Holy crap all ready. It doesn't matter if the rails to Union Station were made out solid gold and mag-lev trains went over them at 1000 mph. THE STATION IS IN THE WRONG PLACE TO BE USEFUL!!!!!!!!!

If you think someone is going to ride in from the burbs to Union Station and then wait around for another train to go the last 8 blocks to Bricktown/downtown then you are stupid. Any modern mass transit hub will dwarf anything that is feasable at Union Station.

__________________
Oklahoma City - The surprise your family has been looking for.

tom, i don't think anyone discounts the need for rail in our future. the map on your website does nothing for me... i wish i could see a detailed map of union staion. i don't understand why a staion by the ford center couldn't link up with the same lines that union does.

simple layman's terms please.

Here's what's needed and what can be immediately developed at Union Station:

(1) Two dedicated platform tracks (one east, one west-bound) tracks for fast, intercity passenger trains. Union Station yard interfaces with north-south BNSF Red Rock subdivision line via renewed interchange ramps near Santa Fe Avenue.

(2) Two dedicated sidings for rapid, intermodal mail and express equipment marshalling and switching supporting intercity and commuter train services.

(3) Two dedicated platform tracks for fast, frequent, regional commuter trains.

(4) Two dedicated platorm tracks with overhead electric catenary for developing, local light rail services.

(5) Two dedicated through-tracks for mainline freight train bypass (one for UP, one for BNSF)

(6) Two dedicated through-tracks for special train handling - tourist, private, military, etc.

(7) Trolleys from north-south streets circulate through Union Station, initially via 7th Street, ultimately via new dedicated yard platforms.

(8) Generous interface with corresponding, connecting bus services, auto parking and pedestrian facilities.

(9) Direct, coordinated ties via existing rail lines to Will Rogers Airport and Tulsa International Airport and state military facilities.

Interim startup services could be started immediately via existing lines. Fast-track development could bring all other basic services on line, at the outside, within a few months to three years.

Check the existing layout yourself, via maps.live.com "Birdseye" function, starting scan at 300 SW 7th St, Oklahoma City, OK 73109-5320.

TOM ELMORE

And again, do you seriously think anyone will be interested in all of this rail line if the area remains blighted, which is what will continue if I-40 is not moved? And everything you're talking about is east-west. There's no way to run it north-south, as it would have to run directly through the CBD. Is east-west REALLY what we need? Do you care at all about a park, making our downtown a viable place for people to live, or do you only care about freight yards and a theoretical rail system for transportation, which we don't even know is assuredly financially feasible? Do the UP and BNSF want these lines?

You didn't answer my question on how much would it take to get them ready for heavy rail traffic? I see the time line for heavy usage but no mention of costs??

Union Station speaks for itself. Take a look. Don't let the weeds blind you to what's actually there. I'm sometimes available to lead tours of the facility. The number is 405 794 7163.

First phase DART Rail tracks, built on long standing existing railway corridors, are 115 lb (per yard) welded rail on concrete crossties. Lightest mainline track in the Union Station yard is 115 lb welded rail on generally good quality wooden ties and extremely high quality road bed. Mainline bridges are in good condition.

First phase of Dallas system -- Electric light rail lines and mixed-traffic commuter line using 13 updated Budd Rail Diesel Cars -- was built with proceeds from a penny sales tax. DART officials say the development was created at roughly one-fifth the cost of building the same amount of new capacity with highways.

Compare the likely one billion dollar+ cost of the "New Crosstown" to total $1.1 billion cost of entire Dallas rail system first phase -- a development which immediately drew tremendous surrounding commercial development exceeding its own cost and had 40,000 daily riders within two years. System is now well along to tripling first phase size, moving over 70,000 daily riders.

Union Station lines have always interchanged with north-south, former Santa Fe lines in a number of ways. Significantly improved fast access is now more in reach than ever for several different reasons.

Via the 2.86 cent per gallon Federal Transit Trust fund contribution from each gallon of motor fuel purchased, Oklahomans reportedly send something over $70 million per year to support Federal Transit Programs.

Money and assets have never been the real problem in Oklahoma. The problem has been that our highway-and-auto-lobby influence sodden leadership has consistently undercut what should have been done.

A Regional Transit Authority (Central Oklahoma Metropolitan Transit - COMET) including Oklahoma County and all immediately surrounding counties could be rapidly established, bringing the political clout of all together for common funding.

Existing facilities in most corridors would support rapid startup services nearly immediately to key locations in each county. Use of commercial lines would be negotiated as standard business arrangement with the rail companies by the Authority. Ultimately, Authority operations might be competitively bid to commercial operators which would function somewhat like utilities under public franchises.

