The 10 Most Useless Urban Rail Systems In the US: Poor Frequency, Weird Networks, Bad Land Use

building rail transit in the U.S is expensive and politically difficult but sometimes it feels like it's even more difficult to build ridership underfunded service weird Network design bad land use around stations So today we're going to investigate the 10 most underutilized Urban rail systems in Metro areas around the U.S and it's coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and this is yet another in the comments on my Workhorse streets video hello Xander said your videos are the niche content I've been looking for and lack the focus to research myself thanks I guess video idea most versus least effective rail Systems Dallas has relatively low ridership relative to the high number of Light Rail miles Seattle has a relatively High ridership relative to the low number of light rail miles how do other systems fare I think it's a cool thing to investigate and guess what national Transit database to the rescue again in previous videos I've used unlinked passenger trips and vehicle Revenue hours from the NTD to look at service and ridership in urbanized areas of the US but today I'm doing something a bit different you see the NTD also has a database of system track mileage you can slice and dice it all kinds of different ways the track mileage comes in multiple categories of at grade elevated and below grade but for this I'm just going to look at Raw total track miles so this is going to be real simple I'm using unlinked passenger trips essentially ridership as the numerator and total track miles as the denominator so the measure of Effectiveness is annual passenger trips per track Mile in other words what we're going to do here is identify and shame the cities that are getting the least bang for their Buck on the rail system they built a couple additional notes for this analysis I filtered out commuter rail or Regional Rail or whatever you want to call it because those systems by their nature connect further flowing suburbs and typically have lower frequencies what is included here is heavy rail so Subways and L's Light Rail and I included streetcar too since for me personally it's functionally the same thing as a lot of us Light Rail for the list itself though I'm not going to include cities that only have streetcar because then the list would be kind of funky and not really that interesting I will share the worst performing streetcar systems when we get to The Honorable Dimensions though and just to provide context let's look at the ridership per track mile of America's best performing metro area which is of course New York this includes the subway but also the PATH train the staff Staten Island Railway and the Light Rail lines that serve the New Jersey side I'm looking at 2019 data pre-pandemic as usual and it's a hair over 3 million annual passenger trips per track mile this is Head and Shoulders above every other U.S city in fact there's only one other metro area that exceeded even a million trips per track Mile and that was well hit the pause button if you want to stop and ponder it first but time's up it was Boston 1.3 million trips per track Mile Chicago DC San Francisco Oakland and actually Atlanta all also exceed half a million again this is just to set the context so that when I show you the ridership for track mile of the 10 cities that unfortunately made this list you have something to compare it to okay I think I've framed this up sufficiently so let's get into it number 10 is Denver 188 000 trips per track mile as to go through I'm going to talk a bit about what might be contributing to each of these cities under performance for Denver the RTD Rail lines run every 15 minutes at best which is really not great frequency for urban Rail and that's going to be a theme that runs through this whole list for land use let's look at Southmore station which is on the E H lines keep in mind this isn't even in the burbs this is actually in Denver proper so let's see platform less than 30 feet from active freeway travel Lanes check a decent land use is the backyards of some single-family homes excellent park and ride with a weird pedestrian underpass under the freeway yeah that all checks out can't imagine why ridership isn't stronger number nine is Salt Lake City Mountain West this is not off to a good start 153 000 trips per track Mile and their Lions also run every 15 min minutes at best just like Denver I hate to roast Salt Lake City because it does punch above its weight nicely when it comes to Transit but we just have to check out the land use let's drop down into Fashion Place West which I suppose is named after a mall that's over half a mile away I don't know I like to keep my station area analysis within a quarter mile so let's check out what's in the catchment area a huge freeway interchange which is always a plus a bunch of surface parking a self-storage facility a plant nursery single family housing yeah I know every station on the track system isn't like this but yikes number eight is Baltimore 151 000 trips per track mile this includes both the light rail which same as the others runs every 15 minutes at Peak but it also includes the subway which runs every eight minutes at peak times that's certainly not terrible so let's check out the land use as you get out west on the metro line you start running into a lot of Park and rides and single family housing I don't know I hate to pick on Baltimore but maybe housing density just doesn't pencil out for some reason but it just looks really bad number seven is Dallas Fort Worth with 135 000 trips per track mile I have no problem picking on Dallas Fort Worth it's the fourth largest metro area in the U.S and still growing fast and at peak times the trains run every 15 minutes I mean that's pretty shameful there are all kinds of she's going to look at with land use in the Metroplex but let's go right into the center of the city the MLK station on the dart green line is about two miles from downtown and this is what the land use looks like I kind of don't want to get into it but I would just point out how the neighborhood was characterized on the redlining maps of the 1930s an area of old houses not well kept mixed population I'd love to think we're a lot more enlightened about how we invest in communities these days compared to the 1930s but I'm just not seeing the evidence here