CHAPTER 2

History of Commuter Rail

2.1 Private Sector Commuter Rail Services

The history of commuter rail in North America spans over 150 years, as shown in Figure 1. Private railroads began running short-haul commuter services from small towns into nearby major cities in the latter half of the 19th century. Towns in Westchester County north of New York City and around Chicago began growing as a result of these services (Young 2015). For example, the lines that became the Metra Electric District first began running on the Illinois Central in 1856 and flourished in the decades after the Chicago Fire in 1871, creating the South Side suburb of Hyde Park around their right-of-way (Allen 1998).

By the 1850s, commuter rail service was present in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia (Jackson 1985; Fischler 2007). In the decades after the American Civil War, commuter rail service was expanded into even more cities around North America. Toronto, Montreal (Wyatt 2020), Cincinnati, Memphis, San Francisco, and Cleveland, among others, all boasted commuter rail systems by the turn of the 20th century. These cities boasted impressive commuter rail ridership through the 1920s, until the Great Depression caused a major drop in rail ridership (Allen 1998).

In the years and decades following World War II, suburbanization, highways, and the rising popularity of automobiles and airplanes began to seriously cut into the ridership of private rail companies (Brock and Souleyrette 2011). For example, the New York Central Railroad lost 40 percent of its ridership in the months after the New York State Thruway opened in 1955; by 1975, U.S. nationwide intercity rail ridership was down to just 23 percent of what it had been in 1960 (no comparable commuter rail–specific statistics exist).¹⁴

As revenue declined for many private railroads across the United States and Canada, these private companies cut back or discontinued much of their passenger service, including commuter rail (Fischler 2007). In the United States, commuter rail services were abandoned in New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and St. Louis (Allen 1998). In Canada, Halifax, Newcastle, Moncton, Pictou, Quebec, and Regina all had services meeting the basic definition of commuter rail that had been discontinued by the 1960s (Fischler 2007).

2.2 Public Support for Commuter Rail Services

Starting in the 1950s, public entities stepped in to maintain whatever service remained. These services initially were purchase-of-service agreements, whereby a government agency would pay a private railroad to continue operating service (Fischler 2007). In 1960, the City of Philadelphia formed the Passenger Service Improvement Corporation, which purchased service on the Pennsylvania Railroad and Reading Railroad for passenger services running within the city. These services ran half-hourly all day and every 15 minutes at the peak, with fares equivalent to those of the subway until 1973, when fares began to increase.¹⁵

The Long Island Rail Road, Toronto’s GO Transit, and MBTA began full public ownership of commuter rail services in 1966, 1967, and 1972, respectively. In 1983, as a result of the 1981 Northeast Rail Service Act, full public ownership of the commuter rail services formerly operated by Conrail was inaugurated in New York (Metro-North), Philadelphia (SEPTA), New Jersey (NJT), and Maryland (MARC) (Fischler 2007; Brock and Souleyrette 2011).

In 1989, Tri-Rail opened in Southeast Florida, the first new commuter rail service in over 100 years. Tri-Rail was initially intended to be a temporary 5-year measure while Interstate 95 was being widened.¹⁶ However, it was a popular service and remained in place after the projected 5-year lifespan. Since then, 15 new commuter rail services have opened around the country (Wyatt 2020). Figure 2 shows the growth in revenue track mileage of commuter rail systems from 1960 to the present day. Almost all new commuter rail services operate in cities and regions that previously had no such service, and the rationales for investing in the new services are myriad and dependent on local contexts. For many, regional planners and officials decided congestion on highways and in downtown parking lots was so bad that a new commuter rail service would be necessary to sustain the growth of downtown office markets, as rail provided a faster or cheaper option.

2.3 Turn-of-the-Century Commuter Rail Ridership Growth

During the 1990s and 2000s, commuter rail ridership was steadily increasing around the United States; however, overall growth slowed in the 2010s, as shown in Figure 3. About 65 percent of the growth came from legacy systems that experienced an increase in commuter-oriented traffic to downtown cores.¹⁷ The remaining 35 percent came from new ridership on new systems across the country. As ridership grew, so did seasonal variations: Ridership predictably dipped by around 6 percent each year in the first quarter, primarily because of poor weather (Singhal, Kamga, and Yazici 2014).

2.4 COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts on Commuter Rail

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic decimated public transit ridership in early 2020, and commuter rail was no exception (Figure 3). Commuter rail as a mode has struggled to return to pre-pandemic ridership levels.

2.5 The Modern Market for Commuter Rail Services

The travel and ticket-purchase patterns of the commuters on which commuter railroads have long relied for revenue and ridership have dramatically changed since March 2020 because of work-from-home and flexible office hour policies of employers around the United States.¹⁸ Before the pandemic, working from home had been slowly growing for decades. According to the American Community Survey, all modes of commuting have been declining except for work-from-home, which grew from 5.3 percent in 2018 to 5.7 percent in 2019, shown in Table 1. Transit operators had been observing a ridership decline in certain markets before the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly on Fridays.¹⁹ The onset of the COVID-19 public health crisis greatly accelerated those trends, and a much broader segment of workers has continued to work from home long after the immediate crisis abated.

2.6 Future Markets for Commuter Rail Services

For commuter rail providers to increase their ridership, they can explore and target new travel markets within their service geography. This presents an opportunity to broaden the appeal of commuter rail as a mode to a wider share of the traveling public. This analysis focuses on understanding travel markets within regions, focusing on select commuter rail markets in North America.