All predictable factors being typical / nominal, rail services may be expected to significantly outperform highways in construction cost, life-cycle maintenance cost and actual service life. Nothing else comes close to the mix of speed, carrying capacity, energy efficiency and flexibility, environmental cleanliness, affordability and safety of rail.

TOM ELMORE

Use of commercial lines by mass transit has been problematic in other cities. And again, we have to build a new Crosstown. We can argue about where, but it is going to have to be built. We're not talking about a local highway. We're talking about one of the only three major east-west interstate highways in the United States. The current road is inadequate in size, and it's crumbling. So, the billion dollars you estimate cannot be taken away from the highway for city use for mass transit. It would have to come from other moneys during or after expansion of I-40.

Is DART used for commuter traffic? How many people in Dallas are actually using DART for transportation to work or even to get to downtown events from outlying neighborhoods? DART is cute, but is it more than a tourist mover?

How many people in Oklahoma City actually work downtown or in areas immediately accessible to rail lines? How many of those people would be willing to use mass transit? What would the price of gas have to be to make use of commuter rail cost effective for the general population? What number of people would have to use mass transit every day and for what distance to make the expenditure of a billion dollars, not to mention the cost of maintenance, justifiable?

Those are questions that need to be answered. Again, we all agree that light rail is a great thing.....if it is actually used by enough people to justify the massive costs. But we can't simply say, "Light rail is great!" and spend the money without careful thought. Again, I think Union Station is a lousy location. Precisely how and where would those Union Station lines interface with north-south? The inconvenience of having to wait for a bus or trolley after taking the train is going to decrease usage, unless the CBD comes to Union Station. And that's not going to happen as long as the Crosstown is in place.

Again, it's not that anyone is anti-rail. I'm simply anti "let's have rail because it will decrease our dependence on the automobile and truck but we don't really know how practical our current locations are or if anyone would even ride it or how much it would cost to build and maintain" enthusiasm. This needs to be thought out carefully, or we could be throwing a billion dollars, and then some, into a white elephant.

betts, during my 6 years in dallas i totaled two cars a year apart from each other (amazingly in the same lane, at the same intersection, hit on the same side both times by uninsured, illegal immigrants... which is another story for another time) and i had to take the dart during those times. one would see a lot of business people downtown, but they would start thinning out around city place and mockingbird station... which makes me think they did it to avoid parking downtown and everything involved with that fiasco. that's when the make up of travelers would end up mostly as lower income folks that can't afford a car and what not (similar to the types of people that would ride the bus).
the only thing i disliked was the large amount of young thugs and gangsters. which there was a large amount of... even all the way up to plano.

I ride the 'Sooner Express' bus from Norman's OU campus to downtown OKC from time to time. its 2.25 for the 20 or so mile trip, each way. my car gets less than 45 miles p/gal so it makes sense to ride it now.

problem being, the damn transport system doesnt run that line on saturday or sunday. so much fun to ride up on friday and wait till monday morning to return...

when I ride it back from the downtown transit center in OKC it picks up a ton of suit wearing folks from the federal building area and drops them at the park and ride on robinson/I35 in Norman.

I think the bus system in OKC is awful, god awful to say the least. If you've ever been to portland, oregon/denver/dallas,etc, you okies might realize that we are way behind the times when it comes to people moving.

I think the union station is kind of like the gold dome, something that needs to be preserved and utilized once the time is right.

but on the other hand i think the mass transit bus system needs to be revamped and expanded. isn't that the next MAPS project?

cheers!

The tone the talk about transit always takes among OKC leaders and Chamber-types has always just amazed me. "Can't be done -- won't work here" -- although trolleys, interurbans and other rail services literally built Oklahoma City.

It's so shrill, so frenzied, so carefully rehearsed as to go "robot monotone," and so completely, transparently absurd that any rational observer immediately understands that these people are simply, blindly protecting the status quo from which they, themselves profit. "Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven," and all that -- the real motto of typical Oklahoma "leadership."

Tiny Gainesville, Texas, a city of less than 15,000 in extreme north Texas (where blue collar Ardmore dwellers have driven daily for years to work at good paying jobs...) made absolute monkeys of every city government in Oklahoma when the Heartland Flyer was dropped in its lap. No thought was ever given there to "leaving customers out in the weather," without restrooms or out under some "open-air gazebo.

