Two trains sliding backward on their tracks. Five buses stuck in the snow. Thirteen minor accidents.
That series of events led officials of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority to take the unprecedented step of suspending all service for 12 hours during the weekend of Jan. 16-17 after a winter storm dumped 15 inches of snow on Northeast Ohio.
But that decision has come under fire from public transit advocates, prompting RTA managers to defend the service suspension during a recent meeting of the RTA board of trustees.
RTA General Manager India Birdsong told trustees that the storm created a unique situation in which snow accumulation of more an inch per hour overwhelmed the system.
Chief Operating Officers Floun’say Caver, said that included two train operators reporting losing traction.
Caver said RTA sent a snow train out to clear tracks but later discovered the problem with lost traction was caused by ice building up on brake shoes rather than track conditions.
Still critics said the service suspension raises concerns because the Cleveland region routinely gets heavy snowfalls every winter.
They pointed to an RTA blog post in 2019 that public transit was a reliable way to get around during harsh winter weather.
Caver defended the service suspension, which was RTA’s first in 19 years.
“I am confident with the decision to have to prioritize the safety, the life and the health of this community,” he said.
Still, Alex Rubin, a member of Clevelanders for Public Transit said the mid-January storm was not historic by any standard.
“Should we expect there to be no bus or rapid service the next time it snows?”
“It should not happen every year,” Birdsong said in response. “This is something we can work to be in avoidance of, and we absolutely will do that.”
All Aboard Ohio called the RTA service suspension another example of RTA’s failure to update its fleet.
“It’s bad enough that GCRTA has let the Rapid fall into disrepair from decades of neglect and a failure to fund and procure replacement of equipment, some of which is way beyond its designed life span,” AAO Executive Director Stu Nicholson wrote on Twitter.
“But a total shutdown of the Rapid along with all bus service makes us wonder if this is willful neglect on the part of GCRTA management.”
Nicholson wants an investigation of the shutdown and for the appointment of new RTA trustees to address it.
Clevelanders for Public Transit made similar statements on its Twitter feed.
RTA officials noted they have taken steps to improve the fleet, including using COVID-19 pandemic emergency aid to buy 40 new buses that are expected to enter service in the fall.
Sixteen new vehicles for the Healthline busline were placed into service in January.
Replacing the rail fleet, though, has been a heavier lift. RTA in 2019 put out a request for proposals from transit vehicle manufacturers only to reject last summer the one proposal it received as inadequate.
A second request for proposals has a deadline of March 9 and RTA officials say a vote by trustees on a bid could occur later this year.
RTA projects that replacing its rail fleet will cost $717 million over a 30-year period.
In the interim, RTA trustees have agreed to spend $2.2 million to replace traction motors on rail cars in the wake of 18 traction motor failures last year. The traction motors were last replaced in 2012.
New rail cars, when they do arrive, will have antilock brakes that Caver said will help their performance during winter weather.
He said the new cars also would have better slide protection and more snow cutters to keep the tracks and overhead power lines clear.
As for the mid-January storm, Caver said, “the trains, for the most part, held up fairly well, but this weather environment created these issues that we had.”
More Hope Than Plan at This Point
February 3, 2021News outlets in Ohio over the past few of days have reported stories about Amtrak service expansion plans in the state.
Most of these routes would have multiple daily frequencies including four daily roundtrips on the Chicago-Cincinnati route.
The 3C corridor service would be three daily roundtrips while the Cleveland-New York service would be two daily roundtrips via Buffalo and one roundtrip via Pittsburgh.
Amtrak would fund these services through a program for which it is seeking $300 million from Congress.
For its part, Amtrak has been issuing a written statement to reporters seeking information that is far less detailed.
After stating that corridor services of 500 miles are the fastest growing segment of its network, the passenger carrier has said, “We have developed a visionary plan to expand rail service across the nation, providing service to large metropolitan areas that have little or no Amtrak service.
