time — agency spokesman Adam Shaivitz acknowledged today that the line might have to open before the Howard Lane station is ready.
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January 8, 2008
Elgin is the new Leander is the new Round Rock
Austin Mayor Will Wynn’s passenger rail task force resumed their regular, weekly (or as close to weekly as possible) meetings Monday morning as they attempt what might be a quixotic effort to figure out Central Texas passenger rail in the next four or five months.
Wynn, you might recall, wants to figure out enough to get some sort of passenger rail initiative before area voters in the November election. His stated logic is that the presidential election, particularly one with new faces on both the Democratic and Republican sides, will bring out hundreds of thousands of voters. Better to have that huge throng making the decision than the 50,000 or so who might turn out for a city council and statewide constitutional amendment election later.
The opposing argument is that you really don’t want to rush something ill-considered (and thus more open to attack electorally) onto the ballot. In any case, Wynn’s committee (which includes some big-name local politicians and civic leaders) began meeting in early December, then took off for the holidays until Monday.
On the agenda this week: presentations by the cities of Leander and Elgin. One (Leander) has rail coming to it; the other (Elgin) would like for that to happen.
John Cowman, the effervescent and quirky Leander mayor, spent the first part of his presentation proudly displaying the city’s logo, which shows a river flowing out of hills with a huge star resting on the hills. “The Rising Star of Central Texas,” Cowman said of his town of 27,000, which he boldly predicted would reach 260,000 at some undefined point in the future.
Cowman said he’d heard of one Texas city, which he declined to name, which hired consultants for $45,000 to produce a logo. “They came up with the letter ‘G,’ ” Cowman said. “And I didn’t even like the font.”
So, Cowman said, he advertised that the city would pay someone $45 for ideas and got several dozen renderings, some of them in crayon. The rising star motif resulted.
“For the record,” Wynn interjected, “we didn’t spend any money at all to come up with ‘Keep Austin Weird.’ “
The point of all this, to the extent that there was one, was that Leander has designed a 2,300-acre “transit-oriented development” that would center around both the coming passenger rail line and the 183-A toll road that opened up last year. Leander is popping, at least on paper, and Cowman, who also serves on the Capital Metro board, said the agency’s coming commuter line is a big part of the excitement. The town is trying to build a different kind of suburban hotbed, one that would be denser and pay more attention to quality of life than is typical.
Elgin leaders, following Cowman to the podium, allowed as how they’d like to do the same thing. But time could be running short for them.
Elgin, you see, is not in Capital Metro’s service area. Which means that when you buy something in Elgin, there is no 1 percent sales tax going to Capital Metro. There is, however, that same 1 percent going half and half to Bastrop County and to an economic development corporation. Which means, unless the county and the city of Elgin were willing to ask voters to redirect that tax to Capital Metro (and they really aren’t), that the town can’t join the Capital Metro family of communities.
Elgin wants rail anyway, somehow. Capital Metro’s rail line, the same one that goes from Central Austin northwest to Leander and beyond, also juts northeast out of Austin and passes through Manor and Elgin. That 19-mile run could be a logical next step after the 32-mile Leander line opens late this year.
But Capital Metro has no financial capacity to build more rail. And Elgin leaders, already beset with an increasing number of traditional subdivisions which cost a city more to serve than they bring in in tax revenue, say that within 18 months to two years that land available for denser transit-oriented development might instead be developed in the old way. Without a solid rail plan, they said, developers will pull the sprawl trigger.
What to do? Tap some of that economic development money? Harvest some property tax money from increasing land values out that way? Get some of it from developers? Ask Austin and Manor and Travis County to kick in? And what about streetcars in Central Austin, and that proposed line from Georgetown to San Antonio? And who will run all of this if Capital Metro is so strapped?
Wynn’s committee is only beginning to ponder these extraordinarily difficult questions. Can they get to some sort of consensus and get something before the voters in November? Don’t bet the house on it.
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December 17, 2007
Yes, that's a Metro train. No, service hasn't begun.
Passenger trains in Austin, after 22 years of debate, an election and something like $100 million (and counting) spent, will begin running this evening. Well, one of them will. However, the only people on board will be transit workers.
