[U]nder the terms of legislation recently signed by Gov. Peter Shumlin, the Agency of Transportation (VTrans) is preparing to study possibilities for commuter rail service that would connect Burlington with Montpelier and St. Albans. It’s an idea that state planners have looked at several times before and rejected, but the notion continues to attract interest.
“We receive a lot of questions all the time about, ‘When will there be commuter rail between Burlington and Montpelier?’” VTrans deputy secretary Chris Cole said. “The goal of this study is to ascertain when it will be feasible on a cost-benefit basis to fund such a commuter train.”
In response to a legislative request, VTrans will broaden the study’s geographic scope to include St. Albans. A single line connects the Rail City with Montpelier via Essex Junction, from which another line proceeds 8 miles into downtown Burlington. The latter route is in poor condition, however, and would require major investments to be brought up to passenger service standards.
A 1991 study commissioned by VTrans found that commuter service connecting Burlington with St. Albans and Montpelier would attract 641 riders daily, and the fares would cover only about 17 percent of the service’s cost. Two years later, another VTrans-commissioned study produced even more dismal numbers and concluded that “the population densities in the State would not support regular commuter rail service, (although) there is strong evidence to support a Shelbume Road Reconstruction Demonstration Service as part of a total traffic mitigation program.” That finding led to the inauguration in 2000, under Gov. Howard Dean’s administration, of a Charlotte-Burlington commuter train that Dean’s successor, Jim Douglas, pulled the plug on in 2003.
That train, the Champlain Flyer, recovered only 2 percent of its operating costs in fares, but operating conditions were hardly ideal. Fares were voluntary and each passenger donated about 60 cents for a ride, on average. Charlotte, population 3,600, is not a major destination. And the train’s normal configuration – a rebuilt freight locomotive and two coaches – failed to generate economies of scale.
Today’s landscape
Much has changed since 2003. For one thing, the population of the Burlington metro area has continued to increase. The Chittenden County Transportation Authority began running LINK Express buses between Burlington and Montpelier in 2003, and between Burlington and St. Albans in 2004. Today CCTA operates nine round-trips on the Montpelier route and four on a St. Albans route each weekday.
The city of Montpelier expects to begin construction next spring on a new multimodal transit center at 1 Taylor Street, right next to the state-owned Washington County Railroad tracks, which connect, at Montpelier Junction, to the mainline to the Burlington area.
The Taylor Street project is billed as a multimodal center, but there are no plans to include a passenger train stop on the little-used adjacent tracks. In public meetings on plans for the facility, some Montpelier residents took note of the opportunity for a commuter rail station, with local buses feeding passengers to the train.
Rail advocates have produced two private studies that have produced more optimistic estimates for the cost of recovery and patronage for commuter rail in Vermont.
A private 1989 proposal called for something quite similar to what the state will be studying this time: Burlington-St. Albans and Burlington-Montpelier services. The proposal anticipated a farebox recovery of 75 percent for the service, which “would make it one of the most cost-effective public transportation services in North America.”
The author of the proposal, Eugene Skoropowski, is the former managing director of a system of state-subsidized Amtrak trains in California. Skoropowski now serves as senior vice president for rail operations at All Aboard Florida, a private venture that plans to begin operating high-speed trains between Miami and Orlando in 2017.
Skoropowski told VTDigger that Vermont had several tools for boosting cost recovery from the low numbers that the state studies of the 1990s anticipated. Lowering fares at off-peak hours brings in budget travelers, and employers on the line, including IBM/Global Foundries, with its plant in Essex Junction, would be eligible for a federal tax deduction for subsidizing employee commuting by public transportation, he said.
He stressed the need to integrate public transportation modes.
“The most successful systems have been where trains and buses work together, as a system. The buses will play a role – there is no doubt about that,” Skoropowski said.
Cole took the same perspective. In one scenario, he said, “You try to hit that peak arrival and departure times with the train and you supplement that with buses” during off-peak periods.
Losing the locomotive
A second private proposal, advanced in 2013 by Burlington’s Tony Redington, a retired transportation planner, called for three spokes of service radiating from Burlington to St. Albans, Montpelier and Barre, and Middlebury. He foresaw an operating-cost recovery of 60 percent on an initial Montpelier-Burlington route, the only one for which he provided a detailed analysis.
In an interview for this article, he described the upcoming VTrans study as “timely.”
“We have less car travel in Vermont now than we did seven years ago,” Redington said. “The swing has been to public transit service in all its forms. The [LINK] buses have been a market test.”
In contrast to the Champlain Flyer experience and the state’s 1993 study, both Skoropowski’s and Redington’s proposals called for using diesel multiple units, or DMUs, as a means of improving the service’s bottom line. A DMU is a passenger rail coach with a motor or two under its floor; thus self-propelled, it requires no locomotive. The technology enjoys increasing popularity in U.S. commuter operations. A DMU typically uses less than half the fuel consumed by a locomotive-hauled train, which is far heavier. The light weight also means faster acceleration and deceleration, a valuable feature on commuter routes, given their frequency of stops.
Locomotives, moreover, could cost Vermont $6 million or more apiece, judging from recent orders from other passenger rail providers.
The DMU idea has something of a precedent. In 2007, the Legislature authorized purchase of five DMUs to replace the locomotives and coaches used on Amtrak’s St. Albans-Washington, D.C. Vermonter, which the state subsidizes. The scenario, which had Amtrak’s support but came to naught when the DMU manufacturer went bankrupt, called for using the DMUs on the St. Albans-New Haven, Connecticut, portion of the route.
The Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office projected that the DMUs would save the state as much as $938,000 yearly, and that the Vermonter’s cost recovery would rise from its then-current 48 percent to 60 percent, according to a JFO document provided to VTDigger.
“I’m hoping this study will revive the interest” in DMUs, veteran passenger rail advocate Carl Fowler, of Williston, said. “We’re going to have to get the focus shifted from full-scale Amtrak operations to something leaner.”
A realistic commuter rail service, he said, “basically … depends on having some sort of DMU technology, with a one-man crew — no two-man crew (as on Amtrak). The only way that it defeats a bus on I-89 is that the train can carry dramatically more people with the same amount of labor.”
“DMUs will definitely be in the mix” of options considered, Cole said.
Train versus bus
But minimizing costs with DMUs doesn’t in itself guarantee that the commuter trains would recover as much of their expenses as the buses that currently ply the Montpelier-Burlington-St. Albans corridor do. As of 2013, five U.S. commuter rail services relied completely on DMUs. Their farebox recovery ranged from 6 percent to 24 percent, and all of them served areas considerably more populated than those VTrans will be looking at.
According to CCTA service development director Meredith Birkett, the LINK buses serving St. Albans and Montpelier recover 39 percent and 67 percent of their costs, respectively, at the farebox.
Further, while much more fuel-efficient than locomotive-hauled trains, DMUs still use a lot of petroleum – at least three times what the LINK buses consume. The Montpelier LINK buses average about 27 passengers during rush hours, while their St. Albans counterparts serve 10, Birkett reported; a Burlington-Montpelier rush-hour DMU train would thus need to attract at least 81 passengers to generate the same volume of carbon emissions per passenger as the LINK buses they would replace.
A difficult assignment, perhaps, but the factors involved are many. For example, a 1989 survey by the federal Transportation Research Board found in case after case that the riding public preferred trains to buses. The study concluded that, when other service conditions are equal, “rail transit is likely to attract from 34 percent to 43 percent more riders than will equivalent bus service.”
In making its recommendations, the VTrans study will have to weigh that factor and many more — the time it takes to get from, say, Montpelier to Burlington or Waterbury by train versus bus, how many stations the train will stop at, where those stops will be located and more. Having so many destinations right along the track will, however, brighten the rail service’s appeal among legislators who represent those places.
St. Michael’s College, Fanny Allen Hospital, the Statehouse, various Montpelier state offices and the new Waterbury state office complex’s site all lie within 1,000 feet of the route. In Essex, the tracks run right alongside the IBM campus. (IBM, which is in the process of selling the plant to Global Foundries, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Amtrak’s role
The message of analyses such as Skoropowski’s or Redington’s is that, if the train maximizes all its advantages, it will prove a better deal than the bus. But, in the light of the actual numbers registered by small commuter systems around the country, that if looms very large. Formulating scenarios that will pass muster with the legislators who will vote on the funding may call for some outside-the-box thinking.
One possibility involves Amtrak’s New York City-Rutland train, the Ethan Allen Express, which the Shumlin administration wishes to extend north to Burlington. In theory at least, Burlington-Montpelier service could be appended to that route. That could mean, for example, transforming the Ethan Allen into a DMU train that, instead of going all the way to New York, would rendezvous with another Amtrak train, the Montreal-New York Adirondack, in upstate New York. The reconfigured Ethan Allen would leave Montpelier in the morning rush hour and, having passed through Burlington going to and returning from New York State, would get back to Montpelier early in the evening. This would combine a limited commuter function with connectivity to Amtrak’s national system.
The scenario would probably exclude any service to St. Albans, but it would entail far less cost. The question is, What’s realistic, financially and operationally, for a little state with the smallest biggest city in the country?
The role of the Ethan Allen will however probably fall outside the project description that VTrans will soon be sending to consultants bidding to perform the commuter rail study.
“The intent of the study is not to look at any extension of intercity rail that would mimic commuter rail,” VTrans’ Cole put it.
Fowler cautioned that VTrans has stumbled in the past by analyzing future rail service in isolation from other elements of the public transportation system.
He referred to a 2014 study sponsored by VTrans and the New York State Department of Transportation on possible passenger rail service between Rutland, Bennington and Albany, New York. That effort omitted any analysis of passenger service between Rutland and Burlington as “beyond the scope of this study,” even though the state had already committed itself to restoring Rutland-Burlington service, which would add substantially to the ridership predicted by the study. Fowler argued for a more holistic approach.
“It’s very worth looking at, not terminating the Ethan Allen in Burlington, but continuing it to some attractive destination — that could be Montpelier or St. Albans or Montreal,” he said.
The Ethan Allen as presently configured recovers roughly 52 percent of its operating expenses through fares and requires an annual state subsidy of about $2.7 million, based on Amtrak data.
One can only speculate how much subsidization the train would require if extended to Montpelier, but it is hard to imagine the train’s cost-recovery ratio plummeting to the single-digit level registered by small commuter rail systems such as those mentioned earlier.
Intercity Amtrak routes that are comparable to a reconfigured Ethan Allen route recovered about 37 percent of costs in 2014, according to Amtrak figures.
How the commuter rail service would be incorporated into the larger public transportation system, both within and beyond the state’s borders, is one of the most challenging questions for the VTrans study to answer.
Correction, June 23, 2015, 9:45 a.m.: Neither Eugene Skoropowski nor Tony Redington funded the rail proposals they produced.