Brilliant idea: raise fares

Hey, the system's working so well since change day -- southbound FrontRunner's been on time to the North Temple station two out of eight times on my weekday runs, meaning I miss my bus and have to make trnsfers -- that UTA poobahs have decided to hike fares. Read about it at The Salt Lake Tribune.

A snippet:

Just after 10 anti-poverty and environmental groups asked the Utah Transit Authority board Wednesday to work toward lower fares to increase ridership, cut pollution and assist the poor, the board adopted a final 2013 budget that counts on an already approved 6 percent fare hike.

That will raise regular one-way fares from $2.35 to $2.50 for bus and TRAX trips beginning April 1 and is the last of several fare-hike steps approved last year.

The streak continues

First train to Clearfield is due at 5:31. Actual arrival time: 5:37.

Thanks, UTA.

UPDATE: Got off the FR at North Temple and a 516 bus was still waiting. As I was walking up to board, the driver closed the door and began pulling away. A UTA employee basically threw herself in front of the bus to get the driver to stop so I could board, and had to tell him to wait until passengers had cleared the "ramp."

Another delay day

First train of the morning at Clearfield FrontRunner station heading south? Seven minutes late. But, I'm sitting comfortably in a Comet car.

We'll probably miss connections at North Temple. I'll update later.

UPDATE:
FR rolled into the North Temple station at 7:09 a.m., so the 516 bus had already rolled (empty, I assume) and the 500 left as the train was pulling into the station -- that had a number of fellow passengers hopping mad.

I grabbed a 209 to City Creek, then waited for a 500 to my stop at 300 South State.

Again, I emphasize: People were angry at the North Temple FR station bus stop.

FrontRunner South's opening day headaches

I was willing to forgive when it came to mix-ups and a littlechaos on the day Utah Transit Authority began FrontRunner service south toProvo. The opening of the new North Temple station and others south of SaltLake Central necessitated all manner of bus-route and even TRAX-train reroutingand schedule changes. I get that.

Still, I’ve been riding FrontRunner to downtown Salt LakeCity for more than four years, and despite questions and complaints fromsqueaky wheels like me, there are some things the UTA simply refuses to getright.

From what I read in the paper, the people who manage UTA arehighly paid for their expertise. Indeed, their competence is offered as thechief defense of what some observers view as outsized pay and benefits andretirement packages. Good for them; I wouldn’t turn down a raise, either.

Given all that superiority in the transit-agency-managing profession:

• Why is there no mid-platform crosswalk at Salt Lake Central Station? It would allow customers departing incoming buses to cross the east set of FrontRunner tracks to board a train awaiting them on the west FrontRunner tracks. There’s a crosswalk at the Farmington station. At Salt Lake Central, those trying to connect between buses and FrontRunner at or near departure times must sprint half the length of the platform, or wait 15, 30 or 60 minutes for the next connection, depending on the desired bus or train route. I’ve asked UTA’s “station hosts” at Salt Lake Central about the lack of a crosswalk. They’ve all said it was supposed to be done long ago. With all due respect to UTAmanagement, why has the agency been able to construct hundreds of millions ofdollars’ worth of rail lines to Utah County but neglected to install a simplecrosswalk?
• And why do buses – empty ones, at that -- at various FrontRunner stations pull away just as the commuter train is pulling into the station, forcing passengers to miss connections and wait? Instead, the buses should be queued up in a line waiting for FrontRunner passengers to disembark.
• I have more complaints, but I’ll conclude with this one, which is specific to my weekday experience on FrontRunner between the Clearfield and Salt Lake Central stations: Why do full southbound trains sometimes have to pull over on a Centerville siding and stop to wait for nearly empty northbound trains in the morning? It creates a five-minute delay that causes us to miss bus and TRAX connections at the North Temple and Salt Lake Central stations, further lengthening our commute. Just as puzzling and frustrating is the habit of northbound afternoon-drive-time trains, full of passengers, parking at the same Centerville siding while nearly empty southbound trains fly by.

If UTA’s goal is to move as many people as quickly andefficiently as possible, that goal is too frequently not being achieved. On“change day,” Dec. 10, I asked a good-humored UTA employee assigned to work theNorth Temple station’s bus stop why my 516 bus pulled away before FrontRunnerarrived. “I don’t know,” he answered, “because they’re not supposed to.” Thenwe chatted for a few moments in the pre-dawn cold as I pelted him with more ofmy complaints, none of which he could speak to with authority. He was polite; Ihope I was, too.

