[URBAN NOTE] "The Missing Link: Why downtown Buffalo needs a new rail station"

[rfmcdonald]

Here at A Bit More Detail I post every so often about Buffalo, that city in New York State not two hours' drive from Toronto that directly adjoins Ontario and is one corner of the Toronto sprawl. Today's justification for Toronto linkage? In one of its periodic links roundup posts, Spacing Toronto linked to an article in Buffalo's ArtVoice discussing a renewed push for improved passenger rail facilities in Buffalo to plug that city into--among other regional metropoles--Toronto.

Ten years ago, everyone thought the wait was over. There was a game-changing plan to re-establish downtown Buffalo as the transit center of Western New York. A part of the empty Aud and the area around it would have been transformed into a regional transportation hub, bringing together passenger rail, light rail, and buses. Local politicians even secured money and drew up detailed plans for the building’s repurposing. The Buffalo News quoted then-mayor Anthony Masiello as saying: “This sends a very strong signal we’re no longer talking about concepts…We’re going to start delivering on what we’re talking about for the Buffalo Inner Harbor.”

It never materialized, the Aud was demolished, and the entire idea of such a downtown project vanished with the building. Buffalo was left with a hole in the ground and its meager Amtrak station hidden under the I-190.

Now, Buffalo faces what some suggest may be a new key to energizing the region: high-speed rail.

Groups involved in the planning, including CSX and the New York State Department of Transportation, have discussed faster trains, higher trip frequency, and more reliable service. All this would be within the Empire State Corridor, a two-track line that stretches from Niagara Falls to New York City, with emphasis on the stretch between Albany and the Falls.

Planning is still in early stages, says Hal Morse, executive director of the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council. A corridor-wide environmental impact statement on the effects and feasibility of high-speed rail, he says, is expected in the summer of 2012. Localized studies will follow, and after those, construction.

[. . .]

In the beginning, higher-speed trains would still share tracks with regular passenger and freight trains. The finished product, Morse says, would be a third track to be used exclusively for high-speed trains. A small part of that third track has already been built outside Rochester.

“When you’re bringing the external transportation to the region—for example the high-speed rail project—one of the things that we do is try and coordinate how will we achieve the vision for this region,” Morse says. “We’re also working closely with the Canadians. We’ve been building this mega-region concept that incorporates the greater Toronto area and Upstate New York. And when you combine that population base it’s really significant and substantially growing.”

The problem with this plan? It may not make economic sense.

“Who knows how much service would actually increase with high-speed rail,” says Dr. Daniel Hess, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at UB. Hess, like Foster, recognizes high-speed rail’s potential. “It would have to be really terrific service, really priced right, in order to greatly increase the number of people coming to Buffalo by rail.”

He says that if it does materialize, Buffalo can handle the increase in visitors that Morse and the NYSDOT predict. “Can NFTA handle the number of people that would be coming on rail? Right now I think absolutely,” he says.

Hess teaches classes on transportation planning, and has experience in researching travel behavior, or people’s choices about where, when, and how they travel. He, too, warns that any decisions on high-speed rail, at both the city and state level, must be approached cautiously. Often, Hess says, American travelers in Western Europe will experience the region’s efficient high-speed trains and demand that the same system be built back home.

“Where rail works best is at its arrival and departure points you have a lot of activity happening. You travel from the center of London to the center of Paris on high-speed rail, and when you arrive in the center of Paris there’s an enormous density of activity,” Hess says. The closest example of such a system stateside is the Boston-New York City-Washington, DC corridor, which is different in more than one way from the Empire Corridor. “The problem with cities like Buffalo is the central city, the central core, has really lost its bang as the nerve center of the region,” Hess says. “If you were to arrive in downtown Buffalo on the rail, there isn’t necessarily so much there for you.”

As at least one commenter notes, Buffalo's more natural partner may well be Toronto not New York City, but the decided non-transparency of the Canadian-American border isn't exactly the sort of phenomenon that encourages the growth of transnational regions. Is making massive investments in high-speed rail networks in a fairly speculative effort at renewing the economy of upstate New York a good idea? I leave this to my readers to discuss.