This is just testing, but a transportation milestone for Central Texas nonetheless.
The transit agency this evening (and overnight) will begin testing the first of two diesel commuter trains it has on hand and assembled. Runs should begin about 8 p.m. and be done by 5 a.m. between the Capital Metro maintenance facility at Burnet Road and U.S. 183 and the intersection of Howard Lane and the Loop 1 tollway. Testing, at least this first flurry, should run for the next three nights.
The car will be tested for now at no more than 20 mph, about a third of the speed they will run in some sections of the Leander-to-downtown-Austin line when it opens next fall. The train will be blowing its horn at road crossings. However, the agency is installing special gates with four arms at most road crossings, which are virtually impossible for a car to pass. Eventually, this will allow the train operators to pass such intersections without blowing the train horn.
The agency is buying six cars for more than $35 million (on time payments). Each car is 138 feet long, with 117 high-backed cloth seats, built by Stadleer Bussnang, a Swiss company. The cars are being manufactured in Switzerland, where they undergo on-track testing and then are broken down in three pieces for shipment to the United States.
The first two cars arrived several weeks ago and were assembled at the Burnet Road facility. Two more cars arrived in the past few days, again, in pieces for assembly. Agency officials have said in the past that they intend to give each vehicle about 1,000 miles of testing on the actual rails. The full commuter line will run 32 miles, with nine stations.
The other two cars should arrive by the end of January, the agency says.
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December 10, 2007
Capital Metro lays it out online
Thank you, Capital Metro.
Starting with this month’s board meeting, the transit agency has begun posting online not only the agenda but also the complete package of back-up materials.
What the agency does — or, more accurately, doesn’t — put out in the run-up to meetings has been a point of contention off and on for the past couple of years between the agency and the American-Statesman’s transportation reporter. Which would be me.
The agenda items tend to be terse to the point of incomprehensibility, just two to four words. I often had to call and ask what a given item was about. And even in the back-up materials, the agency had a policy of not putting out which company won a bid and for how much until AFTER the board had voted. Kind of hard to give input as a member of the public in that circumstance.
But give credit where its due. The agendas will still be terse. But right there next to the agenda on the agency’s Web site you can now see “agenda packet,” which has a full page or more on each item.
The board meets this Wednesday, first at 2 p.m. for a nonvoting work session, followed at 4 p.m. by the official board meeting, all of this taking place at Capital Metro headquarters, 2910 E. Fifth St. If you want to see what business the board is up to, go to www.capmetro.org/news/news_agenda.asp and you’ll see links for the agenda and the agenda package.
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DART makes a slight adjustment
I wrote a lengthy article in your print Statesman a couple of weeks ago about Capital Metro’s way of counting what its commuter rail project is costing. They have it right on budget at $90 million. But if you count a number of closely related expenditures — like park-and-ride lots at stations, transit-oriented development costs and “commuter rail startup” expenses, for instance — the number goes up about $30 million.
Well, Capital Metro’s Dallas cousin has it all over our little old transit agency. According to an article last week in the Dallas Morning News, Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s “Orange Line” will cost about $900 million more than previously estimated. That’s about a 90 percent increase on the previous estimate of $988 million.
The problem, officials told the Morning News, is India and China, the emerging all-purpose fallback villains when a project experiences an overrun. Both countries are experiencing furious development (or so I’ve read; the Statesman has not sent me there to check out Chinese tollways). Presumably as a result of this spike in demand for base materials like steel and concrete, highway construction costs, according to TxDOT, increased about 125 percent between 2002 and 2006. Rail uses that stuff as well, of course.
Seeing all this, DART decided to take a second look at the Orange Line estimates. The answer wasn’t good.
The Orange Line would go from downtown Dallas out through Irving to DFW Airport. DART already operates a red and a blue line, both of them running north/south, and construction has begun on the green line to Carrollton northwest of Dallas.
To deal with this sudden dose of fiscal reality, DART plans to delay some construction and make cutbacks in other ways, including on other planned lines in the Dallas area.
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December 5, 2007
Testing, testing . . . not yet
The e-mail came into StatesmanWatch this week, complaining of the ongoing testing of Capital Metro’s new diesel commuter trains. The North Austin woman said one of them barreled by her neighborhood and that even from a third of a mile away the vibrations and noise were startling, Much louder than the freights that run on the line.
