‘Build it and they will come’ is not enough

For almost thirty years, we’ve been hearing the phrase, first uttered by a disembodied voice in the movie Field of Dreams, as an excuse for moving forward with just about any project that will eventually require the general public to patronize it for its continued success. Unfortunately, in the area of passenger rail, no amount of voices, even disembodied ones, after a new train hits the rails is a guarantee of success.

As I write this, there are literally hundreds of projects underway in North America, each of which seeks to attract riders to new or newly extended passenger rail facilities. Some, like Brightline in Florida, involve commuter rail. Others, a good example is Eglinton Crosstown Light Rail in Toronto, a project of Metrolinx, involving transit style elevated or subway. Still others are streetcar systems, designed to run in existing roadways, like the just barely opened QLine streetcar in Detroit. All are either totally new routings or extensions of existing transit/rail systems in their respective metropolitan regions.

The whoppers of the bunch are the HSR (short for High Speed Rail) projects. California has one underway, vastly modified from the original concept and in pieces. Other HSR projects are basically just money budgeted for incremental improvements, creating a different beast, Higher-Speed Rail.

It would take a book to discuss all of them and all the political, regional, and societal subtleties that have led to each project. Instead, let’s look at a definition of success that may be applied to all of them.

Financially, few of the hundreds is expected to turn a profit for its owners. Financial success is not a good current-day measure. Popularity is perhaps a more down-to-earth metric, although popularity, as in “it’s there when I need it,” is not necessarily a measure of success.

The way I see it, there are four important factors for success. Few of the hundreds of projects will have all four.

1. The finished project must draw all if it’s ridership from an unlimited pool of riders. In other words, no matter how many riders already use the service, can more be targeted?

2. The system must be priced across all economic strata of a particular region. To say that a three-dollar ride is attractive to the lowest stratum is not as important as to say that a three-dollar and sixty cent ride is attractive to the person who can afford to take a taxi, or a ride-share, or drive his or her own BMW. There will always be service disruptions, so the fare has to be low enough to be attractive even if your trains run late.

3. The system must draw riders from a distance greater than walking from the line, but must draw most of its riders from walking distance. This is a tough one, but leads to the fourth.

4. The final configuration of the system must compel developers to increase the population of residents, workers, and businesses within that walking distance, only because it takes the population of those new developments where they want to go before they ever move in.

Only for a very few projects will all four factors be in place before the project starts. No. 1 is the easiest, because it’s not hard to realize. It says the population density around your project must be large and growing. If it’s not beforehand, you’d better plan for No. 4 to kick in very soon after startup. If the population is large, but static, No. 4 will be a tall order. The wise planner would terminate a project if this condition can’t be met. The fool will plunge ahead and hope for No. 4.

No. 2, pricing to attract riders across a wide social spectrum, is the most difficult. Even the most established of years-old passenger rail services don’t have the hang of this one. If you know what kind of growth is occurring in a region, it’s not hard to target the fare that will attract all new residents and business riders without busting a budget. In other words, make fares both the lowest and the highest they can be.

To do that can be self-defeating. Budget changes occur in uneven cycles affected by both political and economic factors that are never synchronized. A budget upturn brings political pressure to cut fares or use the money to increase service. The latter brings increased costs, and even an unchanged fare can then be inadequate as the budget changes direction. A downturn, oddly, also brings pressure to cut fares, as downturns are more often solely the result of economic pressure.

Referring to No. 3, what’s this about walking distance? I’m not suggesting that any passenger rail service not provide for Park and Ride (PAR). Just don’t rely on it. Those people who have to get into their cars to get to your train are on a fine edge where just a simple delay in schedules can throw them into their cars for good, and you’ve lost ridership. It’s far better to have walkers who are not as easily shaken by the delays that even the driver’s will experience.

Which brings me to No. 4. I think it’s a mistake if developers and employers are not in on the ground floor of planning and executing any new passenger rail service. That’s a tall order if your region is not already growing, because you must find developers who are either not developing because of your regional downturn/stagnation, or who are not regional and therefore not familiar.

Ideally, developers, businesses and employers should be willing to hold a stake in the new passenger service. A developer who will augment the population should be willing to pay to augment service. A business or employer planning to double his payroll should be willing to pay for new or expanded passenger facilities, which represent to them a plot of land that can be a warehouse or factory instead of an employee parking lot.

If you build it before these developers and employers come, they will say, why bother, you’ve already built it for us. There’s some truth to that, because there will always be employers and developers who won’t move into a region unless the infrastructure is not already there. More and more, this becomes a bidding war between desperate communities willing to sell of part of their future tax revenues in return for a shot at landing a prestigious employer.

But selling tax revenues is different from dumping them into a passenger train that won’t attract diddly if at least a couple of the above conditions aren’t met.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)