Please don't blow it on Sunday

We’re praying SunRail doesn’t blow it on Sunday.

This Sunday will be a historic occasion – the first time SunRail will carry passengers on a weekend. For months we’ve campaigned for weekend service and we want everything to go smoothly.

The special Sunday operation -- organized to support the Orlando City Soccer Club’s inaugural Major League Soccer match versus the New York City Soccer Club at downtown Orlando’s Citrus Bowl -- is sure to push SunRail and its station at Church Street -- to their limit.

Orlando City Soccer sold out tickets for the Citrus Bowl (#Fillthebowl) – 60,000 seats.

In addition, the Orlando Magic will play the Boston Celtics at downtown Orlando’s Amway Center on Sunday. Basketball fans also will be ride SunRail to the Church Street SunRail station. No doubt lots of leprechauns will ride SunRail to Winter Park’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Sunday afternoon. Surely many other events will be held along the SunRail corridor. In addition, hundreds of residents will ride to check out SunRail for the first time.

We all remember what happened last May when SunRail launched with free rides.  Many stations and trains were overwhelmed. That was then, and this is now. We just hope the SunRail leaders are on top of their game, nimble and ready to respond to unusual situations.

The stakes are high.

International news media will be in town to cover the historic soccer match. SunRail lovers and haters from Washington D.C. to the Tampa Bay area will be watching closely. Attention will be particularly acute in the Tampa Bay area where our mass transportation allies have been fighting for years to get a commuter rail system.

If we have a SunFail on Sunday, anti-rail forces will gleefully smear SunRail as a taxpayer boondoggle, and that will be a major blow to commuter rail expansion here and throughout Florida.

SunRail needs to be prepared to add trains, as needed. It would be nice if they asked Lynx to be on standby to pick up fans at outlying stations and bring them to the Citrus Bowl in time for the soccer match if trains get overwhelmed. Fortunately people will ride for free on Sunday so riders won’t have to struggle with SunRail’s balky ticket- vending machines – a major chokepoint.

The SunRail bosses have an obligation to keep riders informed if there are problems. People tend to feel better if they know what’s happening and what’s being done to resolve the situation.

Before heading to the closest SunRail station riders need to take a chill pill. SunRail was built to be a commuter train, not a special-events train. On Sunday 25,000 people or more could try to use SunRail. Sunday is an unusual situation – very different from the generally smooth weekday SunRail experience.

Realistically the tracks, trains and stations have a limited capacity. SunRail trains aren’t like the New York City subway. The passenger coaches weren’t designed for standing-room only. On Sunday many people will be standing – it’s unavoidable. Things will go wrong. Patience and good humor can do more to solve problems than a bad attitude and angry words.

Now let’s go make history.

See you on The Rail.

SunRail haters gonna hate

Don’t be misled by the SunRail haters.

This past Friday morning one of the haters tweeted that SunRail was a failure because he had just been passed by a SunRail train that was carrying only 7 passengers. (This guy must be pretty impressive because he was able to count 7 people on a passing train.)

Twenty minutes later a SunRail rider posted a photo on our Facebook page showing a standing-room only crowd on a southbound SunRail train in Longwood. The accompanying photo shows the mob scene when that train arrived in Winter Park.

The haters want us to believe that SunRail is a pitiful failure.

We’re the first ones to admit that SunRail has had its share of problems. We ding them on a regular basis. But SunRail gets better and better and more Central Floridians are embracing the train – especially with the expansion of service hours to the late night and the recent service to support the Citrus Bowl game.

Yet the haters are relentless. This fall they used news reports covering SunRail ridership dips to help torpedo a proposal to enhance public transit in the Tampa Bay area.

Don’t expect facts to deter the haters. When they’re finally forced to concede that people are riding SunRail, the haters will change their tune and start saying they’re OK with SunRail “as long as it pays for itself.” Typically public transit system fares cover about one-third of the cost it takes to run the system.

Let’s deal with facts. There is almost no public transit system anywhere in the WORLD that pays all of its expenses out of the fare box. The two exceptions we could find are in Asia where the public transit agency not only runs the trains, but also owns and develops all the real estate around the train stations.

Public transit is a service that is paid for by the public. Police and fire are also services paid for by the public. The big difference is that public transit does generate some revenue – fares – to help pay its expenses. Who in their right mind would say we’ll keep police and fire service “as long as it pays for itself?”

Tell the SunRail haters to go play in traffic.

See you on The Rail.

See how great you did during the #RideBlkFri campaign

We just got the official station-by-station breakdown showing how many people hopped aboard SunRail during our #RideBlkFri campaign to demonstrate support for expanding SunRail service to weekends and late night hours.

Crowded SunRail train on Black Friday

As you recall, since many people were off from work on Black Friday -- the day after Thanksgiving -- we asked you to ride the train to destinations you would visit if SunRail ran on the weekend.

As the numbers on the accompanying chart shows, the turnout was amazing. Volusia County residents proved they’re wild about SunRail. Nearly double the number of regular weekday riders used the train used the DeBary station on Black Friday. There were nearly double the number of regular riders at the Lake Mary and Sand Lake Road stations.

And holy cow, there were nearly triple the number of riders at Winter Park!

Check out Black Friday crowd in Winter Park

Friends, you outdid yourselves with your enthusiastic support of the #RideBlkFri campaign.

Hopefully local politicians are paying close attention because we need them to act quickly by approving the proposal to expand SunRail service to weekends and late-night hours. The SunRail bosses are planning to formally present that proposal to local leaders in January. Stay tuned.

See you on The Rai!

