(The following story by Jonas Beals and Kelly Hannon appeared at Fredericksburg.com on September 6, 2010.)
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Three of the eight Urban Development Areas proposed in Stafford County’s Comprehensive Plan are located along the CSX rail line. And two of the UDAs could have new commuter train stations.
However, two of those potential UDAs–Widewater and Brooke–are in rural parts of Stafford. Having UDAs there could be contrary to the intent of the state-mandated urban development concept.
Supervisor Cord Sterling said the locations were designed to take advantage of the commuter rail service.
“If you’re truly looking to the future, you’ve got to be looking at these alternative transportation elements,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re looking at gridlock up and down I-95.”
Spotsylvania County is also considering a UDA surrounding its proposed VRE station off U.S. 17 in the New Post area.
But will the Virginia Railway Express be able to absorb the riders that thousands of additional housing units near the rails would generate?
The upper limit on VRE under current conditions is around 20,000 passenger trips a day, said Mark Roeber, VRE’s manager of government relations and public affairs. That is the number of individual trips on the VRE system, northbound and southbound, on both the Fredericksburg and Massaponax lines.
The average daily ridership on the commuter train system is now about 17,500 passenger trips. On popular trains, riders boarding at later stops must stand.
Expanding the system to carry more than 20,000 passenger trips a day would require money and political will at the state, federal and local levels, Roeber said.
VRE’s strategic plan forecasts ridership in 2025 as 28,000 to 30,000 average daily trips. Its strategic plan does not forecast systemwide ridership beyond 2025, nor does it include two new stations in Stafford–one in the Widewater area and another near Cool Spring Road.
The most pressing expansion problem for VRE currently is finding space to park trains in Northern Virginia and Washington while riders are at work during the day.
VRE is already using all available storage space. Even if it wanted to add trains, it would have nowhere to put them during the day.
In addition to fixing the storage dilemma, more funding would be needed to operate and staff more VRE trains, and more money would be needed to add capacity on the railroad tracks, which are privately owned by CSX Corp. and Norfolk Southern.
Running trains at new times of day–or on weekends–would require permission from the freight rail companies.