Stimulate that MARC train!

I saw some good news in the Baltimore Business Journal this week. The Maryland Department of Transportation has applied for $360 million of stimulus funds to be applied to commuter and passenger rail improvements. It's a laundry list of good ideas, many of them discussed the in the strategic plan for the MARC that the MTA put out a few years ago. It's great to see that we might actually get funding for some of these improvements. If this funding comes through it should help with some of the complaints everyone has about train delays and rail capacity issues. The Baltimore Business Journal article has a lot of good information on what they're looking into, but I'll highlight a few that I think are pretty interesting.

The most important is probably the $200 million to replace three bridges in Maryland. The new bridges will be three tracks instead of two, allowing for more high-speed (well, Acela at least) trains and increased passenger train usage overall. This is really an important development because increasing train capacity on these bridges is really vital to expanding train service and improving it's timeliness in the region. This is money that will go directly into engineering and construction over the next couple years and will accomplish exactly what the stimulus was meant to do - keep companies going until the economy recovers and the private sector can provide the business. It's a great opportunity to do some good infrastructure work that we'd like to be doing anyway, but might have to pay a lot more for services if there was more demand.

Maryland's Department of Transportation has also asked for $10 million to install a GPS-tracking system in the trains (sounds a lot like what I was on about on about in my complaining-about-the-MARC post).

In the category of really-important-projects-that-we-need-to-start-immediately-because-they-will-take-FOREVER-to-complete is the work to replace/improve/expand the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) tunnel in Baltimore. This tunnel is really Baltimore's claim to passenger rail fame right now, because it is the choke point for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC). Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on the B&P tunnel and on the original Baltimore & Potomac railroad. Basically, the tunnel was completed in 1873 and aside from some repairs and minor improvements to drainage in the early 1980's, it is essentially a 19th century piece of infrastructure. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The B&P tunnel is a big problem for passenger rail travel along Amtrak's NEC because, as Amtrak's 2005 report to Congress on rail infrastructure in Baltimore (see page 2-16, Box 2-1) puts it, "A sharp curve at the south portal of the tunnel prevents southbound trains departing Baltimore Pennsylvania Station from accelerating beyond 30 mph. An uphill, milelong, 1.34 percent grade further constrains train performance." That's right, if you've ever thought "Hey, it feels like we're moving really slow," why heading south on the MARC, it's because that's exactly what was happening.

(Aside: That 2005 report is pretty fascinating, if dense, reading. After reading most of it one Sunday afternoon I got a much better appreciation of why we're still using such a difficult tunnel that opened 136 years ago. Turns out it's ridiculously difficult to build infrastructure in the Baltimore area due to geography - the "Fall Line" runs directly through Baltimore. The report was actually commissioned after the 2001 fire in the Howard St. Tunnel (another piece of 19th century infrastructure (completed in 1890)). When the Howard St. Tunnel was shut down due to a derailment, CSX freight trains on the south side of Baltimore had to detour west to Cleveland, north to Albany, and then head back south to reach the north side of Baltimore.)

So, anyway, this application for stimulus funds includes $60 million for studies and engineering on how to improve this tunnel. It's not going to be cheap, actual construction of a new tunnel will be in the billions of dollars. I have to be honest, I'm not super-optimistic we'll see that starting any time soon. Replacing the B&P tunnel will only shift the bottleneck to Baltimore's Union Tunnel on the other side of Penn Station. Although the Union Tunnel would be easier to upgrade because it's shorter and already has three tracks.

Anyway, there's your story for the day on how under-investment in passenger rail for the last 60 years has left us hamstrung now that we're winding down our love affair with the automobile. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we'll ever replace cars with public transit - I'm saying that America really needs more options for transportation. And if we don't start the projects, we'll never finish.

That's why I'm excited about this project, it's the perfect use of fiscal stimulus money. These are projects that you probably want to do anyway but might not get done when the economy is humming along. Once you're in a recession with a gap between possible output and actual demand and you decide you want the government to step in a provide some temporary demand until private demand recovers. Infrastructure projects like this fit the bill because they will improve passenger and freight movement capability and capacity when things begin to pick up again.

The MARC Train System in Graphs

Recently I've started using the MARC train system a lot (precipitated by wrecking my car and needing to get to work). It's more expensive than driving and my commute is not bad (I have a reverse commute), but I've found it's really a pleasant way to get to and from work. I've also found that there are WAY more people riding the train that I'd thought. I stick to the Baltimore area, but I'm super impressed about how many people are using the trains every day.

