As Rail Riders Disappear, the Feds Want To Spend $8.8 Billion Expanding a Rail Station

The rail lines servicing Washington, D.C.'s Union Station are carrying as little as a quarter of their pre-pandemic ridership. Officials still want to triple the station's capacity.

If you built it, and they're not coming, should you keep building? For federal rail officials, the answer is yes.

This past week, the Federal Railroad Administration released a draft environmental study of the planned massive $8.8 billion redevelopment of Washington, D.C.'s Union Station, reported The Washington Post. The plan includes new train platforms, a bus terminal, shops, restaurants, and more to be built by 2040. Passenger capacity would be tripled.

The Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, which operates the station, and Amtrak, which owns the platforms and tracks, are responsible for the redevelopment project.

The expansion has the enthusiastic support of local congressional leaders. The bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden in November 2021 greatly expanded the amount of money available for public transit and commuter rail projects.

All the money and resources are there. What's missing are the riders for all the added capacity.

All of the commuter and intercity rail services that use Union Station are in deep, prolonged ridership depressions that appear to be outliving the pandemic's suppressive effects on other forms of social and economic activity.

Union Station is serviced by two regional commuter rail services, the Maryland Area Regional Commuter (MARC) and the Virginia Railway Express (VRE), along with Amtrak and the local Metro rail service run by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA).

WMATA's average daily boardings at Union Station are up from the worst of the pandemic, but still only about 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Overall rail ridership on WMATA is at 51 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

It's the same or even worse for the commuter rail services. As of December 2022, VRE ridership had climbed to a little over a quarter of its 2019 levels. Its average rail car is only about 30 to 40 percent full on a weekday. MARC carried 265,107 people in February 2023. That's a third of the number of people it carried just before the pandemic in February 2020.

Amtrak has had the best post-pandemic ridership rebound. Its Northeast Corridor trains, which run from Boston down to D.C., are carrying 75 percent of the people they did in 2019, according to its FY 2022 report.

Nationally, a major factor keeping rail ridership in a post-pandemic rut is the rise of remote work.

This is particularly true for D.C.'s legions of laptop workers. A third of the D.C.-area population works remotely, according to a September 2022 report from the Economic Innovation Group. That's a 400 percent increase in remote workers compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to Apartment List.

Fewer people commuting has unsurprisingly been bad news for commuter rail services, particularly those like the VRE and MARC, which catered to long-distance traveling "supercommuters." Apartment List noted in a recent report that high-income, transit-riding supercommuters have all but disappeared post-pandemic thanks to remote work.

Yet it's right as this class of transit-riding supercommuters is disappearing that the federal government is looking to spend billions on new infrastructure for them in the form of the Union Station project.

Comments

[angelinajolie]

Great article, Mike. I appreciate your work, I’m now creating over $35,000 dollars each month simply by doing a simple job online! I do know You currently making a lot of greenbacks online from $28,000 dollars, its simple online operating jobs.
.
.
Just open the link—————————————>>> http://Www.JobsRevenue.Com

[Teresa Flores]

I am making a good salary from home $6580-$7065/week , which is amazing under a year ago I was jobless in a horrible economy. I thank God every day I was blessed with these instructions and now it’s my duty to pay it forward and share it with Everyone,
🙂 AND GOOD LUCK.:)

Here is I started.……......>> http://WWW.RICHEPAY.COM

[Longtobefree]

Ridership will tick upward after cars are banned and remote work pay is reduced 50%.

[LaraFrayne]

Easily start receiving more than $600 every single day from home in your part time. i made $18781 from this job in my spare time afte my college. easy to do job and its regular income are awesome. no skills needed to do this job all you need to know is how to copy and paste stuff online. join this today by follow details on this page.
.
.
Apply Now Here———————————->>> https://Www.Coins71.Com

[LynnFernandez]

I have made $18625 last month by w0rking 0nline from home in my part time only. Everybody can now get this j0b and start making dollars 0nline just by follow details here..
🙂 AND GOOD LUCK.:)
HERE====)> https://www.apprichs.com

[Mark Breza]

When did they ban horses ?
How much infrastructure help did the government give while making the roads ?

[Religion and Politics, my life]

NO, in reality, as Buttigieg showed clearly, the government response to inevitable tragedies will decline and the huge amounts of money will go where the most people are hurt as Joel Kotkin shows

"Perhaps nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s myopic sense of geography than its transportation priorities. Take urban transit. Biden has proposed a policy that, by some estimates, would allocate $165 billion for public transit (including urban rail — subways, light rail, and commuter rail) against only $115 billion to fix and modernize roads and bridges. Transit, which accounts for about 1 percent of overall urban and rural ground transportation, would receive nearly 60 percent of the money.