Just one problem: The commuter trains, the first two of which arrived a few weeks ago in three pieces each for reassembly and then testing, have not yet left the Capital Metro maintenance facility near Burnet Road and U.S. 183. According to Capital Metro spokesman Adam Shaivitz, the trains are undergoing “static testing,” and won’t be moving out on the rails in North Austin until later this month.
He said, by the way, that the seeming slippage from November to December does not threaten the scheduled Fall 2008 opening of the 32-mile line from downtown Austin to Leander. The other four cars should show up in Austin this month and next, Shaivitz said, which is a few months ahead of schedule. Shaivitz said there would be plenty of time to do the 1,000 miles or so of testing for each of the six vehicles.
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November 26, 2007
Two more years: Walker, Trevino reappointed by CAMPO
While the rest of us were thinking about turkey and rediscovering temperatures below 50 degrees last week, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board was busy reappointing Lee Walker and John Trevino to the Capital Metro board of directors.
A subcommittee of the CAMPO board (only certain members can vote on this under state law) decided 6-1 on Nov. 19 to give Walker, the Capital Metro chairman since 1997, and Trevino a sixth two-year term. The “no” vote, not surprisingly, came from Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty. Daugherty, as many will know, first came to prominence politically in the mid-1990s campaigning to cut in half the transit agency’s 1 percent sale tax. He said that money would best be used on roads, that the agency could run a bus operation on a half-cent sales tax.
Of course, that horse has since left the barn. The agency has spent well above $100 million (see story about this in Sunday’s Statesman) building a rail line from Leander to downtown Austin that is scheduled to open next fall. And the operating expenses for this line will run at least $10 million a year. The agency now says that even the 1 percent sales tax won’t be enough to run things, starting in about four years.
Walker and Trevino would have had to leave the board in 2005, but the Legislature repealed a law limiting them to eight years on the Capital Metro board. Walker, in particular, keeps talking about leaving the board, but then keeps on keeping on.
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November 9, 2007
Seattle rejects rail & roads proposal
Seattle-area voters Tuesday rejected a $47 billion “roads and transit” initiative that, by raising sales taxes and fees would have built 186 lane-miles of highways, a bridge and about 50 miles of light rail over the next half century.
Puget Sound commentators in the wake of the 55 percent to 45 percent rejection said that the measure’s base political strategy — give road warriors and transit crusaders both something to vote for — instead worked the other way. Both sides had something to oppose. Or maybe people just didn’t want to pay more taxes.
At any rate, the vote leaves rail plans dangling. The Seattle-Tacoma area already has lightly used commuter trains running to and from Seattle north and south. And a light rail line from downtown Seattle to the Seattle-Tacoma airport is under construction and should open in 2009. That looks to be it for quite a while, however.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Passenger rail, This and that
October 25, 2007
Walker, Trevino: Two more years!
Capital Metro chairman Lee Walker and board member John Trevino are at ten years, and holding. Both would like to continue serving on the board, we’re told, and they’ll likely get their wish.
The latest two-year terms for Walker and Trevino, who have been on the Capital Metro board of directors since 1997, expired Sept. 15. They are appointees of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board, or more technically eight members of that board who represent jurisdictions within the Capital Metro service area.
Those eight members are the four Austin City Council members on CAMPO, the three Travis County commissioners on the board, and Williamson County Commissioner Cynthia Long. Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe is chairing this informal “Cap Metro caucus,” and he says they’ll probably meet within the next 30 days to act on the Walker and Trevino appointments. No one else has come forward seeking the posts, according to Biscoe.
Walker and Trevino were part of a reconstituted Capital Metro board after the Legislature stepped in to demand new leadership for what was at the time a very troubled agency. Walker immediately became chairman and has held that position since.
Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, a longtime opponent of Capital Metro and a CAMPO member, said that while he doesn’t much like what Walker and Trevino have done (pursuing passenger rail, in particular), he doesn’t plan to raise a ruckus about their reappointments.
State law, by the way, explicitly allows (in fact demands) that appointees such as Walker and Trevino continue in their jobs even when their terms have expired.