The MTA does not publish ridership statistics on the MARC trains, so I emailed their “Contact Us” page. Much to my (pleasant) surprise, they replied almost immediately and were more than happy to share information. In a world where most places ignore your emails or take days to give you a non-answer, the MTA is a great exception. Anyway, I learned some interesting facts:

1. MARC train get a lot of riders
2. Generally, more people are riding the MARC now than ever before
3. It's impossible to make strong statements about how much ridership the MARC is getting

Statements #1 and #2 come from the data that the MTA supplied me. Statement #3 comes from their ridership counting methodology. Here is exactly how they determine daily ridership: on the first Wednesday of the month conductors count everyone who gets on and off at each station. Why Wednesday? Because Wednesday is typically the peak usage day for the system. So, as you'd expect, the data is SUPER noisy and absolute numbers are unreliable. However, after looking it over I'd say that it's probably pretty good from a general trends standpoint. Getting better data is probably possible, but very expensive and of questionable usefulness. I'm pretty sure that the data the MTA does get is good enough to manage the system.

On the other hand, what the MARC data lacks in detail on a day-to-day basis is made up for in it's historical value. The MTA sent me a spreadsheet with their data for monthly ridership counts going back to October 2001! They included their 12 month moving average data going back to February 2002! And, in the spirit of sharing, I've put that spreadsheet up for anyone to download.

It's a lot of data, and whenever I'm confronted with a lot of data I try to graph it to make some sort of sense of it all. So since they sent me this data I've been manipulating it in different ways, trying to see what I can learn and how best to describe the whole system.

(Note: The following discussion assumes that you have a passing knowledge of the MARC train system. Wikipedia and the MTA have plenty of information, but basically you should know that there are 3 passenger train lines – the Penn Line, the Camden Line, and the Brunswick Line. The Penn Line operates on the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor tracks, the Camden Line and Brunswick Line are at the mercy of CSX freight trains. All lines terminate at Washington Union Station. The Camden Line terminates at Camden Yards in Baltimore. The Penn Line passes through Baltimore Penn Station and continues towards Aberdeen and terminates at Perryville. The Brunswick Line has two spurs, one to Martinsburg, WV and the other to Frederick.)

A final note on this data. The MTA counts total station usage (i.e. boardings plus alightings), so the number of passengers is the total usage divided by 2. All of these numbers are daily numbers, but counted on peak usage days, so the average is discounted by some amount (which I won't even guess at). The MARC trains operate weekdays (an average of 250 days per year).

First off, total station usage by station. I have split Washington Union Station into 3 pieces, one for each of the rail lines.

First of all, you're probably thinking “Wow, I never knew that there were so many MARC stations!” and “Wow, everyone's going to DC and they're doing it on the Penn Line.” The Penn Line blows the Camden and Brunswick lines out of the water in terms of total ridership. In June 2009, the Penn Line accounted for 63.5% of total MARC system usage. There are many reasons for this, including facts like better on-time performance because the Penn Line is on Amtrak-owned tracks, good station locations in population centers, and the whole idea of the rich getting richer – the Penn Line is highly used so more capital investment is made on the Penn Line to length platforms, build parkings spaces, etc.

What does total system usage look like? Well, in June 2009 the 12 month moving average of total usage was running at 34,274, which indicates over 17,000 passengers on peak days. That's a lot of cars off the road when you think about. Especially considering that roads and traffic delays are fairly non-linear, the more cars on the road the worse the effect of each marginal car. Since most of these trains run for commuters to reach DC, traffic could be far worse without this service.

Just how many of these passengers are going to DC? From the data I have, I can't answer that question. I can, however, answer a related question, “How many of these passengers arrive or depart from Union Station?” And, “How has that changed over time?”

This chart shows some very interesting trends. Over the course of the last 7 years, the Brunswick Line has increased the proportion of trips that do not involve Union Station from 30% to 40%. That's very helpful for the keeping Union Station from being overwhelmed (spoiler alert: Union Station is pretty much overwhelmed by commuter traffic). I think it's pretty easy to explain this trend though. The Brunswick Line makes stops at Rockville, Kensington, and Silver Spring – good place to get off the MARC and get onto the Metro. Many of the commuters on the Brunswick Line may well be going to DC, they just have better options than Union Station.

