Obscure Transit: SacRT Light Rail

this video was made possible thanks to the support of my patrons over on patreon you probably have never heard of this light rail system in the center of California Sacramento is a city that despite being the capital of America's most populous state is often overshadowed by the larger cities in the state such as Los Angeles San Diego and especially from the nearby cities of the Bay Area but Sacramento by no means is a small City with over 500,000 residents in the actual City and over 2 5 million residents in the Sacramento Metro Area it's about the same size as cities like Portland Oregon and Denver Colorado however while both of these cities are known for having transit systems Sacramento's system often gets overshadowed but why well let's take a look at America's most forgotten light rail system it's the 1980s and the vast majority of transportation funding is going to the same place it has been for the past 30 years you know building more highways and making existing roads even wider however a few cities are actually starting to warm up to the idea of building transit systems for themselves mostly just to reduce traffic on their already insanely congested highways and seeing the success of public transit reducing traffic following the construction of three modern Metro systems in Atlanta the Bay Area and DC and there's actually a fair amount of cities that are interested in doing just that just one little problem there isn't much Federal funding to back them up on building huge Metro systems for their midsize cities so what kind of Transit could they possibly build well one city decided to import an idea from Europe that had seen some success in smaller cities and brought it to their own in 1981 San Diego opened up the first section of what would eventually become the MTS trolley Network and while they weren't the first city on the continent to build a modern light rail system they definitely inspired a bunch of other American cities to build out a similar line and one of the first cities that saw the potential of this new system was just to the north in the state capital of Sacramento what was truly appealing about light rail Transit then and now is the lower cost to construct these kinds of systems with the cost being significantly less to buy the Rolling Stock and the fact that you could convert existing rail ride of way into trackage for your light rail which made it super appealing especially to American cities on the western half of the country which saw some major railroads starting to go Belly Up Sacramento followed a similar model to what San Diego did in building out their Light Rail starting with One Singular line utilizing Street running sections in downtown and Highway medians as well as former Western Pacific Branch line rideways once it got outside of downtown the sacrt light rail first opened to the public in March of 1987 under the name of RT Metro over the next couple of decades sacrt would undergo system expansions that would extend service throughout the nearby cities and suburbs of the Sacramento Metro Area the first extension of the network came in 1998 on what is now the Gold Line from its original Terminus at Butterfield to matfield and Mills however throughout the 2000s the network would more than double in size due to its planned expansions the system would also received some updated Rolling Stock from calf to supplement their Fleet to help service these new stations in l lines first was the South Sacramento extension which added on over 6 M of trackage to the sacrt light rail network this South Extension would be designated as part of Sac RT's blue line but this wasn't the only major expansion of the 2000s because on top of this between the years of 2004 through 2007 sacrt worked on a major expansion to what is now the Gold Line which extended it to the east with a new Terminus at fulam and it also extended the line to the West with its new Terminus being at Sacramento's downtown train station a few years later in 2012 the city would see the opening of The Green Line Sacramento's thirdd light rail line and in 2015 sacrt finished construction on the most recent extension of the light rail network extending the Blue Line south to its new Terminus at consom River College now that we've gotten a look at the history of sacrt let's take a look at I mentioned some of the systems extensions but how about we get a full view of the light rail network the sacrt light rail network consists of three lines first we have the blue line starting with its Southern Terminus at consom River College in South Sacramento the line runs north through Center Parkway Meadow View Floren 47th Avenue Fruit Ridge City College fourth Aven Wayne and Broadway the line then runs through downtown Sacramento before continuing Northeast and stopping at Alkali flat La Valentina Globe ardan El Paso Royal Oaks Swanson Marone arcade and Roseville Road before reaching its Northeastern Terminus at Watt and I80 up next we have the Gold Line this line starts at its eastern Terminus in historic fulam and runs West stopping at Glenn Robert G holderness Iron Point Hazel Sunrise Cordova Town Center Zinfandel matfield and Mills Butterfield Tyber Starfire Waton man love college greens power in University and 65th Street 59th Street 48th Street 39th Street UC Davis Hill 29th Street and 23rd Street from here the line enters downtown and continues to run West until it reaches its Western Terminus at Sacramento Valley Station finally we have the green line which starts north of downtown at 7th and Richards Township 9 before running South through downtown and terminating on the other side of downtown at 13th Street Station both the blue and the gold line operate 7 days a week from 4:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. with