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October 23, 2007
Smell that? Cap Metro trains have arrived
I’ll admit it, the native Austinite in me came out when I first saw Capital Metro’s new commuter trains moving past me Monday — in pieces and on trucks, but nonetheless moving. Silently, as I sat in a line of cars on Burnet Road held up by a traffic cop to let the trucks make their turn north towards a Capital Metro maintenance facility, I had a Gomer Pyle/rube moment: “Gooollleee, look at them trains, right here in little old Austin.”
All of this is quite apart from the larger policy question of whether they’re worth the investment, or will make any difference in traffic congestion, air quality or quality of life. This was more visceral, an involuntary reaction to this sort of big city phenomenon coming to this so-far train-less town (Amtrak aside).
Capital Metro had alerted the media that the train cars, being shipped up from Galveston after a slow boat ride from Europe (where they were manufactured in Switzerland), would show up about 7 p.m. Then, because the trucks made up some time on the highway, the agency said be at the facility off North Burnet Road by 6:30 p.m. I pulled up at 6:12 p.m., and there they were passing by. Or rather, there were about 1-1/3 cars.
The cars actually made the trip disassembled into three pieces, with an engine compartment in the middle that is just a few feet long, and separate passenger compartments on each side. All are painted in what will be the “MetroRail” colors of red, gray and silver.
Stadler Bussnang AG, the Swiss manufacturer, has completed two of the six cars Capital Metro is buying for $34 million, and we had been told both would arrive Monday. Actually, what arrived late Monday were the three pieces of one car, and one passenger compartment for the other car. Capital Metro spokesman Adam Shaivitz said the other two pieces should arrive today.
The trucks, for some reason, overshot the Capital Metro facility on the first try and made a long loop through that industrial neighborhood that took about 15 minutes. So a few other reporters, American-Statesman photographer Rodolpho Gonzalez (see his photo here) and I were waiting when the trucks came by again and turned into the maintenance facility. One of them ran over some substantial rocks making the hard turn, causing the truck and its multimillion-dollar cargo to rock substantially. Capital Metro freight rail director Bill Le Jeune feigned a heart attack at the sight.
But all four trucks made it safely onto the facility’s back lot, just a couple of hundred feet from the existing track where they’ll be carrying passengers in about a year. Capital Metro will now reassemble the cars and begin testing them on the track in the coming weeks and months, along with the other four cars as they arrive. Service on the 32-mile line from Leander to downtown Austin should start next fall.
Reporters, segregated from the cars by a tall fence with barbed wire on the top, peered at the train pieces. The glass on them is somewhat tinted, and I asked Shaivitz what was, frankly, a dumb question. “Are the seats installed in there already?”
Yes, Shaivitz said, and they have “that new-train smell.”
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October 15, 2007
Not saving for a rainy day
The Contra Costa Times has a reminder for us that passenger rail systems, like roads, get old eventually and take big cash to rehabilitate.
The paper reported Sept. 28 that San Francisco’s 35-year-old BART system will need $11.4 billion of repair and replacement work over the next 25 years. But system officials, at least as of now, have only identified $5.8 billion that could go towards that spending. The system already gave fares a sharp boost in the 1990s to fund a $1.5 billion overhaul.
Basically, the BART system’s money managers took care of today and hoped tomorrow would take care of itself. This mirrors, of course, what highway agencies (and the legislatures that fund them) have done over the decades, and now those bills are coming due.
With gas taxes stagnant, and needs for new roads stacking up, that’s one reason highway officials all over the country are pushing toll roads. And when toll agencies go out to borrow money, part of the cash flow projection (aside from paying off debt and year-to-year regular maintenance) is setting aside a nest egg for rebuilding the road in 30 to 40 years.
Capital Metro’s single commuter line, of course, isn’t even open yet (fall 2008 is the projected date) and it is tiny compared to the BART system. But the underlying logic is the same. The line, like all transit, will not cover its cost with fares, with tax revenue making up the difference. Given that, the temptation for the agency will be strong to simply use available money to keep the system going, and perhaps expand it, and hope tomorrow takes care of itself.
BART shows us what they might mean to the next generation.
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