number six is St Louis 132 000 trips per track mile another system that runs trains every 15 minutes at peak times in another city I just hate to pick on I actually like the land use around most of the stations in St Louis proper but man after you get past the Del Mar loop on the red line you start running into the stations that are situated in kind of industrial craters like Wellston I mean in the biz I guess we would call this an opportunity site except the red Line's been open since 1994 so when does an opportunity say it become something that's just never gonna happen St Louis folks let me know what you think number five is Pittsburgh 125 000 trips per track mile not a city I really expected to be in the bottom five like St Louis the trains run below grade downtown for land use it actually wasn't that easy to find a station area to make fun of it's maybe more the operations like yeah it runs below grade downtown but once you get out into the neighborhoods the sections where the land use is pretty good it's running on Street in mixed traffic and the sections where it runs in its own right-of-way the adjacent land use is really poor it all doesn't really explain why Pittsburgh performed so poorly on this metric so maybe part of it is we're just getting into cities that are in the rest belt where maybe they're just not getting the population growth or housing demand that would fuel strong Transit oriented development on the other hand for number four we're going to California this is Sacramento 119 000 trips for track mile trains every 15 minutes at best it's the state capital it's a metro area of around 2.5 million so about the same as Portland Sacramento's first line opened in 1987 which is one year after Portland's first line opened now it's 2022 the Portland light rail network looks like this and Sacramento's looks like this there's a lot of transit-oriented non-development in every direction all over the system there are a lot of station areas that look like this one at Cordova Town Center which appears to be neither a town nor a center there's just a whole lot of impervious surface and the nearest land uses to the platform are like a drive-through bank and a gas station the housing crisis is a big deal in major cities all over California so this is really just kind of shocking so number three is San Jose California where typical home values are in the 1.5 million dollar range VTA Light Rail is getting about 105 000 Riders per track Mile and the lines are running at best every 20 minutes right now so that's a problem with land use there's nothing as Barren is what we've seen in the other cities on this list but when you go up and down the lines it's mostly medium density Suburban office parks in Landis planning you're often trying to balance the location of Housing and employment and trying to build some kind of synergy but there's just not much balance here you have to say the Bay Area is just very very weird okay while you Ponder what the top two could possibly be quick pause to harass you into giving the video a like and positively subscribing if this is the kind of content you're into if once a week just doesn't seem to be enough for some reason I am on Twitter and IG and I do have a patreon where I post a little bit of bonus content as well anyway links are down in the description sub count check the channel now has enough subscribers to fill St James Park home of the magpies of Newcastle United really one of my favorite premier league stadiums I mean in years when Newcastle hasn't been relegated which probably isn't going to happen again anytime soon it's like they took half of a third tier stadium and half of an enormous American college football stadium and just kind of smash them together anyway good urbanism surrounding the park and a metro stop right friend honorable mentions aren't really appropriate here but there are a bunch of cities I kind of expected to see on this list that I'm pleasantly surprised didn't show up and maybe that says more about me than it says about these cities but Charlotte Phoenix Houston Miami you're all solidly middle of the pack so congratulations I guess and like I mentioned earlier this would be a very different list if I counted all the cities that just have like a single streetcar line which I didn't do because it would be an even more boring list than it is already in fact we'd get a completely different top five you'd get El Paso Texas Little Rock Arkansas Memphis Tennessee Oklahoma City and Kenosha Wisconsin this isn't to say that every city where the only rail is a streetcar performs poorly on this metric the Kansas City streetcar actually has excellent ridership more Riders per track Mile in 2019 in fact than the urban rail systems in cities like Seattle LA and Philly if you can believe it okay number two let's go back to the Rust Belt Cleveland has both heavy Rail and Light Rail like Baltimore and it does have trains every 15 minutes at peak hour some of the system dates to 1913 but the Workhorse is the red line which opened in 1955. I do like a heavy rail service that goes to the airport but man the stations you have on the way out there are kind of miserable it's like the worst mix of single family residential and Industrial uses with surface lot park and rides and number one is I never know what to call this and I don't know what the central city is the rail service centers on Norfolk and the rail system in question was serving 91 000 trips per track Mile in 2019. like a lot of others on this list it's 15 minute service at peak times the station areas are just a mess you've got this one at Military Highway where like half the catchment area is occupied by a freeway Cloverly leaf and then you've got this one at Ingleside Road that's kind of landlocked between the freeway and the river and there's just established single family residential there I tried not to come down too hard on Transit planners because I know it's a hard job but how on Earth did they come up with this alignment okay that's all I got thanks for watching thanks to the patrons whose contributions help sustain these weekly installments of drivel it does mean a lot keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 256,519

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban planning, bus rapid transit, light rail, city planning

Id: iEUg9ymgrXk

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022