How to boost SunRail ridership and make money while at it

SunRail — Central Florida’s young commuter rail system — needs more butts in its seats. While it was never expected or designed to move tens of thousands of people a day, it has still fallen short of its very modest projections. But despite its shortcomings, SunRail is an important first step toward making Central Florida less car-dependent. It is living proof that local cities, counties, and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) can work together to implement multi-billion dollar transit projects. And for the few Central Floridians that do ride the train, it’s an opportunity to forego stressful car commutes and to perhaps go car-light or car-free back at home.
Anybody who rides SunRail will tell you that the primary reason why ridership is so low is that the train does not run frequently enough or long enough. And they’re right. The spotty schedule and short, weekday-only span of service are huge constraints in a service economy where less than half of residents work 9 to 5.
So is adding trains the proper next step? Perhaps. But perhaps there are other options we could try before pouring millions of dollars into SunRail operations. And besides, there may be little political appetite for additional spending: SunRail is already racking upwards of $30M in annual costs, equivalent to a $30-$40 subsidy for each ride. Time is running out to solve this problem: local cities and counties will become liable for operating expenses in 2021.
At the risk of seemingly introducing a “silver bullet” solution — which do not exist in real-life transport planning — this author would like to take a trip back to the basics of commuter rail and come back with an idea to make it more competitive— and perhaps make some money while at it.
What is, and what is not, commuter rail
Commuter rail is the odd-duckling of mass transit. Although it runs on steel tracks, it’s very different from heavy rail or light rail. Both of these types of systems thrive on dense urban areas where people and jobs are closer to each other.
Commuter rail needs different conditions to succeed. As the name implies, It does well on long-distance commute trips (say from Long Island to Manhattan or from Sacramento to San Francisco). It does not need dense, urban areas for the entire alignment. In fact, commuter rail is primarily used to connect suburban locations with a job center. When you look at it that way, commuter rail is actually a decent match for Central Florida.
But commuter rail needs to be “competitive” with driving into work. By competitive, I mean that the total cost of taking the train is lower than the total cost of driving. Total cost includes soft costs like travel time or stress, as well as hard costs that people pay with money — like fares, fuel, parking, tolls, etc. This is where the equation is off in Central Florida. For many residents, the total cost of driving into work is still much cheaper than that of taking the train.
Although some may disagree, congestion and driving travel times in Central Florida are not dire enough to nudge people onto the train. Our regional job center, Downtown Orlando, is designed to make driving into it cheap and quick. It’s not anybody’s fault: City of Orlando has not had enough time to adapt its downtown to a new world where driving into it is not the only option.
The Case for Less Parking
When we look at the competitiveness equation for commuter rail, it is clear that some components of the total cost are dictated by outside forces. For example, there’s not much that can be done about gas prices. But there are other components that are squarely within the jurisdiction of our local government. Parking in the downtown core is probably the best example¹.
According to its 2009 Parking Master Plan, the City of Orlando controls half of the off-street parking supply in Downtown Orlando, and almost all of the on-street parking. Approximately eight thousand parking spaces are leased by City of Orlando on a monthly basis — presumably to daily car commuters. Another five thousand City spaces are available on a per-hour or per-day basis. If only a fraction of commuters parking in City spaces took SunRail to and from Downtown Orlando, SunRail ridership would easily double.
How could City of Orlando spark such a shift? The easiest way would be to increase the parking fees. At the time of this writing, most of the monthly parking passes in the downtown core are sold out at the current rates — indicating that prices are below what the market could handle.
Another way would be to sell the land on which City parking lots and City parking garages are built on. Downtown Orlando’s land is the most valuable in the region, with prices above $12M per acre near the Church Street SunRail station. It does not take an economist to realize that the City is subsidizing parking with public funds when you consider the opportunity cost of not selling the land.
And yet there’s more that could be done. The City of Orlando currently sets parking minimums on new developments² to “protect the capacity of the City’s street system and avoid undue congestion on those streets, and to lessen unnecessary conflicts between vehicles and pedestrians.” Many cities around the world — including Mexico City with its notoriously congested core — have realized that parking minimums instead create an oversupply of parking, incentivize driving, make housing more expensive, and do nothing to reduce congestion. Letting developers choose how much parking to provide is an effective way to right-size the parking supply. Unbundling the cost of parking from that of housing or office space has also been proven to lead to better utilization of precious downtown space.
A Transit First Downtown equals SunRail Success
In the end, SunRail — just like any other transit system — needs to be competitive against other travel modes to draw ridership. Right now, SunRail’s competitiveness equation is off and its ridership is suffering as a result. There are several weak points that could — and should — be addressed, but doing so would require considerable investment. In the meantime, there are things that local governments could try that would cost very little or even turn a profit. City of Orlando could take the first step by increasing the cost and eventually right-sizing the supply of parking in Downtown Orlando.
[1] Although I prefer the term “private vehicle storage”, I’ll stick with “parking” for sake of clarity :)
[2] There are small reductions in the minimum requirements for mixed-used and Downtown Orlando developments.
