I'll piggyback on this and point out that Orlando doesn't exactly have great transit or a centralized destination. Tourists will, as a rule, want to go to WDW/Universal. Business travelers will want to go to the OCCC and/or downtown. There's some overlap at I-Drive (and I could see AAF extending to there and WDW at some point if Disney gets onboard with them like they were prepared to with the HSR project), but things are dispersed enough to complicate that. Not to mention that downtown is the opposite direction from WDW...
Texas High Speed Rail
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beautifulplanet
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More local feedback to high-speed rail in Texas from Ellis County, approximately 30 miles south of Dallas:
County could see high-speed railway
December 3, 2014
By Andrew Branca
http://www.waxahachietx.com/midlothian/news/county-could-see-high-speed-railway/article_e928a6ae-2d8d-5aae-a2f9-c16c77eb6a73.html
Also including the up-to-date project schedule:
County could see high-speed railway
December 3, 2014
By Andrew Branca
http://www.waxahachietx.com/midlothian/news/county-could-see-high-speed-railway/article_e928a6ae-2d8d-5aae-a2f9-c16c77eb6a73.html
Also including the up-to-date project schedule:
B
Brian_Tampa
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Seems like the folks behind the Texas plan are/will face much of the same opposition that AAF has. Mainly the people in the middle who do not get a station, just the impacts. This is setting up to be very similar to the Treasure Coast opposition here in Florida. Hopefully, TC will do a better job of "calming the natives" than AAF did.
Overall, the TC project seems much more doable than the CA HSR project.
Overall, the TC project seems much more doable than the CA HSR project.
Well, there's also the fact that the "folks in the middle" are a lot less numerous in the Texas case, relatively speaking, than the folks at the ends. With that being said, my guess is that you'll get a station or two eventually thrown in as a sop, and that said station will end up seeing all of a half-dozen trains per day stop there (likely during off-peak times when frequencies are a bit lower). JR Central has been running N/H/K trains for long enough that I'm sure they can manage something similar here without the world ending.
cirdan
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Regardless of where AAF may add stops in future, what Orlando will need is an attractive transit system feeding into the AAF system.
I'm not too familiar with Orlando geography, but I attended a work-related convention on International drive some years ago, and being the transit fan that I am (and against the express advice of our company travel agency), I travelled there from thae airport on a Lynx bus. The route the bus seemed to be following appeared pretty convoluted and although interesting to a fan like me, it would probably not have impressed your average visitor. I had an interesting conversation on the bus with an elderly lady who asked where I was going and when I told here the name of the hotel, she said, now that's a nice place. It sure is an honor for you that you're going to be working there. This really does show how much the rich-poor divide has opened that she should assumed that being on a bus, I was going to work there rather than stay there (and before you wonder, it's not such a fancy place, the room rate was about 150).
Furthermore, the closest Lynx stop was some way from the hotel (despite this being a big hotel) and I had to walk a mile or so to get there pulling my luggage. There wasn't even a continuous sidewalk all the way. So there's still a long way to go if Orlando ever wants to be walkable or transit friendly, although I have been to worse places, so I won't exaggerate the problem here.
On ariving at the hotel the receptionist asked how I had got there, and when I said on the Lynx vus, she said, there is no Lynx bus that comes anywhere near here, and assumed I had misunderstood the question. There wasn't even that box to tick on her registration form so we had a bit of a standoff when i refused to accept being put down as having come on a taxi. That just goes to show how little the staff are trained or able to guide people who might want to use the transit option. This hotel must see six digit numbers of visitors a year. Does nobody ever come on the bus? Can that really be true?
cirdan
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One other advantage of greenfield stations is that people living out in the suburban sprawl and who will be wanting to drive to the station and park there may be put off by the prospect of driving downtown or to the airport, as well as by the parking fees that will be levied at such locations. So a station on the edge of the metroplex area in a location that is easy to drive to and with plenty of free car parking would probably bring in plenty of additional passengers.