“If I try this stop again tomorrow, will that 516 bus waitfor the train?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.”

I hope so, too.

UPDATE, 6:20 p.m.:
The 516 bus arrived on time, but the 6 p.m. FrontRunner was 20 minutes late. Had a very pleasant chat with a UTA employee on the North Temple platform, though, who said he'd seen several trains with Comet cars in the four-passenger-car setup. I hope they begin including them as a matter of course. He said the learning curve for Utah County riders has not been steep and it's been difficult to get them on and off the trains in a hurry.

Now we're parked at Woods Cross awaiting a southbound train.

Grim story at the D-News

The Deseret News has a story about a body being found near FrontRunner tracks in Sunset:

SUNSET — The body of a woman apparently hit by a train was found near railroad tracks Thursday morning.

Just after 9 a.m., a passenger on a FrontRunner train spotted what was believed to be a body along the side of the tracks at an intersection near 2400 North.

Of dead trains and crowded cars ...

Caught the 4:27 p.m. FrontRunner home today, and we had to wait on the Centerville siding for a southbound train. But it wasn't the usual reason -- instead, it was because the 3:57 northbound train had broken down in Farmington, and all those poor folks had to wait, I guess, 30 minutes on the platform for our train to arrive so they could continue their journey northward.

The good news: Our driver told us what was going on -- that the train ahead of us had broken down and we needed to make room for the other passengers. This is progress, in my book: actually telling us why things aren't happening they way they're supposed to.

Thanks, UTA. That's a good thing.

Behind the scenes regarding UTA-university negotiations

There's an interesting Deseret News story about how UTA and Beehive State colleges and universities arrive at prices for students' transit passes. In the past, evidently, UTA negotiated yearly prices/contracts individually with each school -- which sunds great for UTA, but lousy for the schools who don't have tough negotiators.

But the really interesting tidbit was reporter Geoff Fattah's report that UTA's ridership is 25 percent students. Wow, that's a lot.


The story is packed with lots of terrific numbers and information. Here's a sampling:

UTA to ditch Pleasant View FrontRunner connection?

The Standard-Examiner has a bit of bad news concerning FrontRunner service to the Top of Utah: "UTA may cut FrontRunner runs, increase bus service in Pleasant View."

The Pleasant View line always has been the bastard child of the FR line, as the story notes:

The station was supposed to open along with the rest of the line in April 2008, but UTA couldn't maintain right of way in the area and had to share the stretch of track with Union Pacific.

Improvements that needed to be made to the shared stretch of track were delayed when railroad workers were diverted to repair tracks damaged by a landslide in Oregon.

The Pleasant View leg of FrontRunner was finally completed Sept. 29, 2008, nearly six months after the rest of the line.

Tribune news story: 'UTA looks to future transit growth'

A story at The Salt Lake Tribune today notes the UTA board is peering into the future, as best it can, in an effort to guide its planning in the years ahead.

Allegra said if the UTA and developers encourage more “transit-oriented development,” or building residences where people can walk to bus and train stops, it could fuel much of that growth in transit use. Land use plans adopted by regional planning agencies are pushing that idea more as a way to handle housing and transportation needs amid future growth.

Perlich encouraged UTA to reach out more to young people and ethnic groups as it plans its future to ensure that it meets their needs. Allegra said UTA is in good position to help handle that with plans for expanded TRAX, commuter rail, new streetcars, bus-rapid transit, express buses and traditional bus service.

Today's Tribune editorial criticizes firing of state archaeologists

"Valuing History" is the headline on a Tribune house editorial today. The paper's editorial board comes out swinging against the state's "vindictive" action on behalf of development-loving politicos and private business interests. It's a worthwhile argument to be made, but does anyone believe it will get those jobs back? Didn't think so.

The positions of state archaeologist Kevin Jones and assistants Derinna Kopp and Ronald Rood were eliminated, not only to save money, but to settle scores. The three had become an annoyance to some of the powerful people in the Legislature, governor’s office and the Utah Transit Authority, and they had opposed powerful real estate developers.

It seems they became targets after they fought a proposed site of a new FrontRunner station in Draper when it was discovered also to be the location of an ancient American Indian village. It was a major archaeological find, the earliest known example of corn cultivation in the Great Basin. The three pushed to get the station relocated, raising the ire of Terry Diehl, who was a member of the UTA Board of Trustees and, at the same time, an owner of a real estate company that wanted to locate transit-related developments at the original site.

