Thinking about the role of railroads in regional transit

Riverdale MARC Station, Maryland
Originally uploaded by rllayman.

There is no question that the Maryland and Virginia commuter railroads are focused on bring people to DC (and Baltimore in the case of the Maryland service), but not so much in terms of broader transportation and mobility questions.

The DC oriented services are much more limited in comparison to the services around New York City--Metro North and Long Island Railroad, as well as New Jersey Transit, which is active with railroad-based services throughout the state--Chicago (METRA) or Philadelphia (SEPTA's rail services do provide service within Philadelphia as well as the suburbs.

This has come up because a number of people responding to earlier blog entries about proposals to expand the WMATA subway system to BWI Airport have engendered the response "What about MARC?"

I think that response has two sides? What about MARC?

In their last price hike, it was decided to screw occasional users, including visitors, by raising the price of a single round trip ticket by almost 45%! That's unreasonable.

And both VRE and MARC do not provide weekend service. Although MARC does provide later service (by almost 3 hours) than VRE, from both Baltimore to DC and DC to Baltimore.

The railroads around NYC operate from about 5 am to 2 am and on weekends.

Maybe that's a bit outlandish, but to make DC area railroad services more useful, perhaps the overall service and value equation needs to be rethought.

So this might be another topic to cover in my proposed annual transportation-mobility advocacy conference, to alternate between Baltimore and Washington... (and eventually, maybe we'll have to bring Richmond into the equation).

Index Keywords: mobility