New York University’s Marron Institute just released a report saying that Amtrak and commuter-rail lines could improve their service by making what the institute believes are low-cost changes to their operations. Specifically, the report suggests that railroads replace Diesel locomotives with electric, place platforms at all stops so passengers don’t have to go up and down stairs, and widen the doors on their cars so multiple passengers can board at one time. Based on this report, Bloomberg concludes that “America’s railroads are losing ground when it comes to infrastructural innovation, especially compared to other countries.”
Because wider doors and level platforms would allow people to board more quickly and electric locomotives accelerate faster than Diesels, the report estimates that making these changes would save an average of 2 minutes per commuter stop and 4 minutes per intercity rail stop. This means that Amtrak’s trains between, for example, Seattle and Portland, which have six intermediate stops, could go the distance in 24 fewer minutes.
It’s worth noting that the state of Washington recently spent more than $700 million improving the Seattle to Portland line and managed to cut all of five minutes from the route’s travel times. So there may be some merit to the Marron Institute’s ideas.
The Marron Institute has done a lot of research on why transit projects cost so much in the United States. This is their idea for some supposedly low-cost projects that could be more successful.
Color me skeptical. On one hand, electrification is enormously expensive. California recently electrified the 51-mile double-tracked route between San Francisco and San Jose at a cost of $2 billion. Doing the same for the Seattle-Portland route would cost several times more — especially since Amtrak would not be happy changing locomotives for trains going through Seattle and Portland, which means it would want to electrify the entire 467 miles between Eugene and Vancouver.
Raising platforms also means substantially altering existing cars to install automatic doors that are wider than the cars are now designed for. Frankly, it would probably be less expensive to simply buy all new cars, but that would still amount to tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars per route.
On the other hand, subtracting a few minutes from the schedules of these trains will not make them significantly more attractive than they are now. The real problem with trains is not that they are slow but that they don’t go where people need to go. That won’t be fixed by widening the doors.
For what it’s worth, Caltrains completed its electrification on September 21, 2024, and monthly ridership since then has been about 30 percent more than the year before. But ridership in August and September was 30 percent more than the year before as well, so it may be that the increase in ridership is due more to people returning to work in downtown offices than to slightly faster trains.
Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.
Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.
Photo: MTA Long Island Rail via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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