Raleigh? Rail hub of the South? What happens if Amtrak starts FL's 5 train plan?

[Ocklawaha]

Raleigh now has 6 trains daily, (we have 2 for the whole state). But North Carolina has been pouring money into conventional Amtrak-Carolina trains, and is expanding the service. Like some of us have proposed here, why mess with success with the goofy VISION HSR PLAN of a few years ago? Look what has happened to Raleigh and imagine:

What "if" we moved the trains back into Union Station, and moved the new expanded Convention Center north of it?

What "if" Florida, supported AMTRAK-FLORIDA trains?

What "if" Florida got the 5 daily trains on the FEC - CSX A and CSX S lines plus Sunset route? What would Jacksonville look like if those trains, matched an equal number arriving or departing from the northeast or midwest?

HERE'S A SNEAK PREVIEW OF "WHAT IF"

Amtrak faces space crunch in Raleigh
Double-digit gains in statewide passengers intensify problems
Bruce Siceloff
(Raleigh) News & Observer
Posted: Sunday, Dec. 21, 2008
Slideshow
 
Tim Bulluck, an Amtrak attendant, helps Malakye Craig, 2, get off The Carolinian in downtown Raleigh as a line of passengers waits to get on. The station and the parking lot are far too small after a 20 percent increase in passengers.

Bob Baird and his 9-year-old daughter Alexandra wait for The Carolinian in the Raleigh depot. They were headed to New York City for some fun. The Carolinian leaves Raleigh for New York at 11:06 a.m. daily.

More Information
AMTRAK GROWS IN CARY AND DURHAM 1229841731819178
Durham and Cary will get rail station upgrades in time for the start of a third daily train from the Triangle to Charlotte next summer.

DURHAM OFFICE: The Amtrak office in downtown Durham is housed in a 1,000-square-foot modular building on Chapel Hill Street, on the south side of the tracks. It will move into the renovated Walker Warehouse on the north side of the tracks.

DURHAM STATION: Durham and the state Department of Transportation will pick up the rent for a new 11,000-square-foot Amtrak station, which will take up about one-third of the restored Walker Warehouse. A new platform is under construction, and interior warehouse construction is to start later this winter.

CARY PERSONNEL: Amtrak does not have employees assigned to the Cary station on North Academy Street, where passengers wait for their trains in the lobby of a Division of Motor Vehicles office. That will change this winter when the DMV moves to a new location.

CARY STATION: DOT plans to expand parking and convert the 3,500-square-foot Cary building to a full-scale train station that will be staffed by Amtrak.

Business is getting better for Amtrak in North Carolina, and that's getting to be a problem for downtown Raleigh.

The capital is blessed with one of the railroad's busiest stops in the Southeast and hobbled with one of its littlest stations.

Last year more than 140,000 riders stepped on or off the six trains that stop each day at the modest brick station on West Cabarrus Street. Amtrak offers free parking for travelers, and its tiny lot fills up fast.

"If you go down there, it's a danged zoo because of all they're trying to fit in," said Patrick B. Simmons, Rail Division chief for the state Department of Transportation.

Especially at holiday time. A record Thanksgiving crush saw as many as 900 passengers a day streaming through a station that has only 57 parking spaces.

Later this week Amtrak will call in extra workers to manage the parking-lot chaos, keeping people and bags flowing from car to train and back again. Many Christmas travelers will have to leave their cars several blocks away in a parking deck on Salisbury Street.

The parking pinch will get worse next summer when Amtrak launches a big improvement in rail service between Raleigh and Charlotte: a pair of trains, subsidized by the state, leaving the two cities at midday. That will give riders at both ends of the line a choice of three times each day instead of two.

Even before next year's expansion, crowding at Raleigh's station has forced some Wake County riders to try other Amtrak stations in Cary and Durham. Simmons lives in North Raleigh, but he drives to Durham when he has to catch a train because it's easier to find parking there.

Meanwhile, Amtrak asks riders to catch a ride or take a taxi to the 4,720-square-foot Raleigh station.

"But that only gets us so far," said Mike Jerew, Amtrak operations manager for North Carolina. "We don't want to stunt our growth. We're hoping people aren't turned off by our current situation. We're strapped at this facility."

Amtrak passenger counts were up 11 percent nationwide and 20 percent in North Carolina during the fiscal year that ended in September -- and not just because of $4 gas.

"We haven't seen a corresponding decrease in demand as gas prices have come down below $2," said Jeff Mann, a regional Amtrak manager based in Raleigh. In October and November, the Raleigh station measured a 27 percent increase over the same two months in 2007.

Even with pump prices close to $1.60 now, Amtrak passengers say they have plenty of reasons to stick with the train.

"It's still cheaper for me," said Ted Manby, 48, a Wake Forest pastor. He was riding the Amtrak Piedmont from Raleigh to Charlotte last week -- relaxing in a refurbished rail car called Gray Squirrel -- to attend the board meeting of a missions organization.

Greater comfort

"It's better on my back to be able to stretch," Manby said. "There's no stress from the traffic. I'm able to not lose that seven hours all driving. I'm able to read or bring my laptop -- and plug it in right here.

"And it's actually faster," he added.

Track improvements since 2001 have cut 30 minutes from the travel time between Raleigh and Charlotte. Now, even with seven stops along the way, the Piedmont makes the run in 3 hours, 12 minutes.

Amtrak has improved its on-time arrival record in the past year, reducing delays blamed largely on conflicts with freight rail traffic up and down the East Coast. Amtrak's Jeff Mann says the trains that pass through North Carolina arrived on schedule 85 percent of the time in November, compared to 64 percent in November 2007.