Powerful people tend to be vindictive. Now this trio of knowledgeable scientists is off the state payroll, and the state is the poorer for it.

Tribune's story about North Temple viaduct adds info on new Airport TRAX-FrontRunner connection

Admittedly, I haven't been paying close attention to the progress of the airport TRAX line. So it was a surprise to read in The Salt Lake Tribune this morning that, as reporter Lee Davidson writes,

The $71 million viaduct will include a transfer station between TRAX trains that will stop atop the bridge, and FrontRunner commuter trains that will stop beneath it. “The stops will be connected by escalators,” [UTA spokesman Gerry] Carpenter said.

Cool FrontRunner photo

Found a cool FrontRunner photo on the Web today here. It's by a photographer named James Belmont. Makes me want to find more.

Tribune headline: 'Utah ex-official alleges retribution behind layoff'

At The Salt Lake Tribune, there's a story quoting a former state official who says he was fired for not helping to develop a FrontRunner station -- and associated building and infrastructure -- at an important archaeological site in Draper.

Another former state official says he was laid off — more than two years ago — for getting in the way of plans to develop an ancient Indian village archaeological site for a Draper commuter rail station.

Let's try this again

OK, I got sidetracked (pun!) a while back, but maybe this time I'll stick to it. Like I said: not so much to complain as to offer news and maybe a viewpoint now and then.

So, what got me blogging again? Two passenger cars on this morning's FR train to SLC. Most mornings, I take the 6:31 from Clearfield to Salt Lake Central. There are typically three Bombardier (the double-decker) cars in the morning. Today, only two. And one of the cars was a bicycle car, meaning one whole side of the downstairs compartment on my car was devoid of seats.

I stood to allow a couple of women to sit (I'm always surprised more men don't offer their seats). No big deal, but as I wrote in an email to UTA later in the day, it would have been nice to hear why we had only two cars. There was a train host aboard, but he made himself scarce. And the driver offered only that there had been a "malfunction" that left our train with only two cars.

I believe UTA could reduce most of the passenger frustration simply by offering as much information as possible. The host should have been telling everyone aboard exactly what went wrong. Lots of people around me were complaining; information would have silenced them and let us know what had happened.

This is quite common. When the trains sometimes start out of a station, then stop-start-stop-start even when no other train is approaching, we should know why. Most of us have schedules to keep, and it's a courtesy that's not too much to ask to be informed what's going on.

FrontRunner and Legacy, wrongly conjoined

As I was reading a Deseret News story, this sentence gave me pause: "In fact, FrontRunner was built as part of UDOT's compromise with environmentalists on Legacy Parkway, which has helped alleviate congestion on I-15 in Davis County."

I don't think that's correct. At all. Seems to me both Legacy and FR were being planned long before there was an environmental lawsuit that stopped construction on Legacy, and that FrontRunner was actually under construction by the time the state compromised with enviros in order to get Legacy back on track.

At any rate, Davis and Weber county residents voted to increase their own taxes in, I think, 2000, to fund transit upgrades including heavy commuter rail between Ogden and Salt Lake City. If my memory is accurate, Legacy construction wasn't halted by the lawsuit until about 2002, and the compromise (55-mph speed limit, blacktop instead of cement, etc.) wasn't reached until years later.

It may seem insignificant to some people, but I'd hate for the notion that FR was only the result of the Legacy lawsuit to somehow take hold in the public imagination going forward. A lot of people were planning, designing and lobbying for FR years and years before the Legacy squabble -- both environmentalists, transportation officials, politicians and newspaper editorial boards.

(Photo by the Deseret News)

New Year, but the same old, same old

On Monday, I caught the 4:27 p.m. FrontRunner home. It had only two passenger cars, both the double-decker Bombardiers. As I was boarding, I asked the station host why there were only two cars for a rush-hour train headed north. His response:

"Some have two, some have three."

Which I discovered was true later on, when I chatted with the train host once we were moving. She said the train that left earlier -- the northbound 3:57 p.m. train -- had three passenger cars (two Bombardiers and one Comet). On our train, she said, there were 12 people standing on the northernmost car; and I could see four or five standing on the southernmost car, where I was standing.

