California’s Passenger-Rail Boom: Can It be Replicated?
By Fritz Plous
It is hard to believe today that when Amtrak started up on
May 1, 1971, the State of California got more of its passenger
rail service from long-distance than local trains. Two routes
reached the state from Chicago – one from New Orleans
and one originated in Seattle – but the only trains
scheduled strictly for intrastate passengers were three L.A.-San
Diego trains and a daily run between Los Angeles and Oakland
over the Southern Pacific's Coast Line.
Compare that with 2003. California still gets service from
the same four long-distance routes. But its intrastate service
has blossomed into a whole fleet of state-supported Amtrak
trains shuttling along three different corridors and offering
58 departures every weekday. And the passengers can’t
seem to get aboard fast enough.
“California has, by far, the largest state-supported
intercity passenger rail program today, both in terms of dollars
and riders, and is considered by many to be the model in state-supported
intercity passenger rail service,” said California Department
of Transportation Director Jeff Morales when he testified
before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Surface Transportation
Subcommittee June 5.
Morales’s claim is borne out by other numbers: 3.6
million trips taken in Fiscal Year 2002, amounting to 47 percent
of all corridor ridership outside Amtrak’s Northeast
Corridor and 16 percent of Amtrak’s total ridership.
Morales said he expects that number to rise to nearly 20 percent
of Amtrak’s ridership in FY 2003 more than 4 million
trips. Amtrak California, as the jointly sponsored corridor
services are called, almost certainly will make its numbers.
April ridership on all three routes showed double-digit increases
over the same month in 2002, with the popular San Diego-Los-Angeles-Santa
Barbara “Pacific Surfliner” service up over 25
percent.
Why is intercity train ridership growing faster in California
than in the rest of the Amtrak system, including the Northeast
Corridor?
One possible answer might be what the legendary Willie Sutton
told a reporter who asked him why he robbed banks: “That’s
where the money is.”
When it comes to passenger-train investment, California definitely
is “where the money is.” Since 1976 the state
has invested $1.7 billion in capital funding for track and
signal improvements, new stations, new maintenance shops,
and new locomotives and cars. The program even offers a fleet
of privately operated feeder buses devoted exclusively to
ferrying passengers from outlying communities to stations
on the rail system.
“Because of the buses, more than 95 percent of California’s
population is served by our statewide rail/bus system,”
says Caltrans Rail Division Chief Warren D. Weber.
California’s efforts to build up its Amtrak service
started out modestly in 1974, when Amtrak started a daily
round trip over the 315-mile San Joaquin Valley route between
Oakland and Bakersfield.
That first San Joaquin train received no state support, but
two years later, in 1976, California entered the 403(b) program,
using state funds to help pay for a fourth train to run between
L.A. and San Diego. In 1979 the state began paying part of
the operating costs for the San Joaquin route, with a second
round trip added, and throughout the late 70s and early 80s
it continued to fund expansion of the L.A.-San Diego service,
with some trains being extended north of L.A. to Santa Barbara
starting in 1988.
But it wasn’t enough. With population booming and freeway
congestion becoming unmanageable, California needed more trains
than Amtrak’s limited budget could support.
“In the 1980s we were bitterly complaining that Amtrak
was not providing enough resources to meet our needs,”
says Weber. “Los Angeles-San Diego was the second-fastest-growing
rail corridor in the nation, but Amtrak would not supply enough
cars and locomotives for us to grow the service.”
The answer to that problem came in June, 1990, when California
voters approved three of those “Propositions”
for which the Golden State has become famous:
• Proposition 108, the Clean Air Bond Act, authorized
the state to issue $1 billion worth of general-obligation
bonds to improve railroad infrastructure, $225 million of
it dedicated to intercity passenger-rail projects.
• Proposition 116, the Clean Air and Transportation
Improvement Act, provided $1.99 billion for various rail and
transit projects, including some $382 million for new rolling
stock and locomotives and $20 million for track improvements
on the San Joaquin route.
• Proposition 111 authorized the state to begin an
incremental increase in the motor-fuel tax, which had been
stuck well below the national norm at 9 cents per gallon for
20 years. It also authorized an increase in truck weight fees,
also necessary if the state was to improve its highways.
Why was a highway Proposition important to passenger-rail
financing? The answer is that old legislative stratagem known
as “log-rolling.” State Sen. Jim Costa (D-Fresno),
arguably California’s most powerful rail advocate, crafted
legislative language making highway funding dependent on approval
of funding for rail improvements. Prop. 108 could not take
effect unless SCA 1, a constitutional amendment allowing state
motor-fuel taxes to pay for rail improvements, also passed,
in effect giving rail advocates an inducement to support increased
highway funding in return for rail support from the highway
crowd.
It worked. All three measures passed.
The results weren’t long in coming. The bond proceeds
enabled the state to finance additional track and signals
on the freight railroads over which the trains operate. Meanwhile,
traffic-congestion-relief funds will be used to construct
14 miles of third track along the BNSF main line between downtown
Los Angeles and Fullerton. This is the busiest part of the
Surfliners’ territory, and the extra track is a “must”
if California is to continue to expand this popular service,
which now sees 11 round trips Monday through Thursday and
a 12th trip on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The bond funds also got California deeply into train ownership.
By the mid-90s, Morrison-Knudsen Corporation was delivering
the first of 66 new bi-level “California Cars”
designed to California’s specifications. To pull the
cars the state purchased 10 F59PH diesel-electric locomotives
from the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors. In addition
to providing a level of passenger comfort not known in the
old Amtrak equipment, the new fleet provided Caltrans with
the capacity it needed to demonstrate the importance of multiple
frequencies in building ridership.