The people on board

Many riders are students and faculty members who commute to universities in Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham and Raleigh. Amtrak regulars get to know each other, and sometimes they car pool on days when they don't take the train.

Darrell D. Stover, 52, saw the train and heard its whistle every day for 12 years while he worked close to the tracks -- at Hayti Heritage Center in Durham and Page-Walker Arts & History Center in Cary. Now he rides that train from his home in Cary to Greensboro, where he works at the N.C. Humanities Council.

"It's a nice, relaxing ride," Stover said, sipping coffee in a rail car called Box Turtle. "When it's raining or messy out there, why get on I-40? I get on the train, and then I have an 8-minute walk to work from the station."

The standard one-way fare from Cary to Greensboro is $9.50, but Stover pays $77 for a 10-ride ticket. With additional discounts from a frequent-rider rewards program, each trip costs him about $7.

Nancy S. Magiera, an interior designer for an architectural firm, said her trip to Charlotte was a bargain at $25 each way. She worked on a marketing presentation in the Box Turtle car, sitting with her laptop at what looked like a small restaurant booth.

"I didn't know these tables were here," said Magiera, 56. "I was trying to figure out how I was going to juggle everything in my lap. This is like a little office. I'm surprised more people aren't doing this."

Sprucing up the depots

Simmons has been in charge of state efforts over the past decade to expand train service and make the ride faster, more comfortable and more dependable.

State and local agencies have restored dusty old train stations in towns from Rocky Mount to Salisbury. Stately depots in High Point and Greensboro have been transformed into modern transit hubs.

"Greensboro has a beautiful facility," Amtrak's Jerew said. "You can fit two or three of the Raleigh stations inside that building. The parking is substantial, too."

Charlotte's Amtrak station is almost as busy as Raleigh's, and almost as cramped. By 2012 Charlotte hopes to move into a new station in the city center, where Amtrak will share space with buses and light-rail lines.

Raleigh faces a longer wait for a similar transit center that will have to be built from scratch.

City and state officials have said for years that they want to create a hub for local and regional transit buses, Greyhound and Trailways inter-city buses and Amtrak trains.

They'll have to make room, or at least make plans, for some of the many new modes of transit proposed for the city over the next 10 to 25 years.

These include:

* The N.C. Railroad's proposed commuter trains, which will carry workers into the Triangle from homes as far away as Greensboro and Goldsboro.

* A federal and multistate plan for "high-speed" passenger trains that would zip through Southeastern states.

* A regional plan for electric-powered light-rail trains running from Chapel Hill to North Raleigh.

* A related proposal to bring streetcars back to Raleigh.

Challenge in Raleigh

The downtown Raleigh geography -- "a spaghetti bowl of railroad tracks," Simmons calls it -- will make it hard to get everybody under one roof.

"This is a complex puzzle, a challenging project -- but it's certainly doable," said Mitchell Silver, Raleigh's planning director.

"Money is clearly an issue. It's going to be a public-private partnership. We'll need state and possibly federal money."

He said he hopes to produce a plan by early 2009 for a multi-modal center that could be downtown Raleigh's biggest project over the next 20 years.

"We see this as huge for the growth of the downtown," Silver said. "We see this as really becoming an East Coast transit hub, and we like to think of it as making Raleigh a gateway to the South."

OCKLAWAHA

[thelakelander]

We should all be pushing for a Amtrak Florida service.  Its a no brainer, imo.  As for the convention center, it needs to be booted out of the old terminal.  However, moving it to the north does not make sense.  It should go some place where it can be better integrated with complementing assets (restaurants, nightlife, hotels, shopping, etc.).

[Ocklawaha]

Bishop wants it north, as a anchor for a new and larger entertainment district with transit central to the venues. Not a bad idea if we can attract the investments. Come to think of it with the new Courthouse location, our Station plan, a Convention Center to the north, Bay Street Station, the SAX RESTAURANT SITE (with adjoining lot) starts looking like a jewel for streetcar!

That would make the OCK-MJ terminal plan much more realistic.

Also check this out:

U.S. Rep. John Mica, the ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, met this week with Gov. Charlie Crist and state Transportation Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos to discuss what infrastructure projects should be considered in the stimulus package.


Mica said about at least $45 billion in projects have been identified nationwide that are ready to go. He hopes to get about $400 million secured for projects in Northeast Florida.


Projects that don't get funded in that stimulus package could still get funded later because the federal government will probably keep pumping money into infrastructure projects for a few years to combat the recession, Mica said.


Congress is operating under the theory that for every billion dollars spent on transportation projects, about 35,000 jobs will be created. Mica hopes the stimulus package will create about 14,000 jobs in Northeast Florida.


Mica said he would push for commuter rail funding in the stimulus package and wants state transportation department, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority and Jacksonville City Hall to move ahead with tentative plans to create a commuter rail network.


Northeast Florida is behind other parts of the country when it comes to mass transit, he said, and the area needs to catch up

OCKLAWAHA

[thelakelander]

He may want it north, but it does not make sense if things are looked at from a birds eye view.  Convention Centers typically don't spur things like entertainment districts (if so we'd already have one in LaVilla).  However, they do need to be adjacent to complementing development like restaurants, hotels, cultural attractions, etc.  If we were starting scratch it would be easier to place it anywhere and plan accordingly.  However, we already have one downtown entertainment district that's struggling to fill up.  Creating a second one, that's disconnected from the heart of the core by suburban office buildings, will most likely lead to two struggling competitors.  Its the same concept that Peyton's Big Idea incorporated with the Harbortown proposal instead of working with Sleiman to expand and renovate the Landing.


When I get back to town, we should all sit down together with a Jax DT aerial and aerials of successful DT environments in peer cities and talk.  Aerials really make the issues of connectivity and urban integration stand out.