The second interesting trends on that chart is that the Camden Line's fraction of travelers not going to Union Station peaked in 2008 and has since decreased. My estimation there would be that during high gas prices in 2008 a few more people started to use the Camden Line to commute to downtown Baltimore. Baltimore's traffic and parking situation is nothing like DC's, so when gas prices eased people reverted to their old ways. Honestly though, this could just be a strange blip in the data. The Penn Line has such noisy data for trips that do not involve Union Station that it's hard to understand. When you look at total trips (instead of a fraction of the whole), the data is noisy enough to make you think there is just something wrong with it.

There are some strange dips and peaks in the Penn Line data while the Camden Line and Brunswick Line show much smoother trends. What is good news for the MARC system is the combination of these two graphs. Trips that do not involve Union Station are increasing faster than overall system growth (as evidenced by the fact that total number of trips has increased as well as the fraction of the total). This means that instead of a system that runs trains full of DC commuters one-way and empty trains the other, you are starting to get a few more paying customers on those trains that would otherwise be empty.

Now for a look at the total system usage over the last few years:

If you're a fan of public transit you've got to love a chart that looks like that. The R2 value is 0.96 for a line of increasing ridership from 2002 through 2009. The fit line says every day from February 2002 to June 2009, an additional 1.75 passengers started riding MARC trains. That's great news for the system, but it's not unconditionally good news. I've had a hard time finding official numbers on what “capacity” actually is for the system, but the numbers I have seen are striking similar to actual usage. That means that system is actually operating near capacity and could probably increase ridership further with additional resources.

This is a lot of growth, but where is it coming from? Are there stations that have actually seen fewer riders? In general, growth is everywhere; in specific, the Penn Line. Over the past 5 years the Penn Line has added more usage than the Camden Line has total.

Line	12 Mon. Moving Avg. Ridership		Increase	Increase (%)	Average Annual Growth Rate
	June 2004	June 2009
Penn	16,273	21,762	5,489	33.73%	6.0%
Camden	4,255	4,768	513	12.05%	2.3%
Brunswick	6,765	7,744	979	14.47%	2.7%
Total	27,293	34,274	6,980	25.58%	4.7%

Here are a few charts that show a “then and now” look at the three lines over the last five years. I've maintained the same scale between charts to illustrate how the Penn Line dominates the MARC system. I do not include Union Station simply because it would ruin the scale of the chart.




And finally, just because I have the data and can plot it, here is a look at Penn Line station usage over the last 7 years and Union Station usage by the three MARC lines.




For the Penn Line data, the most impressive part of this data is that even after the financial crisis and the tremendous drop in gas prices, the Penn Line has not lost passengers. Perhaps these passengers are like me, they started riding the train by necessity and they kept riding it because it's just a lot less stressful than fighting traffic. Honestly, I think the number one thing constraining ridership at some of these stations is just parking availability. The plans to build additional parking at West Baltimore will likely increase the ridership there.

Meanwhile, the data on Union Station shows just why that train station is able to support so many businesses and shops while Baltimore's Penn Station can barely support a snack stand and a souvenir store. Actually, that is a bit of a unfair comparison, Penn Station seems to have more than enough traffic to support a few more commercial enterprises – but I'll have more thoughts on that in another blog post.

Red Line - It Lives!

After months of no news out of the Red Line, aside from the fact that a "Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA)" decision would be made in the summer (after the public comment period ended in January), today there is finally some news!

Today Governor Martin O'Malley announced the LPA for the Red Line and it is 4C! If you have read any of my previous post on the Red Line, you know that this is the one that pretty much everyone wants. There is a vocal minority of people from Edmondson Village and Canton that are basically saying "Not In My Backyard", but it looks like O'Malley has picked 4C anyway since it's the most popular and likely to be funded by the federal government's New Starts program. This is key because if they'd waited much longer we would have missed this New Starts program and would have had to wait years for the next one.

Anyway, read the press release here. Go public transit!

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PS - Don't get me wrong, I think it's very important to address the concerns of residents in Canton and Edmondson Village, but they really haven't been able to provide a reasonable alternative that would have a price tag that anyone could afford. So compromises have been made, but effective public transit is really too important to our environment and future to not do this project. Some day I'll post a better description of the issue here, but no time today!