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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup for 6/20/08
Contributed by Fred Camino on June 20th, 2008 at 10:53 am
- The illusion of control: in a car you’ve got control, in a bus you don’t. Or is that really the case?
- Angelenos dump the pump with gusto. Not hard with gas prices over $4/gallon.
- In Orange County, 10,000 people downloaded a free transit pass offered by OCTA for Dump the Pump Day.
- Metrolink hits 50,000 riders on Tueday, its highest single day ridership EVAR.
- A freeway is completed and traffic increases.
Discussion
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Metrolink is the best kept secret in Los Angeles Transportation. It’s arguably the most comfortable transit ride on offer.
Once the Purple Line is completed, Metrolink will have even more a dramatic increase in ridership.
And they’ll all get caught in the blockade at Union Station when the gates are installed.
The Metrolink “business model” also shows how rail should be done right.
Metrolink is not perfect, and most central city residents get little to no upside from the service. (Remember when it started, and all services were inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon).
Here’s why the model works:
1. Most of the capital was in rolling stock that could be applied to extant railroad rights of way.
2. Commuter rail followed and improved the “San Diego miracle,” whereas light rail systems ended up following the BART model. The only standardization modern light rail systems have is standard gauge. Everything else has been custom-built. There’s little uniformity between systems, thereby making light rail construction more expensive than it needs to be.
Commuter rail, on the other hand, usually takes extant rights of way and buys off-the-shelf rolling stock. What’s even better, there’s a clear market leader: the Bombardier bi-level car. This helps brings capital costs down. Plus, there’s the L.A. effect. Metrolink has long had to cope with more ridership demand than it can handle. So, in a pinch, it can mooch off other commuter rail agencies’ stock by leasing spares. (Have you seen the Toronto GO or Seattle Sounder cars?)
3. Commuter rail can be run at lower frequencies and still be popular. A lot of commuter rail is regional rail, designed to connect independent cities together on a corridor, even though these cities are effectively suburbs of a core city. A few lines are pure commuter rail, designed for rush-hour only traffic. Either way, the long spacing between stops allows it to be fast, and it can connect reliably with local bus services that are infrequent.
True enough, but one year after it started that was already starting to change …
I pulled my copy of the November 1, 1993 timetable (the service had started October 26, 1992) and the San Bernardino Line already had two midday trips to LAUS from Rialto (and one from Montclair) and two reverse-direction afternoon peak trips from Montclair.
On that same line, there was service from LAUS to Claremont as early as 6:05am, plus the reverse trips of the above in middays.
The Santa Clarita (now Antelope Valley) Line had two reverse-direction morning trips — service to Lancaster and Palmdale didn’t come until after the Northridge earthquake some ten weeks later — and one midday reverse-direction trip to Moorpark, one to Chatsworth, and one to Santa Clarita. And there were two reverse-direction trips to LAUS from Santa Clarita in late afternoon peak.
As service expanded, there were more such reverse-direction trips, but when the Riverside Line and Orange County Lines started in 1994 the only such trips were on the Riverside Line (one midday roundtrip, plus the deadheads at the beginning and end of the day, which apparently would carry any passengers that wanted to travel direct to Riverside in the morning or direct to LAUS in the evening.
Still, my old friend Wad is correct in that Metrolink didn’t have a lot of investment in track construction, although the October 31, 1994 timetable did have a notation that they would be “installing new track, replacing the signaling system and making improvements at many street crossings between Pomona and San Bernardino” which caused service east of Pomona operating between 9:30am and 4:30pm to be replaced by bus service.
How is the weekend Metrolink service going? I take it almost every weekend and will be doing so tomorrow and Sunday.
While the trains are certainly not as busy as the weekday trains, I do see a ton of people getting off at Union Station. The train may look empty on board, but it can sometimes be difficult to navigate through the mass of people to get to the Red Line, even on the weekend!
Those two Metrolink critics are pissed that weekend service even exists. They pretty much call it wasteful and funded off the backs of hard working weekday commuters. I’m wondering what the other side of the story is.
I’m sorry to change the topic - but that story about the 210 inducing more traffic is too sad and funny.
The solution from the San Bernardino County Association of Governments to the traffic induced by building out the 210? Widen the 210! Of course.
This is well-worn ground in transit advocacy circles, but I don’t think the point can be made enough - more publicly funded car facilities equals more cars being used.
I ride the San Bernardino Metrolink line on weekends (going to LA for SO.Ca.TA meetings, LAPL, Law Library, etc.)
It can be almost as busy as the weekday service at times, depending on if there are any special events downtown (I remember the train being especially crowded for Chinese New Year)
I haven’t been on the Orange County weekend service yet, so I don’t know about ridership there.
The 210, which I occasionally use in the morning, is undoubtedly getting busier. There is starting to be a morning backup around Carnelian and/or Campus, then it lets up for awhile until La Verne….
On weekend days when there are no special events, Metrolink trains do well enough. When there are events in downtown, or special trains to the L.A. County Fair or the Speedway, they are tremendously packed.
Weekend riders tend to be families. You see a lot more children riding the trains on weekends.
Let’s not forget the role that Mother Nature paid in MetroLink’s success. Scarcely two years after service began came the Northridge Quake, wherein interstates collapsed and suddenly commuter rail became the only way short of an airlift to get from L.A. to Palmdale and Lancaster. So MetroLink had a ready answer to justify its own existence that even the NIMBY nincompoops and BRU crazies couldn’t deny.