It seems like a realistic, cost efficient rail connection between Downtown and Oakland is the white whale of Pittsburgh public transport. I have created a system that runs on existing rail rights-of-way that could hopefully solve these problems. You can view it here on Google Maps.
A few notes:
The first station is Penn Station downtown. This would connect to Steel Plaza, and would provide an intermodal transfer opportunity to Amtrak and Greyhound bus services (once the new bus station opens). It's possible you could get rid of this station.
The second station provides service to the Strip District. I have located it near 24th and Liberty so that it can provide coverage for the whole strip district and avoid being too close to Downtown. It also provides transfer options to the East Busway for trips to East Liberty.
The third station is Bloomfield, providing access to residential neighborhoods and Liberty Ave business district. It is also a couple blocks from West Penn hospital.
The fourth station is North Oakland, providing service for...North Oakland.
The final station is Oakland Central, and while it looks to be closer to CMU, the street level entrance would be near the Carnegie on Forbes. The actual station would exist in Panther Hollow, and
large escalators (red line on the map) would shuffle passengers up to Forbes Avenue. right into central Oakland.
6 comments:
So that right of way and track is owned by CSX, I believe. I wonder how much they would want for allowing your service to use it. It would not be cheap, I imagine. But it has to be better than building from scratch, right? Also, how fast would you have to go to make it better than bus service? You lose a lot of convenience by only having a few stations.
One of the biggest obstacles to building new rail service is constructing right of way...so I definitely think it'd be cheaper to use the existing right of way. Incremental (operating) costs would probably be higher cause you'd have to pay CSX, and you'd also have to have gaps in service when the freight trains run, but you wouldn't have the construction barrier. The total track length is about 3.5 miles, I'd estimate it'd take 10 minutes from downtown (21mph avg speed, including stops). It's possible it could be faster than that (7-8 minutes), but I'd say 10 mins is a conservative guess. That's 6 minutes (nearly 40% faster) than the 61C or other Forbes based bus services.
The right of way would be expensive, and RRs can't be taken through condemnation. I can't seriously understand everyone's fetish with rail transportation in this town. It is so much more cost and labor intensive to operate than bus service, and is a huge drain on the Port Authority right now, yet everyone wants more of it. Buses allow for flexibility of routing and can change with demographics and real estate development in new areas. Honestly, do you think rail service in Beechview has made that place better? It is a dump and they've had non-stop rail service since the 20's. Buses are cheap to buy and cheap to run. If you want to pay $5 a ride, then the train is for you. I want dependable service at $2 a ride instead.
I had this idea when I was in high school in Oakland. At the time a loop using what's now the Eliza Furnace trail even seemed possible.
Anonymous makes good points.
CSX and PAT couldn't share the tracks if they wanted to.
1) the CSX tracks are US Standard guage - 4 feet 8.5 inches; the T is Pennsylvania Broad guage - 5 feet 2.5 inches.
2) even if guage were not an issue, Federal regulations preculde the concurrent operation of freight railways with transit vehicles due to the difference in crash-worthiness. Some locales have resolved this by alloting the tracks to freight from Midnight to 6 Am and transit the remainder of the day.
One point of interest of mine is how to link Bloomfield into the mainline east end transportation better. To wit - how to get them a busway station or a station on your line? The valley through which either run is rather deep and I was curious how you would address that. Incline would be cool, though a huge escalator ala Dupont Circle in DC would likely out.
Keep up the interesting posts!
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