Rather than using predictive demand models or regional surveys, this assessment uses the outputs of national travel activity extrapolations that integrate regional mobile location data with population and economic activity information to paint a picture of the travel market in commuter rail service areas. The assessment estimated the size and characteristics of the market for trips that could be taken on a regional train by analyzing data on trips by all modes between the areas surrounding existing stations. The market assessment shows a snapshot of the recent travel market and is not a predictive or dynamic tool. However, it provides insight concerning possible new markets for passenger service on existing commuter railways.

The assessment uses a third-party source, Replica, for mobility data reports on existing travel patterns in a specified corridor or region.²⁰ Replica data reflect an aggregate of the U.S. Census Bureau; the National Transit Database; state traffic counts; financial data, such as credit card transactions; and cell-phone geolocation data.

The analyses reported here provide a simplified review of potential markets for commuter rail services. The authors set catchment areas, station access parameters, and other factors at consistent levels to understand the market potential. Further, the authors acknowledge that even if a market exists, the potential for a commuter rail service to capture a significant portion will vary based on factors such as service levels, land use, parking costs, and congestion on parallel roadways.

Using these data, the assessment process began by defining a service area. For the purposes of simplification, this research uses a standard 2-mile radius as a base assumption for station service areas. This was done to provide comparable data between systems, rather than creating customized filters specific to each station, which would impair comparability between systems. Additionally, the service hours were standardized in each analysis for the same reason.

This service area can be mapped using GIS services and used to abstract down mobility data from Replica. The data are filtered to create an addressable market of trips between station service areas in the network. These filters exclude trips that start or end outside a station’s catchment area, commercial trips, and trips taken outside service hours. As shown in Figure 4, the abstracted final data set includes trips that could but may not be taken on a transit service for various reasons. The methodology is simple, repeatable, and broadly applicable to a diverse array of localities.

Commuter or regional rail services will capture a portion of the addressable market. For example, a commuter rail line with historic ridership of 5,000 passenger trips per day may pass through an addressable market of 100,000. In that case, the historic railway service captured 5 percent of the addressable market. Different service patterns and features can create a wide range of market capture rates. Research and practice show the market capture rate varies, as shown in Table 2, with factors such as land use, fare policy, service patterns, and other factors affecting the overall market capture rate.

Table 2. Typical market capture rate ranges for commuter rail service.

Sources: These mode shares are typical values seen on other market assessments for regional and commuter rail: Capacity and Reliability Study, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, January 2021; Commute Seattle, Seattle DOT, April 2019; Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad Key Performance Metrics, New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, May 2023; Philadelphia Transit Plan, City of Philadelphia, February 2021; SMART Project: Final Environmental Impact Report, June 2006.

The analysis presented here analyzes changes in the travel markets between typical weekday travel in 2019 and 2023 in five markets across the United States:

• Tri-Rail service area (South Florida),
• RTD service area (Denver),²¹
• Rail Runner service area (Albuquerque and Santa Fe),
• MARC service area, and
• Metrolink service area (Southern California).

While some regional differences did emerge, the overall change in travel markets yielded three valuable insights to understanding how commuter railroad services might be reoriented in the future:

1. Declining ridership is not correlated with declining overall travel.

   Despite a decline in ridership on most commuter rail services, the analysis shows a more varied market. While in some regions slightly fewer addressable market trips were taken in 2023 than in 2019, other regions with lower post-pandemic ridership saw the same or slightly more addressable market trips taken in 2023 than in 2019. For example, addressable weekday trips in the MARC service area grew 2 percent from 680,000 trips in the fall of 2019 to 692,000 trips in the fall of 2023. During that same period, ridership fell and has not recovered above 50 percent of pre-pandemic riders. This indicates that travel markets around North America have not collapsed, and people are traveling roughly the same amount, if not more, than they were in 2019. However, in most cases, commuter rail ridership has remained significantly depressed compared with 2019, and commuter rail providers are generally not capturing much of the current travel market.

2. Trip timing has changed.

   On both weekdays and weekends, trips in 2023 were made later in the day. The afternoon peak on weekdays is generally larger than the morning peak, lasts many hours longer than the morning peak, and generally starts earlier than what might be expected based on a 9-to-5 work pattern. Weekend travel went from peaking around the 2:00 p.m. hour to peaking much later in the day. This indicates the potential to capture more trips if commuter rail services were to run later in the evening. As representative examples (for brevity), these trends are shown in Figures 5, 6, 7, and 8 for the Denver and South Florida service areas but were observed across all the service areas analyzed. Researchers, planners, and providers can create similar graphics for other systems following the same methodology.

3. Trip purposes have changed, but not as dramatically as ridership.

   Using the MARC service area as an example, shown in Figure 9, overall work-bound addressable trips have decreased by approximately 16 percent. In 2019, commuting composed roughly 24 percent of all weekday travel. In 2023, that fraction had been reduced to approximately 20 percent. The reduction in work trips was shifted almost entirely to the trip category “other.” (“Other” is a category representing trips not assigned to any of the other listed trip purposes).²² Home-bound trips remained relatively stable, around one-third of all weekday trips, which suggests people are leaving home as frequently as they did in 2019 but are not traveling to work as regularly as they did in 2019. The moderate decrease in work-bound trips does not match the sharp decline and slow recovery rate of many commuter rail systems, which suggests that many suburban work trips are not well served by commuter rail services.

Within each market reviewed by the research team, nuances related to the service and market capture rates varied. It is beyond the scope of this project to review and assess each individual market.

Commuter rail providers can replicate this methodology for their lines to gain deeper and more current insights into their own markets. Regardless, the analysis shows some noticeable shifts in the travel markets for each region. Successfully responding to these trends will be crucial for the long-term survival of commuter rail as a mode. Diversifying beyond downtown-bound commute trips, providing service in off-peak directions and hours, and better serving evening markets are areas to be explored for potential ridership growth.