True, and it seems entirely reasonable for Texas Central to grab some farmland next to a possible stop location that would be (post-construction) 30 minutes from each city (so two chunks of land at about the 1/3 and 2/3 marks) and work to develop them and the area around them. Knowing Texas, this would make for an interesting transit-oriented sprawl project.
Building, in the pre-internet age, meant that the project was ongoing and they were in process. It also included the planning and financing stages.
In the post-internet age it only includes the, "I already pushed the 'buy-it-now' button, why isn't it already here?" phase. But even in the age of instant gratification, some things still require planning and engineering after the project begins until the shiny toy arrives on your doorstep.
They're building a train and it will require planning and engineering before the construction starts. The race with California is on.
Montgomery County is weighing in. They want the proposed routes moved to something that better suits the local government, rather than suits the people paying for the train.
I would have to agree that there is an advantage to serving The Woodlands, but not if it costs more to get there than TCR can get from the connection.
http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/woodlands/news/commissioners-to-consider-high-speed-rail-resolution/article_6427e00a-f373-5477-83b7-d69fb55f31e2.html
I would have to agree that there is an advantage to serving The Woodlands, but not if it costs more to get there than TCR can get from the connection.
http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/woodlands/news/commissioners-to-consider-high-speed-rail-resolution/article_6427e00a-f373-5477-83b7-d69fb55f31e2.html
http://www.khou.com/story/news/local/texas/2015/04/14/senate-bill-targeting-bullet-train-project-advances/25770779/
I'm going to let the bill speak for itself. The way the last week has gone, if I say anything substantial I'll probably regret it later.
I'm going to let the bill speak for itself. The way the last week has gone, if I say anything substantial I'll probably regret it later.
Devil's Advocate
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What do you mean?
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jis
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The current plans are for a high speed monorail (perhaps ... shudder ... Maglev) from the Orlando International Intermodal Center to I-Drive. Also a Sunrail branch will serve Orlando International Intermodal. That is in the phase after the Deland and Poinciana extensions. The ROW is all there, part of a spur to a power station which just needs to be upgraded. Orlando Intermodal is currently under construction and has room for SunRail platforms. That is about it as far as current plans go.
Frankly though, the primary clientele that AAF is looking for is not going to be the transit bus riding type. They will do SunRail and Maglev riding type, and mostly they will rent cars or get onto Disney Magic Kingdom or other shuttle buses at the airport, or pick up cars left at the various airport related parking facilities. AAF ridership projections do not depend that much on general transit access at the Orlando end. Any that materializes will just be gravy.
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Ok, if you read the article, there are two general issues here:
-Issue number one is the traditional NIMBY stuff. I don't have a lot of sympathy for it, but I'm (painfully) used to it showing up. If it were limited to the usual kvetching I'd be annoyed, but not nearly as much as I am.
-Issue number two, which is the one that has me about to detonate, is the bit about blanket revoking eminent domain authority for this one, specific mode of travel. Ok, I've watched a lot of folks saying "Well, if the private sector will do it..." blah blah blah. Well, the private sector is offering to do it and now a bunch of dingbats in the Texas Senate are trying to block that. On top of the **** in Florida it's leaving me more than a little bit short of patience. They're not blocking it for airport expansion, they're not blocking it for highway expansion (government-funded or otherwise), and they're not blocking it for freight rail.
To be fair, Texas Central could probably evade the block by cutting some deal with a shortline operator to nominally make their run a "freight service" (which involves one freight engine doing an equipment move once a week in the middle of the night with absolute temporal separation) to avoid the restriction and/or theoretically only running a 79 MPH service...and then "conveniently noticing" that their tracks will take trains going about 2.5x faster. Frankly, I'd love to see them do that, if only to spit in the eyes of these guys.
I'm going to stop now, but it ought to be pretty damn clear why I didn't want to say much on this beyond linking it.
Cliff, the Texas Legislature is a strange and terrifying place that sane people should avoid!
