OK we have a plan to get some Saturday SunRail service, but
we need YOUR help.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings proposed increasing the
county sales tax by a penny to help pay for transportation improvements –
including expanding SunRail service.
We strongly support his goal, but we know persuading voters
to increase a tax will not be easy. It never is.
Even though SunRail drastically improved its ridership
during the past year – some trains are standing-room-only, there remain, residents, who view SunRail as a boondoggle because it doesn’t run on the weekends or late
at night.
SunRail was created as a commuter service – Monday to
Friday mostly bankers’ hours – and it was funded as such by the Florida
Department of Transportation, which is footing much of the bill.
Regular readers of this blog know that there is no transit
system that is supported mostly by the farebox. Tax dollars are required to
keep public transit running, the same way those dollars pay for fire, police
and other essential services.
The state dollars for SunRail end next year, which adds
some urgency to Mayor Demings’ penny-tax proposal.
So how do you encourage people – especially the doubters –
to support the tax.
Show them what’s in it for them.
Here’s where it gets good!
What if enough money could be raised to run SunRail one
Saturday every month from now until November when we expect the tax proposal
will be on the ballot?
It costs about $90,000 to pay for a regular full day of
SunRail service – 40 trains from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.
But do we really need 40 SunRail trains on a Saturday?
A couple of years ago SunRail and some public-private
partners funded service on a few Saturdays. It cost about $20,000, per
Saturday.
So how much Saturday SunRail service can $20,000 buy today?
We envision a couple of early-morning Saturday trains to
support caregivers at the hospitals on the SunRail corridor and airport workers
(many people in Central Florida do not have a traditional Monday to Friday work
schedule).
Then go to a more relaxed late morning and afternoon schedule for
folks headed to farmers’ markets, museums, movies and such and then wrap it up
with a few night trains.
OK, so here’s where it gets dicey – how to pay for this?
Together there are 8 stations serving Orange County and
Orlando, so we need to appeal to those governments to help bankroll this effort.
Winter Park is the most popular destination for leisure riders, so they should
put some skin in the game – as they have in the past.
We know Kissimmee is not in Orange County, but we also know
downtown Kissimmee merchants would benefit if the train service was available
on a Saturday. So, it would be nice if Kissimmee chipped in. The same goes for
merchants in Seminole County’s historic downtown Sanford.
Imagine everything we could do if SunRail service was
available on the first Saturday of every month. That seems like a reasonable
way to get more people excited about supporting SunRail and the transportation
tax.
So Dear Reader, here’s where you come in:
Take a moment and send an email to the mayors asking them
to support this plan.
See you on The Rail!
The Covid came along and delayed the plans. They need to raise a lot of money because unlike before they now have to pay the engineers and conductors to work Saturdays (or weekends), as well as the security people and the cleaners. In the early years when the sunrail did run on weekends, the engineers and conductors worked on a volunteer basis, in other words they were not paid, they worked for free. But their Union soon ceased that!
ReplyDeleteI hope they can soon stop running in the red and can run the train on weekends. They just don't have enough people riding at the present (or before the covid).