trains running every 15 minutes for most of the day with operations after 700 p.m. changing over to running every 30 minutes the green line however runs with similar hours 7 days a week however it only runs every 30 minutes no matter the time of day a single one-way trip on the sack RT Light Rail is going to set you back about $2.50 sacrt also offers other fairs for more frequent Riders including a $7 day pass a $50 unlimited ride two week pass and a $100 unlimited ride monthly pass some of these passes are good for other agencies in the region including YOLO bus Amador Regional Transit fome Stage Line and a few other agencies depending on the type of pass that you have at the moment sacrt is using a few different trains for their operations along their light rail network the two most common trains you're going to run into at the moment along the Sacramento Light Rail are the Seaman dual EG u2a and the s200 made by calf the Dual wgs have been running in service on the light rail since its opening and as mentioned earlier in the video the calf lrts were acquired in the early 2000s to help supplement the fleet during the expansion of of the system you'll generally also see sacrt running two car consists on the blue and gold lines with one car consists running on the green line despite the increase in overall trackage that sacrt operates on the light rail network has actually seen a decrease in ridership over the past decade and a half however sacrt is currently working on improvements to turn this around increase ridership and bring back rail transit to more parts of the Sacramento Metro area one of the newest projects that sacrt is about to complete is the modernization of their Rolling Stock I mentioned earlier that some of the vehicles on the network have been running on sacrt since day one of the system and to say that they're completely outdated would be an understatement in fact they're quite literally falling apart which obviously isn't good however what is good is The Replacements that they're getting sacrt placed an order with Seaman Mobil for 45 s700 Light Rail Vehicles these are currently being used by multiple other agencies across the US and will provide many benefits including improved wayfinding and level boarding with improved accessibility for riders with the last of the brand new s700 rolling out of the Seaman Factory based in Sacramento sacrt has been testing these new trains for the past year and plan to completely replace the DU wigs in the next couple of months outside of the modern ation of Rolling Stock sacrt is looked at expanding Light Rail service to other parts of the Sacramento area one of the weirdest quirks of the network has to be the insanely short Green Line this line only contains one stop that's separate from the rest of the network but this is actually just considered to be the first phase of the green line as the original plan for the green line from the start has been to connect it to Sacramento's airport to the northwest of downtown this extension to the green line would add 12 Mi of track to the network 14 new stations the creation of a brand new rail bridge to cross the American river and would without a doubt be the most expensive project that sacrt has undertaken unfortunately due to the high cost of what it would take to build this major extension Sac RT has had some struggles finding a way to fund this project and unfortunately it remains in kind of a limbo the other service expansion that sacrt has looked into is a 1 and 1/2 Mile along street car line that would run West over the tower bridge from downtown and provide Transit service to West Sacramento the plan for this project is to begin Construction in 20127 as final permitting gets wrapped up over the next year and to eventually begin service sometime around 2030 Sacramento's Light Rail has often struggled with ridership mainly from issues of its creation as a value engineered system utilizing existing R of ways help make construction easy early on but it has hurt ridership relegating many stations to be in Highway medians or parking rides however a lot has changed since the original construction of the sacrt light rail with a new understanding that Transit oriented development helps to encourage ridership that Transit is for more than just the commute toer job and that Transit is essential for the creation of safer and more sustainable cities sacrt with its buses and Light Rail will continue to evolve and adapt to help the city of Sacramento get around and help it become a better place to live but how do you feel about the sacrt light rail how was your experience on it what changes could they make to help improve your experience let me know in the comments below and if you enjoyed this video be sure to like And subscribe I'd like to thank everybody who helped me make this video I also have to thank Tony stunts and all of my other patrons who helped support the channel without their support this video wouldn't have been made so thank you so much for supporting the channel and if you want to get early access to my videos extra video content your name and the credits and more feel free to check out my patreon the link is down below you can also find my socials down there I post updates news and extra content if you've made it this far thank you so much for watching the video your support has been incredible as of recent and as always I'll see y'all on the next one

Channel: Climate and Transit

Views: 7,903

Keywords: Sacramento, SacRT, Transit, Bus, Light Rail, LRT, LRV, California, California Transit, Tram, Streetcar, Urbanism, Yolobus, SacRT Light Rail, City Planning, Public Transit, Trains, Train, MTS, San Diego, San Diego Trolley, S700, Trams

Id: mEQ9dwg0R0M

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024