Unfortunately their actions, and lack of action, are things we have to live with and pay for!!!
Unfortunately their actions, and lack of action, are things we have to live with and pay for!!!
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jis
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It is educational to read the history of how the Pennsylvania Railroad managed to drive into Washington DC in the face of a zillion legal obstacles thrown at it by the innovative Maryland legislature, in order to protect their home railroad, Baltimore and Ohio,s franchise into Washington DC. Finally the Pennsy managed to completely flummox the Marylanders and got their way exactly as they wanted it.
Devil's Advocate
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There is nothing wrong with pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of a strictly contrarian ideology.
How this? State Senator Lois Kolkhorst ® doesn't want the power of eminent domain used by TCR because "...she didn’t want to see private landowners lose their land for a project that she believed is likely to fail."
And this fine quote, "
Yet at Wednesday's hearing, Republican senators expressed concern that a private company was going to use eminent domain authority for a for-profit venture.
“Eminent domain is probably the most horrific power that the government has, and to dole that out to individual companies that can misuse that or use it for projects that result in profits, we have to be very careful about doing that,” Hall said."
Since when do Republicans oppose for-profit enterprises?
Oh, sorry, that's right. When it runs on rails.
cirdan
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Maybe initially that's a good strategy.
But by and large, the world is divided into those who like to drive and those who don't. Those who like to drive will not be seen in a train unless pressed very hard. In other words, hardly ever. Pursuing this demographic and trying to convert them is mostly a pointless exercise Then there are those who like trains and want to use them. Some of these may be the typical captive bus clientele, often being from the underpriveledged demographic. But there is increasingly also a different demographic of people who like transit. They are middle-class folks, often of the younger generation, who never bought into the car = status symbol thing. They can afford to drive but choose not to if they can avoid it. Their numbers are increasing all the time, as reflected in increased interest in downtown apartments and the often criticized gentrification of formerly undesirable neighborhoods .But because they are car free by choice, their being car free depends on workable alternatives being offered. Build a decent transit system, build an intercity rail system, and the car free will come flocking to use it. But cut them off by building car-centric out of town peripheral stations not connected to the areas where they live, and they won't be able or willing to use it.
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I think a lot depends on the area you're talking about and how bad the traffic is. For example, if VA had gone with an option to build a bridge across the James River to link NPN and NFK (this was an option considered early on in the Hampton Roads HSR planning process) and made the whole operation double track, I think you have plenty of folks who would have used a high-frequency DMU service to shuttle between sides of the water even if they had to stick cars on each side, such is the atrocious traffic on the HRBT. [1]
In the case of Texas, as long as you have a Suburban Station and a Downtown Station on each end you should be able to sweep up a good deal of traffic. You'll have car rental facilities at each end, but knocking a four-hour drive down to a 90-minute train ride is enough that even assuming half an hour of transfer time at each end you're still 90 minutes ahead of where you'd have been...if traffic was cooperative. Throw in bad traffic and I'm fairly sure you can add another hour or two to that on the wrong day. Downtown Dallas is also pretty transit-friendly (and generally getting better as time goes by, too, from what I can tell), and it's "good transit" (i.e. light rail and streetcars, not buses) so I suspect you can get your businessmen to ride it.
Down in Florida you have a tangle of groups AAF would be looking at, but you're right: This is not the "bus crowd" in some sense. Give them high-frequency SunRail to downtown (and for the record, it is quite possible that the airport will happen before Deland does because of paperwork issues...apparently the ridership estimates for Deland are low enough to cause issues qualifying for funding and I think someone screwed up a round of /something/) and you'll get transfers, if only because I have had far too much experience driving in Orlando to call it "pleasant". South Florida is a similar story...if the streetcar projects down there ever actually end up /going/ anywhere useful (like, say, connecting SunRail stations to FEC stations or going more than a few blocks in any direction) then using the trains to get downtown will be a viable thing.