Don't let SunRail become a boondoggle

SunRail will become a boondoggle unless it gets expanded to full service -- trains running on the weekend and late-night hours.

SunRail’s current weekday-only, rush-hour centric schedule is barely adequate. We’ve talked to many riders and would-be riders who find the current weekday schedule frustrating. “What’s the point?” many ask.

There are many times during the work week when we could have used SunRail to go to business appointments in Sanford, Longwood, Lake Mary, Winter park or downtown Orlando, but we opted to drive because if we took the train we would have to endure a 2-hour wait to get back to our home station at Sand Lake Road. We know people who rode SunRail to lunch in Winter Park, or downtown Orlando, and then got stranded because there was no return trip for 2 hours. Is that any way to run a railroad?

Originally everyone assumed that nurses and other medical staff members at ORMC and Florida Hospital would be big users of SunRail. Certainly some do, but many do not because trains aren’t scheduled to fit the real-world work cycles for nurses and other health-care professionals at the hospitals. SunRail tinkered with the schedule a little, but it’s still not attracting the throngs many anticipated.

There is a SunRail station 2 blocks from the Amway Center and the new Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Orlando But you can’t use the train to attend events because either the train won’t be available to take people home after the event, or the train doesn’t run on weekends.

We know that the rationale to build SunRail was to alleviate anticipated congestion during the I-4 Ultimate project, but we expected more from commuter rail than what we got. SunRail’s shortcoming are starting to make the train irrelevant, and that’s a shame because SunRail’s potential is enormous.

More than 3,400 riders and would-be riders have signed the petition calling for an expansion of SunRail service. Nearly 5,000 of you packed the trains on Nov. 28 during the #RideBlkFri campaign – 2,000 more than SunRail’s average daily ridership.

Fortunately the SunRail bosses are now preparing a proposal to add 4 daily round trips on weekdays and 9 roundtrips on the weekend. To move forward with this plan the SunRail managers need approval from their local government partners in Volusia, Seminole, Orange and Osceola counties and the city of Orlando. #expandsunrail

If the approvals come through, SunRail expanded service could begin next summer. Are you willing to reach out to your local officials to tell them to OK expanding SunRail service?

Stick to the numbers #RideBlkFri

Just the facts

SunRail’s average daily rider was:

• August: 3,647
• September: 3,045
• October: 3,214
• Nov. through Nov. 21: 3,166
• #RideBlkFri (Nov. 28): 4,555

At Wednesday’s SunRail Technical Advisory Committee meeting SunRail bosses said the #RideBlkFri was based on counts by the conductors and those counts were probably a little off because the cars were so crowded that it was difficult for conductors to get through the train to count people. The bosses said they think there were probably as many as 5,000 riding on that day.

The SunRail bosses said the #RideBlkFri riders show there’s intense demand to get SunRail running on the weekends and during off-peak hours.

Don't get tricked by SunRail naysayers

During the last few weeks some naysayers have been invoking the name of SunRail to derail the Greenlight Pinellas voter referendum in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg, Fla.) that would create a regional transportation system, complete with a new light rail train.

The naysayers are clucking: “SunRail is failing because the ridership has declined.”

Hopefully Pinellas County voters won’t fall for the hype and they will approve Greenlight Pinellas on Tuesday -- Election Day.

SunRail hasn’t failed – far from it. Thousands of Central Floridians use SunRail Monday to Friday every week …and they love it.

Are there things that the SunRail leaders can do better? Sure, and we write about those issues all the time. We’re like sports fans who yell at our hometown team’s coach and players – not because we hate them. We just want them to do better.

We also don’t believe the SunRail official ridership decline is serious, or permanent. Based on what we and other riders we know have seen – SunRail ridership remains very strong, despite the official numbers.

Everybody with any common sense knew SunRail would experience a ridership dip in August when the kids went back to school and the “Harry Potter effect” – newest ride in town – wore off.

But we also think a number of other factors that have skewed SunRail’s official ridership count.

For one thing, SunRail’s has been dogged by problems with the ticket-vending machines in the stations. We’ve been in stations early in the morning when none of the vending machines were working. We still boarded the train. We wanted to buy a ticket, but the machines weren’t working.

Sometimes the conductors are so busy with train operations and safety concerns that they don’t have a chance to count heads or inspect tickets.

And then there are dishonest riders who have figured out how to game the system – ride the train without buying a ticket.

It’s noteworthy that the ridership decline began during the same month that SunRail laid off the station Ambassadors who worked on the platform to answer questions and assist riders. The Ambassadors did a great job of gently reminding riders to tap-on and tap off the trains. Everybody knew the Ambassadors were watching and we bet that helped discourage cheaters from trying to board a train without a valid ticket Fortunately, SunRail bosses recently decided to bring back the Ambassadors.

Granted the reasons we cited here are speculation on our part. But we’re absolutely certain that SunRail is not a failure. 

Why SunRail ridership declined?

The SunRail bosses are at a loss to explain why there was a ridership decline in August.

Wish we had a good answer, but we noticed that the ridership decline corresponds with SunRail’s decision to layoff the platform Ambassadors who were hired to answer questions and assist SunRail riders. In addition, Ambassadors helped ensure safety and enforce rules – such as no-smoking on platforms -- at SunRail stations.

All the riders we know say the Ambassadors -- who wore black monogrammed golf shirts -- were extremely helpful. SunRail bosses don’t think Ambassadors were needed anymore. Now riders are on their own.

Unsure which platform to wait on to catch the train to Longwood?

Too bad.

Having problems getting a SunRail ticket from a vending machine?

So sorry.

Who knows, maybe a SunRail boss will drop by to answer your questions.