Now that it is a virtual certainty that intercity passenger train service will be returning to the Milwaukee-Madison corridor, thanks to the leadership of Gov. Jim Doyle and the Obama administration’s award of $823 million for construction of this line, it is time to address the proposed location of the Madison train terminal.
The current plan provides that the Madison terminal for this new service will be at the Dane County Regional Airport - miles from the Capitol and downtown Madison. The airport location is a mistake that must be corrected if the new service is going to succeed.
It is well established that one of the principal challenges of successful intercity rail passenger service is addressing the problem of the “last mile,” namely the ability of rail service to provide a connection between the train terminal and a traveler’s final destination.
Where the last mile can be covered by a short walk, short taxi ride or a short trip on local transit, rail service will be successful. The success of the existing Hiawatha service between Milwaukee and Chicago is a perfect example of this principle. The downtown location of Chicago’s Union Station makes Hiawatha service very attractive because a rail traveler can access all of downtown Chicago and surrounding neighborhoods, such as Michigan Avenue (“the Magnificent Mile”) and the Museum Campus (Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium & Soldier Field) by walking, a short taxi ride or a short transit trip. In fact, the entire Chicago metropolitan area is accessible from Union Station because Chicago’s commuter rail and rapid transit lines all converge in downtown.
It is this connectivity that has enabled Chicago to maintain the most robust intercity passenger rail service outside of the Northeast U.S. corridor and why Chicago will be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System.
To a lesser extent, the same is true for Milwaukee’s Intermodal Station. Downtown Milwaukee is presently accessible by walking or by a short taxi ride. Milwaukee is currently planning a Downtown Streetcar Circulator which will greatly enhance the connections between the Intermodal Station and downtown Milwaukee and surrounding neighborhoods. Again, connectivity is the key to successful intercity rail passenger service.
The principle of connectivity is universally applied in Europe where every major city is served by a downtown rail passenger terminal that provides connections via foot, taxi and other transit service to multiple final destinations.
The official rationale for the Dane County Regional Airport location is that it will save travel time on the eventual high-speed passenger rail line to the Twin Cities. There are several problems with this rationale.
First, it assumes that high-speed passenger rail service will in fact be built between Madison and the Twin Cities. In the short run (the next 10 to 15 years), this assumption is questionable.
Years of planning will be required to accomplish this service extension. A route has not yet been selected and when it is, this service extension will require an investment several times larger than the $823 million allocated to the Milwaukee-Madison corridor.
Under a best case scenario (planning proceeds with no major technical or political delays and billions of federal funds are made available to finance the project despite the current political environment), I believe it will take a minimum of 10 years to implement such service.
A more likely scenario is that the current federal appropriation for high-speed rail represents an opportunity which Congress will not duplicate in the near future until at least some of the corridors funded by the $8 billion appropriation contained in the federal stimulus bill are up and running and the public can assess their costs and benefits. Under this scenario, high-speed rail to the Twin Cities is 15 to 20 years in the future, at best.
Therefore, it will be 10 to 20 years before high-speed rail service is extended beyond the Dane County Regional Airport. Given this reality, it makes more sense to build a downtown Madison station now, and when, and if, high-speed service is extended to the Twin Cities, Madison area station locations can be adjusted if that is deemed necessary at that time.
Second, even if high-speed rail service is extended to the Twin Cities, a downtown Madison terminal will not significantly diminish the quality of that service. The argument is that travel time to the Twin Cities will be lengthened because trains will have to go into downtown Madison, change ends (the train engineer would have to transfer from one end of the train to the other) and proceed back out toward the Twin Cities. This maneuver would involve some additional travel time for a Chicago-Twin Cities trip that would take somewhere between five and six hours overall. However, given the huge benefit of a downtown terminal location (the “last mile” issue), this additional travel time is well worth the trade-off.
On this point, we can again learn from our European friends. I recently returned from a trip to Italy where I rode the Italian high-speed trains between Rome and Florence. Rome and Florence are intermediate stops on the Naples-to-Milan high-speed line (186 mph service). At both Rome and Florence, the high-speed trains travel into the historic downtown stub end stations, the engineer changes ends, and the train proceeds to back out to rejoin the high speed right-of-way. In both cases, travel time is added to the overall Naples-to-Milan trip versus a station stop on the high-speed right-of-way on the outskirts of Rome and Florence.
The Italian rail planners realize that one of the principal benefits of this rail service is that it serves downtown Florence and Rome, and a stop on the outskirts of town would defeat the whole purpose of the high speed service - service to the city centers of the major Italian cities on the line.
In short, the Dane County Regional Airport plan is flawed. This station location will diminish ridership on the line and will jeopardize the success of the service. Travelers whose final destination is downtown Madison, surrounding neighborhoods or the University of Wisconsin will simply continue to drive or take existing inter-city buses because the “last mile” must be covered by a long taxi ride or a transfer to local transit.
For example, the fastest local transit connection between the State Capitol and the airport takes 30 minutes (not including wait time) and requires a transfer between bus routes. Even if Dane County builds some type of commuter rail/light rail service connecting downtown Madison and the airport, there will still be a transfer and a relatively long trip on this mode. As for walking, this option would be completely out of the question unless the traveler is actually going to the airport.
Advocates of transportation choice and sustainable transportation infrastructure have been waiting decades for a high-speed rail connection between Wisconsin’s two largest cities, and it is exciting that this connection will now be built.