Anyhow, the point is more that you have an increasing number of areas where I think two other groups exist:
-Your "want to drive" folks (generally older);
-Your "don't want to drive" folks (generally younger);
-Your "wouldn't mind driving if driving wasn't miserable" crowd; and
-Your "want to drive but not too long/not after dark" crowd.
Texas Central is shooting for #1 and #3 (by simply killing driving on travel time). AAF has a lot more of #4 to work with (and #4 is basically what #3 turn into as they get older) alongside substantial elements of #3 given that traffic in South Florida has been atrocious for decades (there's a reason that Tri-Rail was able to grow like it did). I think Florida has more of the "don't want to drive" crowd as well, between Northeastern transplants (who know what "taking the train" is) and a long enough legacy of bad traffic (especially in South Florida).
By the way, when I've been down in the Orlando area my experience in listening to the radio is that there isn't much of an anti-rail crowd to be had around Orlando...the main thing I've heard on the talk radio down there is a bunch of complaining that SunRail doesn't run enough service/doesn't go enough places (for example, there was a special set of weekend service to a dining event in Winter Park...but the geniuses at SunRail didn't think to try and arrange an evening frequency, resulting in the last train leaving at like 1600 rather than at 1900 or so as would normally be the case IIRC). You've got a NIMBY crowd in between the two areas (which I predict will more or less collapse once stations start going in) but that's about it.
[1] There are some fascinating "roads not taken" to consider here. A DMU-based service could easily have taken modest upgrades on the Virginia Beach line as-is (class 3/4 track would have sufficed). You'd have simply had The Tide terminate at Harbor Park station and act as a downtown streetcar system. The DMU lines would have gone out to the Oceanfront (I think you would have needed to extend the line by all of four blocks to get to Atlantic Ave) on the one hand and wrapped around to roughly the James River Bridge on the other (which would have hit Suffolk along the way); you could probably have worked something out to run a service to the gates of Norfolk Naval Station as well. There would only have been limited overlap with existing mainline freight service right at Harbor Park Station (as well as on the Peninsula Subdivision, but that could arguably have been mitigated at least somewhat). All I can say is that "At least it would offer a competent connection between Norfolk and Newport News for less than $3bn" (the estimates at the time for the bridge and the tracks on each side were around $600m).
There has not been much discussion of the Texas CR HSR plans lately, but the project was facing an attempt in the Texas legislature to kill it by preventing the Texas DOT from spending any funds at all to work with TCR on the HSR line. Here is a company proposing to privately fund a HSR corridor between the 2 largest cities in the state and even then, many Republicans want to kill or block it entirely. The news is that the language that would stop TCR was deleted in a 6-4 committee so that threat is over. I'm sure there are many more attempts in the works to stop the Dallas- Houston HSR line.
WFAA: Bullet train project saved in late-night vote.
Dallas Morning News: Budget writers remove provision that threatened bullet train proposal.
WFAA: Bullet train project saved in late-night vote.
Dallas Morning News: Budget writers remove provision that threatened bullet train proposal.
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Must be in the pay of the Airlines or that new Luxury Bus Service in Dallas? ( can't think of the name)
Years ago when the privately funded Texas Bullet Train became a big do, Southwest Airlines and the Land Rights people ( fore runner to the T- Party) lobbyed in the Lege to kill it even though the Gov., Lt. Gov and theSpeaker of the House were all for it!
It was DOA!!!! This one looks like it actually has a chance!!
Years ago when the privately funded Texas Bullet Train became a big do, Southwest Airlines and the Land Rights people ( fore runner to the T- Party) lobbyed in the Lege to kill it even though the Gov., Lt. Gov and theSpeaker of the House were all for it!
It was DOA!!!! This one looks like it actually has a chance!!
Pure ideology. Republicans are against rail travel, even if it's not publicly funded.
As a Republican, I find my party a little embarrassing these days.
Thought about becoming an Independent and voting for the best overall candidates? More people are doing this all the time, Parties are Dinosaurs!
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