All aboard?

It's time to check in with some public transportation notes...

Downtown Orange County, which apparently is a liaison agency between I-Drive businesses and Orange County government, announced this week that they had secured $2 million from the Florida Department of Transportation for an I-Drive transit hub. The so-called "super stop" will be a pick-up and drop-off point for buses, taxis, trolleys, and shuttles. The transit hub has apparently been on the drawing board since the 1990s, but was put off each time a planned rail project along I-Drive failed.

We tried to analyze the reports on this station to figure out how it finally made it to the front of the line, as it sounds very similar in concept to the intermodal station that Kissimmee is proposing for downtown. It isn't tied in to a major transportation push in that area, and in fact it appears that none of the stations being proposed for the commuter rail system would be built as "hubs," so even if/when we get a commuter rail station, it wouldn't be built as a hub. And other than this "Downtown Orange County" group, we didn't see the names of any of the other governmental or quasi-governmental groups involved with securing funding. Anyone know the secret handshake?

Also this week, the Sentinel printed a story that originated in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel proclaiming that for the second consecutive year, the South Florida Tri-Rail commuter rail line ranked in the top 3 fastest-growing commuter railroads in the country. They note that the ridership is a big turnaround from 18 years ago, when the rail system opened to mostly empty trains, and that train frequency has increased from once an hour to once every 20 minutes. The biggest obstacle that the train continues to face is that CSX Transportation continues to control dispatch of the rail lines, and commuter trains are sometimes given lower priority than freight trains, leading to delays.

We hope that the Central Florida commuter rail folks will take a lesson from our neighbors to the south. Clearly for the commuter trains to gain riders, they must be reliable and run on schedule, which requires that they have priority over any remaining freight on the tracks. We understood that the CSX Transportation board was to take up the issue of selling the existing track for the project to Florida Department of Transportation in mid-September, but we have not been able to find any evidence that the deal has been completed.