“Six trips a day is the magic number when ridership
really starts to grow,” Weber says. “Frequency,
reliability and competitive time with the auto are the keys.”
The new rolling stock provides the frequency and reliability
that Amtrak’s meager supply of older equipment could
not. These trains are limited to 79 mph except on a short
segment of track between Los Angeles and San Diego where Automatic
Train Stop allows speeds up to 90 mph.
Yet Amtrak California has become car-competitive –
not because its trains are so fast but because California’s
freeway congestion keeps autos slow. Especially between L.A.
and San Diego, the train typically beats the car.
In 2000 Amtrak California began receiving a new set of trains
specifically designed for the San Diego-Los Angeles-Santa
Barbara “Pacific Surfliner” route (on which one
daily train runs as far north as San Luis Obispo). Forty new
“Surfliner” cars arrived from Alstom Transport,
which had acquired and improved Morrison-Knudsen’s California
Car designs. The Surfliners were ordered by Amtrak. California
ordered another 22 Surfliner cars of its own.
Today, in addition to its 11 weekday Surfliner round trips,
Amtrak California operates six San Joaquin trains, four of
which run from Bakersfield to Oakland while two switch off
the line at Stockton and terminate in Sacramento. And the
state’s youngest intrastate service, the Sacramento-Bay
Area Capitol Corridor founded in 1991, has overcome its late
start and now carries 1.1 million riders per year on 12 daily
round trips. One trip originates at Auburn, 36 miles east
of Sacramento in the Sierra foothills. And four of the trips
(six on weekends) have been extended from Oakland to San Jose
at the western end.
A major force in making the Amtrak California program successful
is marketing. The state spends $5 million a year on it, issuing
a separate four-color, slick-paper timetable folder for each
route. The state-funded folders use easy-to-understand color
coding to highlight each train and each connecting bus while
suppling abundant information on local transit connections,
points of interest and even local history.
For demographic reasons, the Pacific Surfliner corridor remains
the busiest and fastest-growing of Amtrak California’s
three routes. Its most recent victory has come from a marketing
innovation known as “Rail 2 Rail” that premiered
in the Los Angeles metro area in September. Under Rail 2 Rail,
commuters who use monthly passes to ride L.A.’s Metrolink
suburban trains can use the same passes on the Amtrak California
Surfliners.
“Most of the Metrolink trains are scheduled for rush
hour, which means that commuters who need to go home early
or start work late often find there is no commuter train when
they want to travel,” Weber says. “But with Rail
2 Rail they can use a mid-day Surfliner train at no extra
cost. And it works both ways. If you’re holding an Amtrak
ticket you can ride Metrolink if it serves the destination
on your pass.
“The result has been a win-win,” Weber says.
“Metrolink is selling more monthly passes now, because
the riders know they can use them throughout the day on both
kinds of trains, and Amtrak wins because Metrolink pays Amtrak
for their pass holders to ride an Amtrak train. Ridership
on the Surfliners has been up 30,000 per month in each of
the last seven months, with 20,000 of those rides attributed
to the Rail 2 Rail program.”
What lessons can other states learn from California’s
experience?
Obviously, the willingness of California’s voters to
take on indebtedness to fund a passenger-rail program was
key.
But it’s not clear that the same thing could happen
elsewhere. California’s constitution makes it easy to
set up referenda (“Propositions”). The process
is more cumbersome and controversial in other states. In the
Midwest, the money to fund passenger trains must be appropriated
by the state legislature.
California also had some remarkable luck back in 1990 that
states may not be able to duplicate today, including a dedicated
environmentalist group, the Planning & Conservation League,
headed by its shrewd and resourceful executive director, Jerry
Merrill.
“Jerry did two smart things,” said a California
rail advocate. “First, he designed Prop. 116 so it was
project-specific. Every county in the state knew exactly what
bike trail it was going to get. Every city that wanted to
start a light-rail system knew exactly how much money it would
get. It brought everybody in, made everybody a stakeholder.”
The other “smart thing” Merrill did was to enlist
the considerable lobbying abilities of the Southern Pacific
Railroad, California’s largest landowner and a major
power in the state’s politics since its founding in
the 1860s by the “Big Four” – Leland Stanford,
Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Collis P. Huntington. Despite
its enduring political power in the Golden State, SP in the
early 1990s was financially shaky and awaiting rescue by a
merger with the Union Pacific. It desperately needed money
for track improvements. By including track money for SP in
the referendum’s language, Merrill made sure the measure
would have the carrier’s support.
Finally, the three Propositions enjoyed almost perfect timing.
The California economy was growing strongly in 1990, and voters
were confident the state’s tax collections would grow
at a rate sufficient to pay off the rail bonds.
The importance of that window of prosperity would become apparent
two years later, when another pair of rail bond issues was
submitted to the voters. By 1992 the nation was in recession
and the bond issues failed. Another bond issue is unlikely
until California works its way out of its current $38-billion
deficit.
“Timing is everything,” Weber says.
Thus, California’s experience does carry some lessons
that other states can use. But the biggest lesson is that,
except in unusual circumstances, no state can expect to fund
a serious passenger-rail service on its own – at least
not indefinitely. Passenger rail, like other modern transportation
programs, cannot develop or grow over the long term without
strong federal support.
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