From Crain’s Detroit Business

A new economic development study of Woodward Avenue north of Eight Mile Road through Birmingham represents an early step in potentially extending Detroit’s planned light-rail line into the suburbs.

Currently, there is no plan for the modern streetcar-style transit service to go north of the city limits near the Michigan State Fairgrounds — something critics have warned will make the Detroit project less effective because it doesn’t tap into neighboring communities.

But a task force of elected officials and stakeholders from Ferndale, Huntington Woods, Royal Oak, Berkley and Birmingham was organized in September and has commissioned a first look at what must be done to create the right economic development climate for when the train service is built through those communities.

The task force is spending $13,000 of a $32,700 planning research grant from the Michigan Department of Transportation to hire Grand Rapids-based community planning firm LSL Planning Inc. to develop a transit-oriented development plan for Woodward from Ferndale to Birmingham, said Heather Carmona, executive director of the Woodward Avenue Action Association.

The nonprofit association aimed at bolstering Woodward Avenue organized the “Transform Woodward” Transit-Oriented Development Task Force in September 2010, and the plan is expected to be completed by September.

LSL, which has a Royal Oak office, will create a “framework” plan for Woodward from Ferndale to Birmingham that will include a model transit zoning ordinance, development strategies and concept plans, she said.

The remainder of the grant will be used for initial data collection, outreach and communication.

The communities have different zoning for their respective portions of Woodward — some are blends of retail and residential, while others are purely commercial — and the study will be used in efforts to align rezoning that maximizes economic development along the corridor.

“Until now, there hasn’t been consensus among these communities on what they envision for transit and how (transit-oriented development) factors into that,” Carmona said. “Cities plan in isolation. Now they’re looking at their shared borders and how that impacts the whole on Woodward in Oakland County.”

Also on the task force are representatives from the SMART bus system, Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, Michigan Suburbs Alliance, Detroit Zoo and Beaumont Hospital.

Transit-oriented development is typically part of new commuter rail projects.

Installation of a rail transit line typically creates $4 to $8 in new economic development activity in that corridor for every $1 spent on the line, transit insiders say.

The Federal Transit Administration — the agency that provides much of the federal capital funding for new mass transit projects — defines transit-oriented development as “compact, mixed-use development within walking distance of public transportation.”

The FTA can provide funding for transit-oriented development activities such as real estate acquisition, demolition, site preparation, utilities, parking and improvements for pedestrians and bicycles.

The Detroit Department of Transportation‘s $528 million plan is a nine-mile line from downtown Detroit to the city limits at Eight Mile Road. The Woodward task force has met with DDOT and its hired planners to discuss the status of the city’s project.

“The task force is interested in aligning the work they’re doing now (with LSL) with (DDOT) and keeping communication open,” Carmona said.

The city project is being financed by a mixture of public and private money, and construction (pending approval of federal aid) is expected to begin next spring.

Some of Detroit’s most prominent business leaders, companies and organizations have pledged $100 million toward the rail effort — something the private sector hasn’t done in Oakland County.

And politically, there is some skepticism from Oakland County’s dominant political force, Executive L. Brooks Patterson. He’s said he’s supportive of regional mass transit, but noted that there is no consensus on funding.

“I’m going to be a hard sell,” he said. “I’m not going to block it. I don’t have the ability to block it. Some serious research has to be done on where it goes and who pays for it. Right now, none of that is happening.”

There also is a need for a regional transit authority to govern a multicounty system, and providing funding through some mechanism — probably a regional tax. Efforts to create a regional transit authority have stalled over disagreement on funding-split formulas between the city and suburbs.

Capital costs are a major factor for extending the line into Oakland County.

Traffic improvements to Woodward made by the Michigan Department of Transportation north of the city limits make it more costly to build a rail line there — perhaps up to $500 million to extend the line to 11 Mile Road.

“It could be a very expensive extension to advance north of Eight Mile,” said Mark Ryan, a vice president with San Francisco-based engineering firm URS Corp., in a previous interview with Crain’s. The firm, which has a Detroit office, has been contracted by the city to handle the preliminary engineering for the rail line and also prepare the funding application for federal transit money.