However, the Dane County Regional Airport rail terminal will jeopardize the success of this connection and in so doing, diminish the chances for future extensions to the Twin Cities, the Fox River Valley and Green Bay.
We are at the dawn of a new era in intercity transportation in Wisconsin, but there are many skeptics who will exploit any evidence that this new service has failed to achieve its predicted ridership or produce the predicted public benefits. This has to be done right because the future of high-speed rail in Wisconsin will hinge on the performance of this new corridor.
Alderman Robert Bauman, a longtime transit proponent, represents Milwaukee's 4th Aldermanic District.
7 Comments
Bob,
If we can only get the destination correct, this whole thing will be a big success! Just like the Amtrak Hiawatha!
The Hiawatha loses money every year. It may qualify as a success for you govenment types, but it doesn't have enough riders to even pay for itself. I think more people go from Milwaukee to Chicago then Milwaukee to Madison. So the Madison route probably sucks even worse.
In a real economic sense, we are borrowing money that our children will have to pay in future taxes to pay for a railroad line that is not commercially sustainable. Bob, the real bad news is that eventually this type of foolish spending will be such a drag on the economy that maybe government benefits and pensions will have to be reduced.
All levels of government need to reduce their spending now. Let's start with the train. Perhaps there are some other areas we could reduce as well. I wonder.
Mr. Flater:
Where were you when we started a war that killed millions and costs us trillions of dollars every year? Where were you when the tax rates were cut taking us from a budget surplus to a budget deficit? And where's your concern about having to spend millions to "widen" the road to Chicago? Or repair the Zoo Interchange...only to have to do it again later? Amtrak is an obsolete system. It's that way because the car won out in this country sixty years ago and we put all our money into roads. Other nations are years ahead of us in developing their infrastructure to support commerce. (Our car companies are bankrupt). My worry for my children is not a debt. Debts can be repaid. They have been in the past. My worry is a country that lost what it once had. Leadership. Vision. Progress. Those come with some risk to be sure. I applaud Alderman Bauman for his insight.
He already understands the need.
Amen, Bob! Where were all of these fleabag deficit hawks for the previous eight years? Our country lost eight years of progress to the rest of the world and needs to make up for some lost ground. China and Europe passed us up. They're building high-speed rail all over the place. It will require some investments, but those too will be recovered by a mobile, green, modern and efficient economy that will produce the jobs that are needed tomorrow.
I, for one, wonder what Bill Marsh has to say about this.
Bob, Tim,
Where was I? In Muskego bitching about the government spending money foolishly, just like now. We shouldn't have spent the money on stupid stuff the last 8 years. We also shouldn't spend foolishly now.
If you were to identify areas to reduce government spending, what should you do once they are identified? You should start reducing spending. You guys are arguing that since we wasted a bunch of money for 8 years, we are justified in continuing to waste money. That's really not a good response.
Europe is probably not a good economic model to follow, given its very high chronic unemployment. I don't think that the European economies are threatening or beating the United States.
China is an interesting comparison. It is growing on the backs of its underpaid work force. Trains are an easy way to move people who don't have easy access to cars or fuel. China is not very "green" Tim. It is modern and efficient, in an Orwellian kind of way.
As far as "debts can be repaid" Bill, it seems to me that the people who create the debt should be the ones to repay it. We are spending the money and leaving future generations on the hook. Something seems wrong with that to me.
Vision, Leadership and Progress is spending within our means. It's not wasteful, underutilized trains that we need. We need the vision and leadership to oppose stupid things.
Excuse me, but all you guys are talking past one another.
The Texas DOT recently took a hard look at the economics of highways. Their conclusion: the cost of building and maintaining a highway, over its useful lifetime, is approximately six times the amount of money generated by "road use taxes" over the same period. That is, for every dollar of "road use taxes" spent on a road, approximately five dollars have to be expended from general revenues over its lifetime. That is, highways on average receive a fivefold ongoing "operating subsidy", which is actually very much greater than the operating subsidy for trains, which look pretty good by comparison, and rail lines don't chew up thousands of acres in the process. (The entire Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, yards and stations included, covers about 6000 acres. By comparison, I-94 between Madison and Milwaukee, less than a fifth of the distance, consumes over 2,000 acres . . . . of some of the best farm land in the word.) And note that Amtrak's farebox recovery of about 74% means that a subsidy six times the operating income would take about 18 years to accumulate.
Incidentally, it's all well and good to recite the virtues of a "downtown station" in Madison, but where? A committee empaneled by former Mayor Baumann to study the options and recommend a downtown site concluded, in so many words, that none existed. Currently there's some agitation to locate the station at First Street and East Washington Ave, some 3.4 miles from the capitol; most of Madison's business, arts, educational installation, etc., etc., are west of the capitol. Parking, at least (a minimum of 350 spaces), wouldn't be problem at the First Street site, whereas it would be a terrific problem at any point (on a track) closer to "downtown". A much better idea would be a system of shuttles making pickups and dropoffs at five or six point and timed to mesh with the rail schedule, wherever the actual station is located.
If the Hiawatha train, which is a great way to get to Chicago, cannot operate at a profit, what chance does the Madison train have.
We currently pay for our roads with the gasoline taxes. That tax has generated enough revenue in the past that Governor Doyle has been able to raid that fund in order to balance the budget. We all use roads and we've figured out a good way to fund them. The vast majority of us will not use this train and it will be drain of money.