
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 27, 1993                   TAG: 9306270057
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MANASSAS                                LENGTH: Medium

COMMUTER RAIL'S RIDERSHIP HASN'T MET PROJECTIONS

In the year since commuter rail began, John Parks estimates he's saved hundreds of hours slogging through traffic. Instead, he reads the newspaper or works on a laptop computer during his hour-long trip to and from work in Crystal City.

"I can't say enough good things about it. It's hard to remember how awful it was to drive," on perpetually clogged Interstate 66, the civilian Navy employee said as he got off the train in Manassas recently.

But such glowing reports from riders contrast with some major disappointments for the fledgling train service in the year since the first train left the station in Manassas for Washington.

Daily ridership is well below the 4,500 projected in the first year for the Manassas rail and its companion Fredericksburg line. And some of the localities that contribute to the line's operation are squawking over bills that are far higher than expected.

The Virginia Railway Express deferred a planned expansion of service that would include a midday run and additional rush-hour trains at least until January.

And Spotsylvania County, which has a growing commuter population, has refused to join the cooperative rail organization.

Daily ridership has grown over the year and is now hovering between 3,500 and 3,700, VRE spokeswoman Marie Bravo said.

"The 4,500 number was an estimate, and it had a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent," Bravo said. "Everyone is kind of stuck on that number, and there are a lot of other factors involved."

But she acknowledged the rail line's management quoted the figure extensively in selling and preparing for the new service. Rail officials said 4,500 train commuters would equal a full lane of rush hour traffic removed from busy Interstate 95 or I-66.

The line also has had to contend with a variety of unwelcome surprises ranging from a brief Amtrak strike that shut down service to a series of equipment failures caused by one of the railroads whose tracks the VRE uses.

Perhaps the most thorny surprise has been a miscalculation of who would use the train most.

When the train was planned in the mid-1980s, transportation experts said it would be most popular in heavily populated Fairfax and Prince William counties.

Instead, it has proved most popular in the outlying Washington suburbs and beyond.

The popularity of commuter rail in Fredericksburg and Stafford County means those localities will have to pay two to three times as much as expected under the rail line's budget formula. The formula calls for localities to pay based primarily on ridership.

by CNB