Source: http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20110731/SUB01/307319981/next-stop-oakland-suburbs-study-expansion-of-woodward-rail

From AnnArbor.com

Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje July 27, 2011 released a five-page missive on the Fuller Road Station project city officials are considering on a portion of Fuller Park, calling it a “one-time opportunity for our community to advance into the modern age of rail.”

The letter touches on how the project could be funded and what impact it could have on general fund activities like police and fire protection.

• Download the letter

The big-picture concept for Fuller Road Station, Hieftje writes, is a multimodal transit hub that includes accommodations for automobiles, trains and buses, as well as walking and biking facilities. It’s proposed for the south side of Fuller Road in front of the University of Michigan medical campus, where a paved parking lot sits close by the east-west rail line.

“It will serve the park and facilitate job growth at one of the fastest growing employment centers in our region, the University of Michigan Health Center, where 24,000 people go every day,” Hieftje writes, adding it also will serve downtown and U-M’s north and central campuses.

Hieftje goes on to say the entire project — both the first and second phases — can be built without any significant upfront cost to the city.

Read more: http://www.annarbor.com/news/ann-arbor-mayor-releases-five-page-letter-explaining-reasoning-behind-fuller-road-station-project/

From the Dearborn Press & Guide

With high-speed rail funding targeted for elimination by congressional Republicans, city officials are racing against the clock to get funding for a new Amtrak station in town.

City Council on Monday approved several key measures to facilitate the construction of the complex.

The resolutions formalized agreements with the state, Amtrak, and the project architect and construction manager to build a $28 million facility using grant money from the federal stimulus law of 2009.

Dearborn’s Economic and Community Development Director Barry Murray said Thursday that the resolutions finished up the work the city had to do before the federal government could obligate the grant money.

“So now we’ve got our agreement to get the money and run the management side of it with the state. We’ve got our agreement with Amtrak to lease the station from us. And then we’ve got our agreements with our architect and our construction manager,” said Murray. “Those are the basic agreements. We have to have a place to get the money obligated and then we’ll start the final design project.”

Officials with the Federal Railroad Administration, which is handling the grant, said via email they hope to have the money obligated this summer, but declined to give a specific date.

Dearborn’s grant was awarded as part of President Barack Obama’s $8 billion high-speed rail initiative.

But with federal deficit concerns driving the agenda in Washington D.C., there are serious talks about eliminating unobligated high-speed rail funds; money that has been awarded, but not yet disbursed, like Dearborn’s. The GOP-controlled House last week passed a bill that would eliminate all of the unobligated funds and divert it to Midwest flood relief.

In a statement for the record following passage of the appropriations bill, Congressman John Dingell (D-Dearborn) derided the cuts and “cynical” and “short-sighted.”

“The 15th District is slated to lose more than $495 million in funding awarded to four high-speed rail projects in our district,” Dingell said. “This rescission will result in the loss of as many as 13,008 jobs.”

The Democratic-controlled Senate has yet to draft its version of the 2012 energy and water spending bill. The push to take away rail money is expected to meet strong opposition there, however.

The chairwoman of the Senate energy and water appropriations subcommittee, California’s Dianne Feinstein, is a supporter of the high-speed rail project in her state and the Obama administration is stridently against the cuts, The Los Angeles Times reported.

According to a report by the Congressional Bicameral High-Speed & Intercity Passenger Rail Caucus, the House bill would nix nearly all of Michigan’s high-speed rail projects approved since 2009, including Dearborn’s train station; rail acquisition and upgrades for the stretch between Kalamazoo and Dearborn; and at least some of the money that was awarded to buy and refurbish passenger cars for the Detroit-Chicago Amtrak route.

Mayor Jack O’Reilly said Friday that the federal budget-cutting is a concern, but that he is hopeful the FRA would be able to get the grant disbursed before the end of September, when the federal budget is due for completion.