Echoing conventional progressive rhetoric, the administration’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, embraces the idea of getting Americans out of their cars and into trains and buses. For at least half a century, this has been a principal public-policy objective — and the results have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Despite the expenditure of more than $2 trillion and the construction of many new rail systems, transit’s share of daily commute trips dropped 44 percent from 1970 to 2019 (8.9 percent to 5.0 percent of the total). Even before COVID, working at home accounted for more commuting nationwide than did transit. Outside New York City, nearly 60 percent more people worked at home than rode transit in 2019, according to the American Community Survey. Transit accounted for less than 2 percent of all urban travel before COVID. The administration nonetheless is thinking about taxing vehicle mileage to pay for infrastructure, something that would be wildly unpopular outside the handful of dense urban cores where transit ridership is high.

[BillyG]

Missing context: even with ridership down the Amtrak terminal is still over capacity. Looking out into the future, ridership expected to climb. They're also proposing to increase retail space in the shopping mall area.

[Anastasia Beaverhausen]

"Over capacity" as defined by bureaucrats eager to justify more pork.

[Mark Breza]

Who build more and more highways .

[creech]

As long as voters are content to not vote Libertarian, then this kind of spending nonsense will continue.

[Religion and Politics, my life]

Libertarianism is to blame for most of the problem. You act as if the average man needs to be a doctrinaire Ayn Rand fanatic to notice that his life is gettting worse and worse while Biden approaches the $8 Trillion mark in spending for progress.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

If you build it, they will come.

The mass transit freaks who get hard-ons from trains, that is.

[Chip Watkins]

Another astounding--but not astonishing--example of wasteful spending to support labor unions.

Profitable privately-owned mass transit began to die in the 1960s, about the time a critical mass of middle-class families (including mine) acquired their second car. As noted by Charles Lane, https://wapo.st/3ogvtTM, tax-subsidized public transit benefits many who could afford to pay more. Agencies should figure out a way to target the subsidies to those who need them.

[Seamus]

And in the future, when the government outlaws gasoline-powered cars and makes it prohibitively expensive to operate electric vehicles, the commuters will return to public transit. The government sees Eastern Europe in the 50s and 60s as their model.

[Ride 'Em]

Exactly, just a move to payback unions for political donations.

[no_longer_CZMacure]

“Agencies should figure out a way to target the subsidies to those who need them.” – unfortunately, this is Sisyphus effort, because the addressed situation does not stay still. As soon as the agencies channel the subsidies in a new direction, this immediately creates new market for these subsidies, and they are basically stolen. This model works without fail in all markets and in all countries, be it international help to poor and starving in Africa, or giving tax breaks to female-owner businesses in USA. This was brilliantly described in the lectures of Milton Friedman available on YouTube.

[Henry Porter]

Good point!

When poor people can’t afford to buy groceries, we give them coupons and send them to a grocery store. We don’t build a completely new grocery store for poor people, then hope well-off people are attracted to it, too.

But when poor people can’t afford cars, we build them a separate transportation system that’s more expensive to run, burns more fuel, generates more pollution and offers poorer service than the one they can’t afford. Then we overlook and/or deny the flaws and subsidize it forever.

Why don't we subsidize the passengers instead of the transit bureaucracy? Suppose we gave poor people vouchers, in proportion to their need, entitling them to "spend" their vouchers on whatever mode of transportation makes sense for them?

Think about that.

[Henry Porter]

Our elected representatives will continue to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on services and infrastructure that taxpayers clearly don’t need or want as long as taxpayers continue to allow them to do so.

…and I don’t see any movement toward preventing it. All I see is a few pundits, like Christian Britschgi and Randal O’Toole, calling out the obvious to a tiny readership.

I think the blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the so-called “professional” engineers and economists in FHWA and state DOTs for not publicly calling out the ABSOLUTE IDIOCY of spending the public’s treasure on infrastructure the pubic doesn’t want or need, while simultaneously starving infrastructure the public demands and that is critical to a strong economy: highways.

[Leland Davis]

I ride the MARC train every day to DC. Ridership is down due to the after affects of the pandemic, but it is climbing back up, and Union Station was overcapacity before the pandemic.

[Anastasia Beaverhausen]

“Over capacity” as defined by bureaucrats eager to justify more pork.

[Henry Porter]

There’s no such thing as “over capacity”.

[Religion and Politics, my life]

When our lazy and stupid President says he is making the world much better, he means all but actual people. The people without a job, dealing with inflation, not experiencing any betterment will have a much bettter useless trainline that is part of the better world.

Life for actual people is hard and getting harder.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

He’s just a mindless puppet.

[CE]

8.8 billion would buy a lot of SUVs. Everyone deserves safe, convenient, spacious transportation. SUVs for All!

A mid-size SUV like the Ford Explorer (can't spend taxpayer debt tokens on foreign cars) retails for $36,760. That would give 239 thousand car-less people a nice option to avoid buses and trains.

[tlapp]

Not only work from home but crime is up and DC's metro has a horrible record of maintenance and breakdowns. Lot's of reasons to avoid using Metro system.