Today let’s look at Part 2 of the Houston regional rail system – the Gulf Corridor. This corridor is the big one in the news lately, and rightly so. It’s the primary link between the region’s two major historical centers (Houston and Galveston), and features a number of major institutions and attractions along the way. Most of the attention given to a public-sector commuter rail option has been in this corridor. Also, this corridor forms a key extension of any inter-city rail project in the state, offering a final link from Central and North Texas to the coast.
There are some challenges in the corridor, however. A traditional steel-wheel system is going to have a hard time connecting to many of the activity centers directly. While an underutilized ROW exists (parallel to SH-3), it doesn’t pass within walking distance of any major hubs.
A private-sector solution utilizing elevated rail could avoid most of the alignment problems. However, this corridor involves longer distances between stations, and that means the financing cost per rider would be higher than in a shorter corridor. For those reasons I think a shorter corridor would have to be developed first.
Now, my previous analysis for the South Corridor was very detailed. The reason for that was to illustrate that the costs compared to the potential revenue are close enough to make this a serious proposal. I’m not arguing that my analysis is perfect and that you could use it as a blueprint for construction. There are all sorts of potential issues that would have to be worked out in greater detail before any kind of system could be built. My only goal is to illustrate a credible concept.
With that in mind, for the remainder of this series I’m not going to try and do a cost-benefit analysis on each corridor. I’m only going to look at effectively connecting destinations in highly-traveled corridors. I’m going to rely on some evidence and some gut-instinct to locate corridors that have potential for acceptable ridership on day one, a lot of TOD, and very high potential ridership as the corridor develops more densely (in response to rail).
Preface aside, let’s look at the route. Using AMT’s elevated MagLev technology, we can connect directly to major destinations, and there are a lot of them in this corridor. The major targets are Downtown, University of Houston, Hobby Airport, Ellington Field, NASA, Kemah Boardwalk, Moody Gardens, Schlitterbahn, The Strand, and UTMB, plus commuter-collecting stations in between.
By aligning the track down the SH-3 right of way we can pick up most of the smaller towns in this corridor, but by swinging across I-45 when needed and including a circulator spur in the NASA / Clear Lake area we’ve got a much more useful system. Specifically, let’s look at how the system would tie in to Downtown Houston.
Extending from the redevelopment area around the Toyota Center, the line now connects to Main Street, the Allen Center, and the Theater District. This ties in directly to both the existing METRO Rail and the planned METRO Rail line, as well as offering direct walking access to most of the Skyline District.
The travel times directly to and from the stations in this corridor are extremely competitive with car travel, and would clearly surpass it during peak hours. Take a look:
| KM | MI | Minutes | Seconds | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Theater | Allen | 0.65 | 0.40 | 1 | 2 |
| Allen | Main | 0.61 | 0.38 | 1 | 1 |
| Main | Toyota | 0.52 | 0.32 | 0 | 58 |
| Toyota | Leeland | 2.21 | 1.37 | 1 | 38 |
| Leeland | UH | 1.85 | 1.15 | 1 | 31 |
| UH | Gulfgate | 5.37 | 3.34 | 2 | 48 |
| Gulfgate | Simsbridge | 2.72 | 1.69 | 1 | 46 |
| Simsbridge | Hobby | 3.28 | 2.04 | 2 | 17 |
| Hobby | Crenshaw | 6.87 | 4.27 | 3 | 11 |
| Crenshaw | Ellington | 6.38 | 3.96 | 3 | 3 |
| Ellington | Gemini | 7.2 | 4.47 | 3 | 16 |
| Gemini | Dickinson | 12.55 | 7.80 | 4 | 36 |
| Dickinson | Texas Cty | 8.06 | 5.01 | 3 | 29 |
| Texas Cty | LaMarque | 6.65 | 4.13 | 3 | 8 |
| LaMarque | Moody | 14.12 | 8.77 | 4 | 59 |
| Moody | West End | 3.59 | 2.23 | 2 | 22 |
| West End | Strand | 4 | 2.49 | 2 | 28 |
| Strand | UTMB | 1.82 | 1.13 | 1 | 30 |
Highlights:
- From Main St. to the Strand: 41 Minutes (as compared to 55 to drive)
- From the Theater District to the Toyota Center: 3 minutes
- From Moody Gardens to the Strand: 5 minutes
- From the Allen Center to Hobby Airport: 12 minutes
- From Hobby Airport to the Strand: 30 minutes
- And, not shown in the table above:
- The Clear Lake spur takes 12 minutes to travel from Friendswood to Kemah.