“Once we get that letter obligating the funds, we don’t have anything to worry about and we can get to work on the project,” he said. “Is it something we’re keeping an eye on though? Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

If and when the city gets the money, the city is ready to begin the final design process.

City officials estimate the design phase would take six months and then the construction phase another 18 months on top of that.

Depending on when the money arrives, Murray said the city would look to evaluate whether it makes sense to begin construction before the winter or just wait until the spring.

“We’ll have to talk with our architect and construction manager about how much we can get done,” Murray said. “There’s not really a good point in us paying a premium to work in the winter months if we don’t need to.”

If the FRA is unable to get the funds obligated before they are potentially rescinded, it would be a coup de grace fitting for a project that turned up a Native American burial ground during site selection studies.

There has been more than one projected ground-breaking date for the project; a commuter rail service designed to be part of the upgrades has lost funding; and the sheer volume of documentation has at times been dizzying, officials said.

“This has been a bureaucratic nightmare from the beginning,” said O’Reilly. “And it’s really been frustrating because sometimes government just doesn’t function well.”

The $782-billion stimulus law necessitated the creation of previously nonexistent funding channels to get the money in the hands of states and localities.

For the high-speed rail dollars, the funds first go through the FRA, then through the Michigan Department of Transportaion, and then to the city.

But the FRA, for instance, typically functions in more of a regulatory capacity rather than a funding unit. As a result, there have been some growing pains along the way.

“We did have a learning curve to deal with initially,” said FRA spokesman Rob Kulat. “And I think everyone did, too, because there were not these types of programs. People had to apply for them before.”

One key hurdle that caused headaches was a planning document submitted by The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village.

The map showed that some of the parking for the station — slated for Elm Street on the south side of Michigan Avenue — would encroach onto the grounds of the national historic landmark, raising red flags with regulators.

“We dealt with some boundary issues with some federal agencies and that took a while,” said Therese Cody, a program manager for the Michigan office of high-speed rail and project advancement.

O’Reilly was more blunt in his assessment.

“Even though the map was wrong, and The Henry Ford said it was, and we submitted the legal documents showing otherwise, there was nothing we could do to convince them (the feds),” he said.

There also were concerns about the station design that had to be satisfied.

“You don’t want to have a station that is like this 21st Century, really cosmic-looking station that you can see from Greenfield Village or The Henry Ford. That was one of the things they were interested in,” said Cody.

Source: http://www.pressandguide.com/articles/2011/07/25/news/doc4e29b7ae45c33480895573.txt?viewmode=fullstory

From the Toledo Blade

Amtrak’s route between Detroit and Chicago is among those the Obama Administration has chosen for high-speed rail development, but right now, 135 miles of the line east of Kalamazoo, Mich., is anything but fast.

The tracks’ owner, Norfolk Southern, has determined that freight traffic along the line no longer justifies maintaining it for the ordinary top speed on many Amtrak routes, 79 mph. Beginning last year, after a maintenance agreement with Amtrak expired, the freight railroad has on several occasions reduced the line’s speed limits to the point where most of the track is restricted to 60 mph or slower, with some stretches 25 mph.

The slowdown has caused Amtrak’s three daily Wolverine Service round trips between Pontiac, Mich., and Chicago, via Detroit and Ann Arbor, to run about 90 minutes late since June 1, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said.

Read more: http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2011/07/21/Michigan-to-buy-rail-line-for-high-speed-Amtrak.html

From PeterGreenberg.com

With gas prices still dizzyingly high, and seemingly unlikely to fall anytime soon, more and more travelers are turning to Amtrak.

The American rail system has seen a significant jump in traffic, up almost 14 percent since last July, and is on track to smash the previous record of 25.8 million passengers.

But Amtrak has long gotten flak for its delays, often caused by having to share routes with the freight train companies that own most of the tracks.

So which routes are notorious for delays and which ones will whisk you to your destination on time?

Read more: http://www.petergreenberg.com/2008/08/22/amtraks-top-5-and-bottom-5-on-time-train-routes/