“We are working with our state partners, local officials and other stakeholders to understand their interests in new and improved Amtrak service and will be releasing that plan soon. We will call on Congress to authorize and fund Amtrak’s expansion in such corridors by allowing us to cover most of the initial capital and operating costs of new or expanded routes”
And that’s it. The statement did not provide any details about specific routes and service levels.
The specific information came from All Aboard Ohio, an advocacy group that has long sought without success to push for creation of a network of passenger trains in the Buckeye state.
But is this proposal the “game changer” that some on social media are calling it?
It could be but keep in mind it is simply a proposal. There is no guarantee Congress will approve funding for the corridor development program and no guarantee that any of the proposed Ohio trains will ever turn a wheel.
AAO public affairs director Kenneth Prendergast acknowledged in an interview with Trains magazine that the five corridors that his group has identified are “more of an outline or goal than a plan.”
Amtrak officials have been meeting with local officials throughout Ohio to discuss the corridor program proposal. Similar meetings have been held in other states, including Tennessee and Kansas.
Based on what Amtrak government affairs officials said during state legislative hearings in those states, Amtrak would front the costs of route development and pay operating expenses on a sliding scale for up to five years.
State and local governments would have to begin underwriting the service starting in the second year and assume all funding after the fifth year.
If you read the Amtrak statement carefully, it says the passenger carrier would pay for most of the initial capital and operating costs.
That is not necessarily the 100 percent federal funding factoid that AAO described in a post on its website and it officers have been talking up in news media interviews.
In fairness, though, the AAO post later said that Amtrak might pay up to 100 percent of the initial capital costs and up to 100 percent of the operating costs for the first two years.
Given that Amtrak has yet to release details about the corridor development program and has yet to formally ask Congress to fund it, there is much that remains unknown.
And given that the Amtrak statement falls short of saying it will pay all costs of getting a route up and running it is reasonable to conclude that state and local governments would need to pay something, although we don’t know yet what that would be.
One guess is local and state money would need to help fund station development.
Not even AAO expects the proposed services to come to fruition anytime soon.
Writing on Twitter, AAO said it can take three to six years to get a route started depending on its complexity.
In the meantime, AAO has said it will seek a “small appropriation” in the next biennial budget to pay for state-level planning of the five proposed corridors.
It is not clear whether Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio legislative leaders would be receptive to that.
AAO argues that DeWine is more inclined to be supportive of passenger rail than was his predecessor, John Kasich.
As a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, Kasich adamantly opposed using a $400 million federal stimulus grant the state had received to start 3C service.
Upon being elected, Kasich returned that money to the U.S. Department of Transportation although not before making an unsuccessful pitch that the state be allowed to redirect the grant toward highway development.
AAO contends that DeWine has asked the Ohio Department of Transportation to put passenger rail “back on the radar.” But the scope of DeWine’s support for passenger rail has yet to be publicly articulated.
It is all but certain that once concrete proposals are introduced in the legislature authorizing spending state money on rail passenger service development that opposition will arise from opponents decrying wasting public money.
Another unknown is what demands the host railroads would make to agree to allow these trains to use their tracks.
We know that in the past host railroads have submitted lists of millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements as the price of acceptance.
How necessary those improvements were is debatable, but the demands seemed exorbitant enough to discourage the proposed service.
Such pricey demands have thwarted efforts to operate the Chicago-New York Cardinal and the Los Angeles-New Orleans Sunset Limited daily rather than tri-weekly.
Some of the articles and social media posts about the proposed Ohio corridors have noted that President Joseph Biden is an avid supporter of passenger rail and is expected to release an infrastructure proposal later this year.
Passenger rail advocates are hoping to use that as the springboard to shake loose billions of federal dollars for passenger rail development.
It may be a time to be optimistic yet nothing is certain. At best Amtrak’s proposal represents hope. But as we’ve seen in the past, those hopes can be a very fragile thing.
Tags:3C passenger corridor, All Aboard Ohio, Amtrak, Amtrak in Ohio, commentaries on transportation, intercity passenger rail service, Ohio's 3C Corridor, On Transportation, posts on transportation
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