Texas proud, Texas savvy Gainesville leaders -- whose historic Santa Fe depot building was not quite ready for service by June 14, 1999, moved a portable school classroom into the parking lot north of the depot building -- where Heartland Flyer riders were met from the git-go with an air conditioned, clean, people-friendly, temporary facility sporting comfortable seating, sparkling restrooms and a well-stocked marketing desk showing you where to go to spend your money in the area.

More than this, however, they already had something substantially in place that no Oklahoma community has to this day -- a real, people-friendly, multimodal transportation hub.

Heartland Flyer passengers would have no trouble reaching Gainesville's Frank Buck Zoo, the historic downtown square, North Central Texas College venues or Factory Shops outlet mall. They had only to walk across the historic Santa Fe depot platform to find that the city's transit vans had already been based there -- and passage was, and is, one dollar.

While Oklahoma leaders were whining and stalling and leaving customers without even restrooms because "everything wasn't perfect" -- the folks in a city nearly too far north to be in Texas -- created a start for modern, multimodal transportation mostly out of their own pride and will.

What if they'd had a facility like OKC Union Station -- which could have and should have been used for THE HEARTLAND FLYER from day one?

THE FLYER should have been supporting itself with a revenues from a healthy mail and express service on the route from Kansas City to Ft. Worth via OKC from the outset -- but Neal McCaleb and ODOT deliberately prevented this, even as Amtrak's Ed Ellis, whose wife's family is from Duncan, worked frantically and persistently to convince McCaleb to tap the opportunity he had carefully tailored for the train. The mail contract was already being trucked up and down I-35, awaiting the train.

But it was a train that never came. McCaleb was not about to do the right thing -- nor were OKC leaders going to insist. They apparently didn't want the train to succeed on its own terms, either -- or Union Station might well already be the Southwestern Hub for the Amtrak intermodal mail and express network that should have been.

So -- the $23 million startup fund that accompanied the train, righteous money by any standard, was burned up covering overhead costs in about four years -- instead of proliferating service to Tulsa, etc. The train now subsists on state subsidy.

THE FLYER was to have been the showpiece of Ed Ellis' "new Amtrak." A man of understanding with the courage to risk his career and reputation trying to bring common sense to Amtrak, Ed had gone "back to the future," with an advanced, intermodal version of the revenue sources that had supported commercial railroads' successful passenger trains from the beginning -- business the railroad industry literally created -- general, economical First Class Mail routing and fast, reliable and inexpensive Express Freight capable of handling literally anything.

But Neal McCaleb and Frank Keating simply would not have it. And it wasn't "enough" just to frustrate THE FLYER's sterling, innovative business plan. They were clearly hell bent to destroy Union Station's usefulness forever -- by putting a highway through the rail yard of the terminal building that had been purchased a decade before with federal transit grant funds for the stated purpose -- documented in reams of accompanying data and analysis -- of becoming our regional transit center -- all done with the written approval and under the signature of Neal McCaleb, Henry Bellmon's Transportation Secretary, in 1989.

That's right. The study of Union Station's suitability for use as our transit center was done pre-1989. COTPA's got it. You'll have to pay 'em to copy it -- and bring a hand-dolly to carry it out.

TOM ELMORE

I remain wholly unconvinced and the very thought that this is going to slow down construction of the new crosstown even further is very frustrating.

Tom sounds like an automated recording that just keeps regurgitating the same tired message.

I've read everything he's written and studied the maps and aerial photos and all I see is a hub in the wrong place and tracks going where no one wants to go.

The city should have been designed with transportation in mind, and our current layout will be a costly mistake when gas hits $10/gal. (To call that crazy now is no different than calling $4/gal crazy a few years ago).

Our way of life will change, one way or another. I'm considering moving to within walking distance of downtown, I would also consider moving to a place that was on a rail hub going downtown.

It all seems expensive, but not as expensive as where this is going.

Union Station services places where there is current development as well as places where there used to be development.

In the case of the later, you would think the city fathers could use this as an opportunity to develop new communities serviced by rail. It is and has always been true that development follows closely behind the addition of rail access.

I wouldn't be opposed to a 2-hub system -- one primarily serving lines running west to east, another serving north to south lines.

As we move on, demand for west-east transit is going to do nothing but increase. In fact, at first at least, our best public transportation customers are coming from NE OKC.

I would agree with most of that.

The idea of a multi-modal, central transportation hub is good. Crossroads might be a better choice though.

The central transit station needs to be under the new Boulevard with direct access to the Ford Center, New Convention Center, and the downtown Cooncourse system. A modern multimodal transit hub would have to be 3 or 4 times the size of anything that could ever be built at Union Station. You need places for transit police, sales, administration, operations, airline check-in and on and on and on.