- From Gemini Station (SH-3 and Bay Area Blvd) to the Space Center is 2.5 minutes.
- From Gemini to Kemah is 8 minutes.
In other words, this service is blazing fast.
How much travel occurs in this corridor every day? According to the TxDOT statewide planning map, there are between 250,000 and 300,000 trips per day on I-45 from the Beltway to Downtown, and about 100,000 trips per day on I-45 in Galveston County. Much of that traffic is headed to the major destinations listed already.
The H-GAC commuter rail study that came out last year indicated an expected 10,000 passengers per day would ride a slow, steel-wheel train that ran only along SH-3 to Galveston and didn’t extend inside the loop. So how many would ride a high-speed train that stops directly at all the major destinations we’ve already discussed? I don’t know for sure, but I could realistically imagine 40,000 – 50,000 from day one (again, remember that the Main St. line in Downtown carries about 40,000 per day), and much more as the corridor stations grow and become centers in their own right.
This corridor is pretty exciting to envision. It makes a lot of sense at a regional level as it links together so many important destinations, but it also lays the ground work for intercity service in the future.
I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on this concept, start things off by leaving your comments below!
Categories: featured, move
Tags: , AMT, commuter, Galveston, high speed rail, Houston, rail, transit, transportation
Share:
Contact Us
The fastest way to reach us is by email. You can use the addresses listed below to reach us, but to prove you're not a spam-bot you'll have to type them in to your email client manually!
Topics
License and Privacy
- neoHOUSTON design by Andrew Burleson
All neoHOUSTON articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.- For commercial uses of the works listed on the site, please contact the post author to obtain permission.
- For privacy information, please click here.
9 Comments
Permalink
@ Andrew -
two requests:
(a) please clarify your relationship, if any, with AMT Corporation. If you have none, your thoughtful posts should perhaps focus more on the transportation requirements/opportunity.
There are lots of proven rail transit systems featuring full grade separation, including funky stuff like suspended monorails. Don’t start with the solution and go looking for a problem..
(b) can you elaborate on the acceleration profiles you use to estimate line haul times between stations?
(c) local-only service is ok for a 10-mile line. Galveston is over 50 miles from Houston, you may want to consider offering semi-express service level with just half a dozen intermediate stops in addition to local trains. That implies reliable operation to a timetable and bypass tracks at stations with low boarding/alighting numbers. Keep in mind that a low line haul time between the downtown areas depends on high average speeds. Trying to compensate for frequent stops with high acceleration and high top speed is expensive and inefficient.
Permalink
Rafael,
First, I have no relationship with AMT. I have enjoyed meeting their President, Tony Morris, who was helpful when I was working on my thesis research. I like their technology because I like it, and I’m imagining it in operation in Houston because this is my blog, and I can.
As I posted on your last comment, I used an acceleration rate of .15g and a top speed of 150MPH. I did not account for curvature of the track for two reasons:
1. The only place where tight curves are likely required is on the approach to urban stations, and usually you’re decelerating already in order to stop. On many of those segments there isn’t room for the train to hit much over 50 MPH anyway.
2. The track should be designed for speed. I didn’t engineer it, I just sketched out a route. When the engineering work is done that alignment should be configured so that the train is traveling as fast as possible, and as close to even, uninterrupted acceleration and deceleration as possible. That certainly won’t happen in every instance, but until the engineering is done it’s not worth the time to try and guess what compromises will have to be made and how much they’ll affect the travel times.
You’re right about the option of express and semi-express services, those would significantly reduce travel time. For this particular post I’m still looking primarily at regional commuter service, however, so the number of stops is what I think is appropriate for that service. The route should be built so that it is capable of handling both kinds of service simultaneously (probably triple or quadruple track in certain areas). I’ll look more at what some express travel times might look like later in the series.
Permalink
Yeah, would you post the acceleration formula you are using? My own calculations are within .72 minutes of yours for all but 6 stops. Maybe .72 minutes is door-time?
@Rafael, in “Texas High-Speed Rail: Houston – Part 1″ Andrew puts the distance to top speed as 1500 meters.
