(The following story by Cathy Woodruff was posted in the January 28 online edition of the Albany Times Union.)
ALBANY, N.Y. — The allure of a sparkling new station appears to have boosted Capital Region train travel, but office space there is proving a tougher sell and a shuttle service to downtown Albany is being scrapped due to a lack of riders.
As few as five people a day were using the shuttle bus, which was slated to make 8 to 10 daily round trips, said Capital District Transportation Authority spokesman Carm Basile.
CDTA, which built and owns the station that opened in September, also reports that no tenants have signed leases for some 2,900 square feet of mezzanine office space. However, the leasing agent said interest has been high and prospects are good for leasing the space soon.
With more than 620,000 arrivals and departures each year, the Albany-Rensselaer stop was among Amtrak’s busiest, even before the new $53.1 million station and garage complex opened in the fall.
But during the last three months of 2002, the number of travelers arriving and boarding trains at Rensselaer jumped 3.6 percent from the same period in 2001, according to Amtrak.
“We believe this increase can be attributed to interest in the new station,” said Dan Stessel, an Amtrak spokesman in Washington, D.C.
The 162,600 comings and goings in October, November and December were 5,600 more than the year before, and the rise was significant, Stessel said, because overall Amtrak ridership was down 2.3 percent during that period.
At midday on Monday, the station was fairly quiet. One to two dozen people waited for trains in the main lobby, on the sunny atrium bridge over the tracks or in the coffee shop as a buffing machine hummed across the lobby floor.
While many local travelers consider the building grand compared with the cramped, gritty old station, Prissana Alston of New York City offered a different kind of compliment, contrasting the upstate stop with New York’s Penn Central Station.
“It’s nice and quaint and cute,” said the 43-year-old registered nurse.
But the station has its critics, and it remains to be seen whether the initial upswing in travelers will continue.
“It’s just a cathedral to a parking lot, as far as I can tell,” said Paula DiPerna of Cooperstown, an environmental policy consultant, who said she travels to New York City at least two or three times a month.
DiPerna, 53, said parking in the garage and paying, taking an elevator up to the main station floor, getting to the bridge over the tracks and taking an escalator down to the platform typically adds 20 minutes to her trip. She finds the parking garage particularly off-putting, with its narrow lanes and dark surroundings, especially at night.
And while the configuration might work well for people catching cabs or rides with friends and family, she said, “It is not efficient for the professional, regular traveler. It is prettier once you are in there — I can’t take that away — but looks are not everything.”
Due to the cost and inconvenience, DiPerna said she now sometimes takes the train from Hudson instead.
Meanwhile, CDTA announced Monday that shuttles between the station and downtown Albany will end Friday.
“We might remake the service” and bring it back, Basile said, but the drivers and buses are needed for other CDTA routes now.
The regular No. 14 bus between Rensselaer and Empire State Plaza and the No. 24 bus between Troy and Albany, both of which stop several times a day at the station, will continue, he said.
The lack of office leases, budgeted to bring in up to $60,000 a year, won’t create a shortfall for the station, said Basile. “That is not a budget-buster,” he said. “We can exist without that number for the foreseeable future.”
An annual $656,000 operating budget outlined in September, excluding the garage, anticipated at least $40,000 from leased office space in this fiscal year.
CDTA appears likely to make up the current loss in other areas. Officials recently announced plans to charge for parking in lots to the north and have said that income from the garage is exceeding projections. Expanded advertising space also was added to the station plan late in the project.
Donald N. Noland Jr. of CB Richard Ellis, CDTA’s leasing agent for the space, said interest has been brisk, but “most of these who have looked at it wanted less space.” The layout is more practical for one tenant than several, he said.