__________________
Oklahoma City - The surprise your family has been looking for.

Kerry - I don't disagree with you on service to the central city but the metropolitan area is so much larger now than when Union Station was viable.

A Crossroads location for the big hub would be in a good location to server Tinker and east, Will Rogers and southwest, OU and south, as well as going through downtown to UCO and north.

I agree with you on size, too - at least 3 or 4 times and maybe larger. I really don't even see Union Station that well positioned for a neighborhood hub.

Still no answers to my questions.

The Heartland flyer is nice, but it's transportation that competes with cars and planes for leisure time travel. No one goes to Dallas every day to work. Personally, I've never taken it, because I don't want to end up in Fort Worth and have to take public transportation or cabs everywhere I want to go in Dallas. I've thought about it, and I might take it to OU-Texas this year to see how it all works, but to try and compare it to public transportation in Oklahoma City is comparing apples to oranges.

1. What percentage of people living in Oklahoma City and it's east-west suburbs (El Reno, Yukon, Del City, Midwest City) actually work downtown or work at Tinker or another business that would be served by an east-west line? How does that compare to the number of people who would use a north-south line?

2. What percentage of those workers live far enough away from their place of business that it would be cost effective to ride a train to work?

3. What percentage of those workers would be willing to take a bus from Union Station to their place of business once they had arrived?

4. What would we charge for transportation, including rail and bus service that would make it financially feasible for people to ride the train and then take the bus instead of driving? Approximately what price does gasoline have to reach before a significant number of people would be willing to stop driving?

5. How many people would rather replace a fuel-inefficient car with a hybrid or fuel-efficient car than take public transportation?

6. What kind of time frame would most people who took public transportation have to anticipate for getting to work? How would that differ from drive time?

7. If we had commercial east-west rail, where would it go? How many people could we anticipate would take rail from their hometown into Oklahoma City? Would where they arrived, and transportation options have any impact on whether they would be likely to use such service?

8. What kind of subsidies would be needed to make commercial east-west rail feasible?

9. What honestly is needed to make the Crosstown safe and large enough to handle current traffic? Can we expect traffic increases in the future that need to be anticipated? Where is the most cost-effective place to locate it that also allows for future development of our downtown and removal of urban blight.

These are all questions I have. This is why I would like to see this issue studied in depth. Unless someone has answers to those questions, simply saying we need light rail or even commercial rail is not enough. Again, we need to make sure we have rail that would be utilized. Otherwise, we'll be throwing billions of dollars out the window for rail that runs empty.

i went and checked out union yard thinkoing i would encounter a web of tracks.... i found two sets of tracks. maybe i was looking in the wrong place.

You're exactly right, Kerry.

The station is a beautiful structure and will be a great facility in the new C2S park. But in today's Oklahoma City, it is situated in a location that does nothing to bring commuter rail traffic downtown. The central business district is the target of dreams of a viable light rail system and Union Station isn't located there.

Perhaps Tom has something in that the railyard could work for mail or shipping. But that's it. Passenger, long range and commuter isn't going there.

Tom, for years now, you've been railing against any and all public officials who dare to disagree with you on this topic. Knowing many of the city officials and even being involved in the process from the inside, I know how off base many, if not most, of your claims are.

My question to you, tho, is: Do you have any kind of document or study, created by an independant source, such as a private consultant not hired or supported by either you or the local public agencies, that supports your numbers and theories? You obviously know your side of the debate. What do you have to back up your claims that everyone would agree is an unbiased source.

Paul the Apostle -- to the Corinthians -- again comes to mind:" For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise."

Some years back the OKC NW Republican Club asked if a colleague and I would debate the issue of the value of Union Station versus ODOT's New Crosstown Plan. The answer was "yes." "Anybody you wouldn't debate?" they asked. "We'll debate any of 'em, any of 'em and their brothers, any of 'em and their brothers and their dogs -- any time, any place" was my answer.

The time and place was set -- but nobody was found at repeated requests who would take the challenge of defending the ODOT plan. Not ODOT, not the OKC Chamber, not any of the "highway lobby partisans." Finally, one of their own members, long time state highway users federation director Paul Matthews and state Traffic Engineering Council chair Leonard West agreed to take up the task.

The audio from the debate is on KGOU's archive. Their chief point? As always, echoing the wise and courageous bureaucrats at ODOT, "We're gonna do it and you can't stop us."

In 1999, I worked several months with the Citizens League of Central Oklahoma to assemble a transit development program for an evening forum at Metro Tech. My organization paid its money to bring real experts to town to represent several aspects of successful transit development from their own experiences - a DART official, the CEO of the Dallas McKinney Avenue trolley system, and the Executive Director of St. Louis Citizens for Modern Transit.

