By: Margie Slovan
Daily Journal of Commerce
November 18, 2008
It will cost more than $1 billion to build a commuter rail line along BNSF Railway's Eastside rail corridor, according to a draft report released yesterday by Parsons Brinckerhoff.
The Port of Seattle is buying the 42-mile corridor from the railroad for $107 million. The plan is to add either a commuter rail line, a trail or both to the corridor. The cost of a trail along the corridor would be between $245 million and $360 million.
This report, which was mandated by the state legislature in its last session, was done for Sound Transit and the Puget Sound Regional Council. It evaluated 35 miles of rail corridor between Gene Coulon Park in Renton and the city of Snohomish, along with a 7-mile spur between Woodinville and Redmond.
The report assumed there would be 16 stations along the corridor, and that trains would run every 30 minutes in each direction. It also budgeted money for a maintenance base and figured that all the rails, ties and ballast along the corridor would have to be replaced.
Ridership on the commuter rail line between Snohomish and Tukwila would range between 84 riders and 208 riders per mile. In comparison, Sounder has 124 riders per mile. Caltrain, in the Bay area, has 457 riders per mile and NCTD Coaster in San Diego has 163 riders per mile.
The busiest section would be between Tukwila and Everett, where there would be more than 6,000 boardings per day by 2020, the report said.
Ridership forecasts were prepared by the Puget Sound Regional Council.
“What we got out of it was that it is feasible from a ridership perspective,”said Bruce Agnew of the Discovery Institute, a long-time advocate for commuter rail. “If it showed poor ridership there would be no reason to go forward but this is healthy ridership.”
The rail line described in the report is expensive, however, costing up to $27 million per mile. Other recent commuter rail projects cost much less. In Oregon, a new commuter rail line scheduled to launch next month costs $11 million per mile. In Denver, a commuter rail corridor in the planning phase will cost $19.4 million per mile.
Fewer stations would bring the cost down significantly, according to the Parsons Brinckerhoff report.
Stations would be located in Renton, Bellevue, Kirkland, Woodinville, Maltby, Cathcart, Snohomish and Redmond. Some cities would have two or three stations.
Sound Transit plans to contribute $50 million to building a commuter rail line. Besides the port's contribution of $107 million, no other funding has been identified.
To read the report, visit www.psrc.org/projects/bnsf/reports.htm.