Furthermore, she said she'd called someone at UTA offices -- apparently the man who makes the decisions about how many cars each train should have -- to tell him the train was too crowded. She explained that it didn't make sense to her, since the earlier train didn't have nearly the number of passengers. She said the man told her that by next week, all trains would have three cars.

I wondered why it would take a week to make that happen. A week? Couldn't it happen on Tuesday? That's what the train hosts have been telling me since the short trains and overcrowding have been happening: that after Jan. 1, three cars would return.

Listen, I love UTA's service, but I don't appreciate having to stand for 30 or 40 minutes on the ride home. I'm sure no one else does, either. I'm just wondering why the response and scheduling has been so spotty when so many people on the trains have been complaining. It's my observation that ridership is up since the August schedule changes. But now the transit agency risks alienating riders, and losing them.

My question: Is there solid research guiding these decisions about how many cars to run? Or is someone just making the determination based on their gut?

FrontRunner's 'missing' Comet cars

Inspiration born of frustration. That's how this blog is being launched. I'll admit it right up front: The Utah Transit Authority has been frustrating me lately, and I have to vent about it somewhere. (More on that in a moment.)

But while I admit my crankiness, I don't want this to be one of those blogs that does nothing but bag on a target -- or targets. I've been commuting from Davis County to an office building in downtown Salt Lake City via FrontRunner, TRAX and bus since autumn 2008, and I must admit I'm slightly fascinated by the way the system works, and the odd habits of riders and drivers and schedulers. So my aim is to write about more than my complaints, although I do very much like to complain.

So, on to the griping: What finally tipped me into blogging about my experience was UTA's decision to trim FrontRunner passenger cars from three to two -- and without any warning that I ever noticed. (I looked on the UTA Web site after the fact, and there was nothing there in the newsroom.) Two or three weeks ago, on a Monday, if memory serves, I rode FR to Salt Lake, as usual, riding in the Comet car (the long, single-decker passenger car situated just south of the engine as opposed to the double-decker Bombardier cars that have tables). Anyway, that evening, arriving back at Salt Lake's Central Station, the train heading back north had no Comet car in the mix, and only two Bombardiers.

I walked onto the north car just about a minute before it left the station, and was left to stand with about 20 other passengers who didn't have a seat -- all the seats in our car were occupied. I asked the station host who was holding the doors open for late-comers why there was no third car. He replied that since the U. classes were over for the semester, they would need one until January. I asked him, rhetorically, if the standing-room-only didn't disprove that theory. He just let the door close.

After the train left the station, when the reflective vest-wearing host walked through, everyone had to make room for her. Not looking forward to the long ride home standing between the doors and unable even to find a handle to hold onto or a wal to lean against as the train rocked back and forth between Salt Lake and Woods Cross, I asked her why there was no third car. She was polite, but said the decision was made above her pay grade. Then she allowed that she'd moved to Utah from the East Coast, and people standing on trains there was no big deal, it was to be expected. I saw other people besides me roll their eyes at that one.

Too rudely, I'm sure, I told her that's why people live out West instead of in the East: more room. Plus, I said, I'm used to having a seat for my 40-minute ride. If I have to stand from now on, I'll take the slower express bus or maybe even drive -- the latter defeating a chief purpose of public transit: to get people out of single-occupant vehicles at rush hour.

She recommended that is we didn't like it, we should write or call UTA. As we stopped at Woods Cross, Framington and Layton, people got off, a few got on and seats filled back in from those standing. I stood until my stop in Clearfield.

The odd thing has been, some trains have since arrived with three passenger cars, while others continue to have only two. But the timing doesn't make much sense, as far as I can tell. Earlier this week, for example, the southbound train arrived with only two Bombardiers; it was snug, but nobody was standing in my car. But the northbound train -- the ones that are practically empty because so few people ride northbound trains in the morning -- had two Bombardiers and a Comet.

To me, that doesn't make any sense. But I'm probably missing something.

I understand that UTA is trying to save money, and towing one fewer passenger car saves fuel. But how much, in the grand scheme? A UTA manager told me once that the trains burn a gallon of diesel ever 0.9 miles traveled with three Bombardier cars in tow. The Comets, he said, weigh half as much but have slightly fewer seats and no tables for laptops. I'm no mathematician, heaven knows, but isn't there a combination of the Comets and/or Bombardiers that could haul lots of people and still meet the fuel-use targets? Just wondering.

At any rate, I can't wait until next week when three passenger cars becomes the standard again ... I hope.