When we got to the forum, we discovered that the program had been turned over to Drew Dugan, apparently a "chamber man," who refused to allow the experts to make their presentations. Instead, he passed the microphone around among the local citizens asking, in effect, "what do you think about transit?."

What the visiting experts from cities with real transit systems saw that night has stayed with them through the years. As one told me as we reminisced several years later about the events of that night -- "I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I've always heard how backward and corrupt the situation in OKC is, but until I saw what happened at that forum, I would never have believed the depth of it. I've never seen anything like it. It's made a great conversation piece. I've told the story of what I saw that night every where I've gone."

When nationally respected OKC Planner Garner Stoll offered his very unflattering personal opinion of ODOT's plan in a four-page critique, written at the request of a state rep, his view was rebuffed. His position here in OKC was ultimately "very courageously defunded" by a city councilman who, like the rest, insisted on endless, unsupportable sprawl development. If you can't shut 'em up, "defund 'em."

As I've noted, the "Fixed Guideway Study" and its predecessors were pretty much all completely transparent shams -- produced by people and organizations obviously beholden to Neal McCaleb and the highway lobby.

Having witnessed years of the same games in his own state, New Mexico Governor Richardson put the "Rail Runner Express" commuter trains to work without "a study.' He'd seen far too much public money blown on other sham "studies" designed to fail. He knew the trains would work -- and they are working today.

My colleagues and I have always been completely willing to debate and compare our views with the views of any others. I don't recall ever shutting anybody out of any forum I was handling. We urge and encourage open debate. Our views have been gladly forged in the polemic fire. We have engaged in give and take with world experts on this and other transportation projects -- like the late Malise C. Dick, a native of Scotland and longtime World Bank lead transportation economist, who lived in Norman for a time during the late 1990s.

It was Malise Dick who insisted during his time here that the "New Crosstown" proposal -- sold as a "$236 million project" would cost at least $500 million even then. Of course -- he was directly on-target, and ODOT was exactly wrong. He considered the plan to destroy Union Station's rail yard completely wrong-headed.

I've never talked to a single transportation expert anywhere -- who did not work for ODOT or was in someway beholden to the special interests surrounding this mess -- who thought the whole idea of the destruction of the last grand rail yard in the West to make way for four miles of urban expressway was anything but suicidally absurd.

As former Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson said of the plan (and I repeat) -- "it's insane."

Broadcast news today is saying "$5 a gallon gasoline by the Fourth of July."

How about it?

TOM ELMORE

How about answering some of the above questions? I'd be happy to debate, or at least see what you think about them. It doesn't matter if gas is $5 a gallon if the mass trans doesn't go where the people want to go.

I don't claim to have specific operational answers to all questions, Betts. I think I've offered many links to information from cities that are running these services today from which you could draw reasonable conclusions. But operational reality is hard to model.

I'm always suspicious of people who don't seem to want to talk to those who've done it -- or who, as I've all-too-often seen here -- go to great lengths to keep others from hearing from them.

I've consistently found the "new transit cities'" leaders very eager to discuss their own experiences and to make recommendations. I don't know of one "new transit system" that has failed -- or is not experiencing a boom in use today due to the motor fuel price tsunami we're all now facing. But no rational individual would expect financial performance from one mode that is not demanded of the dominant mode, especially in early development stages.

I believe it's entirely self-evident that it would be a shame -- verging on a death wish -- to allow a bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats who, manifestly, can't successfully manage the roads on which they claim expertise to destroy the center of our elegant, one-of-a-kind state rail network at a time like this.

My view of the value of OKC Union Station and our existing rail network has been informed by and universally and energetically supported by any and all transit leaders in other cities that I've come to know. Only "certain Oklahomans" scoff at these assets -- and I've come to learn that most of these "have their reasons" for doing so -- reasons that generally serve exclusively themselves in fairly shockingly "near-term" ways.

I'd urge all to recognize that we are fortunate to possess a wealth of existing transportation assets that could help us immensely -- unless we allow civic vandals to mindlessly destroy them.

You have my contact information in these posts. If I can offer other resources or information, I'll always try to do so. But there's a lot of good information out there for all to find if they're willing to seek for it.

TOM ELMORE

the truth is that you have answers to almost nothing .. you speak in vast generalities and keep talking like a broken recored .. everyone on the inside is "corrupt" and i am the answer. Sure you have no agenda?

the union yard is not in a good place for a transit hub .. .period