I did my calculations in Excel but here they are in js:
//milesDistance is the distance from one station to the next
topSpeed = 150;
milesToTopSpeed = 0.932056788;
milesAtTopSpeed = if(milesDistance>(milesToTopSpeed*2)){milesDistance-(milesToTopSpeed*2)}else{0}
milesBelowTopSpeed = if(milesDistance<milesToTopSpeed*2){milesDistance}else{milesDistance-milesAtTopSpeed}
minutesTravelTime =((milesBelowTopSpeed/(actualTopSpeed/2))+(milesAtTopSpeed/topSpeed))*60;
Permalink
Adolph, here are the formulas:
To calculate travel times I worked the following math…
Max Speed
Acceleration
Time to Top Speed
Distance to Top Speed (Remember Vo is zero)
The forumla is then basically the same as what you typed.
If the distance is more than 2x the acceleration distance, take whatever is more than 2x the acceleration distance and divide by the speed to get time, then add the twice the acceleration time to top speed.
If the distance is less than 2x the acceleration distance, take the half the distance, calculate the travel time at the given acceleration rate, and double it.
In all cases I added 20 seconds at the end of each segment for stop-time.
If I can figure out a way to put that in JS on the web, I will.
Permalink
@ Andrew -
thanks for answering my questions. Please note that acceleration is typically not constant. Wind resistance increases with the square of velocity, so the closer you get to a vehicle’s top speed, the smaller the amount of additional acceleration you can still achieve. Ignoring this means your results are either way too optimistic or the vehicles have to have stupendously powerful motors.
Note that in steel wheels technology, trains are limited to 150mph if the tension on the overhead catenary system is just 3kV. For higher speeds (or high acceleration at high speeds) higher voltages are needed. Most of the NEC uses 12kV, Germany/Switzerland/Austria uses 15kV, more modern dedicated HSR lines use 25kV.
The AMT system appears to use a third rail pickup, those are typically limited to 1500V and suitable for top speeds of around 80mph – no more. You might want to ask AMT exactly how their propulsion system works before parroting their claims of 150mph top speed (extremely unusual for regional/commuter service).
A secondary issue is that discontinuous jumps in acceleration should be avoided. You need a few seconds of ramp-up and ramp-down to optimize passenger comfort.
Permalink
Would you want to include a spur into central Texas city? I am also assuming your alignment downtown would be subway.
Permalink
@Rafael,
Well, I’ll keep that in mind, but for the purposes of this example I’m not going to try and revise the numbers. I don’t have the time or the engineering data to model it much more accurately than I have already. I’ll make a note on future posts in the series reflecting some of the factors you’ve mentioned that aren’t in the model.
@KP,
I might include a spur into Texas City, but I’m a little more inclined to suggest some kind of high quality BRT circulator to connect to Downtown TC and the TC Industrial complex.
In the short term I have no feel for how much traffic would go back and forth from central Houston or Galveston to those destinations – Texas City is really a very self-sufficient city.
To implement the BRT, I’d improve Palmer / 9th to a multiway boulevard configuration. That strikes me as offering much greater local benefit than a second train station in the near term.
As the city grows – and especially if there ever is a major anchor downtown (like a major redevelopment effort around the Dike), then maybe that BRT circulator route could evolve into a rail spur.
Permalink
KP, part 2:
The alignment Downtown is grade separated. I would be fine with it in a subway, but I think the tunnels and various other underground construction would make that pretty difficult. The guideway can fit just fine running over the street, and running between buildings isn’t a problem – just slow down through downtown.
Aesthetically speaking, it’s possible to do a very nice job of building an elevated system in a downtown environment.
I stayed in Taipei for about a month a few summers ago, and I had a lot of fun checking out the elevated system they have through much of the city. It’s done very nicely: it’s way up high, it provides shade (but doesn’t make it too dark), and they’ve used the space underneath as a sort of pedestrian plaza with shops and fountains and things – it really is a very enjoyable retail colonnade or sorts.
So the answer is, it could be either. My gut feeling is that elevated is a lot more realistic, but I certainly recognize that a tunnel would probably be less controversial.
Permalink
Andrew, any new technology increases cost escalation risk. The cheapest and most successful rail systems are those that use proven technology, and, unless they’re extremely competent (i.e. not American), don’t try to invent anything. They avoid elevated or underground construction, which are impossible to do for under $100 million per route-km even when the builders know what they’re doing. They spend extra money on feeder buses and on central station locations, not high top speeds.